Giacomo Puccini called her “Bicchi” and, in time, everybody called her Biki, thanks to the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who transformed her childhood nickname into something exotic. “I’m just a seamstress,” Elvira Leonardi Bouyeure once said, the inventor of the “Made in Italy” label, stylist to Maria Callas, Sofia Loren and Brigitte Bardot. Her golden childhood was marked by the influence of huge cultural giants on her upbringing. Characters like Giacomo Puccini, to her “Nonno Tato”, her grandmother’s second husband. When she met, in Paris, art collector Robert Boyeure, her future husband, Biki came into contact with the fashion world and was immediately bewitched. Her constant contact with this world, after one voyage to Paris after another, gave her the idea of turning her natural fashion sense into a creative vocation. Thus, in 1934, she opened her first atelier. At her Milanese studio at Via Senato 8, the first styles inspired by Parisian fashion began to appear, designed and manufactured by Gina Cicogna and Biki, who quickly became convinced that their creations were destined to dress women everywhere. The combination of colours (eccentric for the time), such as blue and green, soon became a trademark of her unmistakable style.
Created to enhance the museum’s collections, the exhibition displays a collection of “exotic” artefacts brought from different parts of the world by Milanese citizens, enthusiasts, businessmen, travellers, researchers.
Once Again. Chiara Dynys Between Waves, Light, and Memory
Palazzo Citterio presents Chiara Dynys’s immersive work: mechanical waves, light, and fragments of text emerge in the hypogeal space, evoking a mental landscape between dream, memory, and visual illusion.
Twelve restored plaster busts by Antonio Canova, discovered in a villa in Veneto, are the highlight of a new exhibition at Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera, celebrating Neoclassical sculpture and the return of the marble Vestale.
