Luisa Beccaria

Luisa Beccaria had always dreamt that fashion was one way to express her fantasies and her ideal of beauty. This passion was to reveal itself as a language and the best way for her to communicate her personality. Luisa was very young when she designed her first clothes. She was only twenty years old when she was offered the opportunity to exhibit and sell her designs in Piero Fornasetti's art gallery in Milan. Everything was snapped up in three days. She sold her dresses to an extremely heterogenous public and realised that her pastime had become, without realising, a job.

Luisa continued organizing other similar exhibitions and soon newspapers started taking an interest in her designs. She received her first orders from shops and that soon led to her first fashion show in Milan. At the time everybody was talking about Luisa Beccaria's designs.

In 1983, as she was expecting her first child, Luisa was preparing for the opening of her first boutique. She was picking up the fruits of her first successes. "Since then", Luisa says, "I have never stopped; the collections became regular". In 1984, she inaugurated the first boutique in Via Madonnina where one of her first fashion shows had been held. Soon she had another boutique for children's clothes and an atelier where she experimented all her ideas and was able to work on special dresses, made to measure.

In 1989 Luisa Beccaria was asked to participate in Italy's high fashion shows. "Couture is a reality that is very familiar to me," says Luisa, "it has allowed me to develop my passion for researching refiness and exclusivity, as well as my ideal of beauty and harmony." Luisa considers that Couture shows are a great luxury and a great liberty because they "allow you to realize what you feel deep inside, to create fabrics and prints, to elaborate color and they let your imagination run free".

Luisa Beccaria describes herself as having a strong but delicate personality. She feels close to artists such as Fragonard, Winterhalter, Alma Tadema and the Preraphelites. She loves iridescent and undefined colors, draped fabrics, a certain type of atmosphere and the harmony of nature. In her creations she searches for the origins in order to project the future, mixing past and present.

She has always loved Paris which has offered her some strong emotions and fills her with enthusiasm each time she goes there. She first showed in Paris in 1993 at the invitation of the Italian Institute of Culture. Since then she presents her collections regularly in the French capital but "it is always like the first time: the desire and the fear".