A New York Fashion Week exhibition

The Painted Years A lost chapter of fashion history, uncovered.

Painted suede. Early 1970s.

Photography + creative visual collaboration — Anne-Marie Mueschke

Seven women in vintage bridal gowns spanning a century of design, photographed on film at the RERACKED studio

ARCHIVAL FASHION & VINTAGE BRIDAL

A couple on their wedding day, the bride in a vintage silk slip gown and lace gloves

vintage for the modern bride

Begin your style portfolio How it works

Katie Ruther

Archival wedding gowns in black and white — silk, lace, and opera gloves

Wear your story

Shop the archive

If it isn't on the rack, we go find it.

Personal sourcing Styling Alterations & reformation

Our love letters

Laura is an artist in curation. She knows it is more than clothing — it is stories and lives lived, the past joining the future.

A RERACKED bride

Chronogram Readers' Choice Presented at CFDA Bridal Fashion Week Kingston, NY & NoMad, NYC

Visit

Kingston

314 Wall Street, Kingston, NY 12401

The boutique and atelier — open Friday through Sunday.

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By appointment

NoMad

12 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001

The studio — private appointments and the front room.

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The origin of a career.

Experimental, free-spirited and true. He was playing — exploring his own artistic medium — and the result is astounding.

Decades before the leopard prints and the red-carpet glamour that would come to define his name, a painter from Florence worked out how to print and paint directly onto leather and suede, patented it, and licensed the technique to Hermès and Pierre Cardin. He showed at the Sala Bianca. Brigitte Bardot wore his work, uncredited. His grandfather painted with the Macchiaioli.

An intersection of art, fashion and invention — and a softer, more experimental and artful side of Roberto Cavalli, one that remains largely unknown to the fashion world today.

By hand, and by a method he invented.

The invention

He painted suede by hand, and devised a technique for printing onto leather and suede that no one had used before. He patented it. Hermès and Pierre Cardin licensed it.

Often both at once

A single piece can carry hand-painting and printed motifs together. Florals and paisley, a lotus border across the shoulders, a peacock worked down a back.

Made by hand, in limited quantities

No two pieces are identical, and one design language runs throughout — the enamel flower snaps, the brown leather tags.

Two labels. One chapter.

Pieces labelled Roberto Cavalli and Roberto Cavalli for Crissa — a collaboration released simultaneously, in highly limited quantities.

Fran Ornstein came by the pieces when they were released — her mother was president at Crissa. She wore them, and kept them, for more than five decades. It is the industry that never knew they existed.

“I always felt amazing in them. I knew the chance was slim that anyone else was going to appear in them. In a time of people going out in costumes I guess these were my go-to’s.”Fran Ornstein

Through research we believe this is a significant part of fashion history, and a chapter the designer was proud of, that the world should see.

The full story will be released and the collection documented. Follow along on Instagram for updates.