Milan leaves the black and white and is tinged with more cheeky colors
IMAGES IN POSTERS
The images of the past retain a certain nostalgia within their contours. Often they are faded, really too far away; there are others, on the contrary, that explode effervescent like laughter.
Milan leaves the black and white and is tinged with the most brazen colors of glamor in a walk among the gold of the Galleria. Milan is lively, smiling, in love with life in her posters. Milan is modernity, fashion, design. Milan is everything and everything converges here, in the feathers of a hat, in the flourishes of a skirt, along one arm holding a glass of Martini.
Forerunner of modern advertising on TV and on the web, the poster was the first direct communication channel to the mass; no longer an elite, therefore, to whom to direct cultured readings, detailed explanations or inaccessible museum productions.
Since its inception, the poster has been the instrument of great visual impact that fills the walls of cities; through the billboards it is possible to convey large or small themes: politics, religion, news, but above all advertising. The figurative part occupies the foreground, then the message arrives... clothes, spirits, tourist destinations, hotels, insurance.
Posters accompanied and portrayed the change, the economy of a city always looking to the future.
Milan had already become an economic and commercial meeting point since the end of the 19th century, not only in Italy, but also at a European level. In 1920, with the expansion of the exhibition spaces and the inauguration of the Trade Fair, an extraordinary production of posters begins, a sign of the metamorphosis of advertising, which translates into new forms and colors so linked to art, to painting, which nevertheless incorporate some element of the signage. Graphic design was born and with it a whole sector of creatives, who think to conquer, bewitching their users. We are no longer talking about Art pour l'Art, but rather about beauty, style, elegance with a well-balanced purpose: to capture attention.
The posters of these years are the mirror of the Italian Dream: the agricultural development that gives way to the industrial one, and together, the urban, commercial and tertiary ones appear. Milan embodies the place where everything is possible. A natural destination for migratory flows from all over Italy and especially from the South, the city - in the middle - still continues to attract workers, artisans, and artists, intellectuals, onlookers and ... adventurers. New cultural and social relationship dimensions emerge in the first true Italian melting-pot, which does not speak just one language, but 1000 different ones.
Find your Milano imprinted in "Skylight", designed by Alessandro Giust, produced by Terenzi Srl.