The Measures Taken

Giacamo Balla's 'Futurist Manifesto of Men's Clothing' focuses on the functions of colour. This might seem curious, as the image of the Futurist or technocrat is often associated with the colours of industry itself, all metallic greys or imposing blacks- consider also the black shirt that Marinetti would don as he became Mussolini's intellectual cheerleader. Futurism is on a pivot between these mechanistic duns and a riotous brightness. In his study of the wearing of black among men, John Harvey describes Mussolini's 'musketeers' in terms straight out of Marinetti- 'their movements different from the usual human lope, more severe, more regimented, more like a dangerous mechanism'. A contrast then, with Balla's 'hap-hap-hap-hap-hap-happy clothes'. Balla, in a way that strikingly anticipates the designs of Varvara Stepanova and Sonia Delaunay, derides this 'funeral tonality'. Instead, the most dazzling and artificial designs the machine can produce are advocated for men's dress. With that in mind though, he envisages Futurist clothes as a magnification of the straight lines and reflexes of the male body; 'forceful MUSCULAR colours- the reddest of reds, the most purple of purples, the greenest of greens-and SKELETON tones of white, grey and black': artificiality to reinforce a 'natural' superiority.

Designs of futurist clothing often needed the proviso of fantasy or science fiction settings, perhaps because of poor prospects for manufacture, perhaps because the actual dressing of the figure threw the avant-garde into everyday life in an especially shocking way. A fine early example of this is Kasimir Malevich's designs for Kruchonykh's 'Victory over the Sun'. The sketches that survive reduce the body to abstract shapes charged with kinetic force. The costume design for the character 'Many and One' shows a man in red and black; his legs become two sets of two triangles, his back is covered with black spikes. It evokes armour, a mechanical ferocity. This was contemporary with the discovery and exhibiting by the colonial powers of African sculpture, which actually inspired Cubism and Futurism's leap into the 20th century, giving it a dubious undertow of colonial discourse- 'the true artist of today is a savage', declared Wyndham Lewis. The figure's name evokes Leninist vanguardism (though it was produced four years before the October revolution)- a personified vanguard party, a ruthless single figure representing the mass.