Sketch by Marco Silombria for FACIS, Italian Pret-a-Porter

Sketch by Marco Silombria for FACIS, Italian Pret-a-Porter company.

Italian Pop art

Water-colour and ink on paper.

Size H cm 68 x L cm 48

Defects on paper, due to humidity and dust. 

Irregular surface of paper.

This project is created during the collaboration of Marco Silombria with Armando Testa, who was the main advertising graphic designer of FACIS, starting from the 1950s.

Work by Marco Silombria (Savona, 1936 - Albissola, 2014). The history of the Facis brand began in the 1930s in Turin, when the Donato Levi company and the Rivetti wool mills merged into a single company, giving rise to the GFT (Gruppo Finanziario Tessile) and the Facis brand (Fabbrica Abiti Confezionati in Serie).

Thus, shops with the Marus and Facis brands began to spring up in Turin. During the post-war period, the Facis brand revolutionized the men's formal clothing market in Italy. Inspired by the American model, they focus entirely on clothing tailored to size. In the early 1950s, the GFT literally took the measurements of more than 25,000 Italians, allowing Facis to dress the whole nation for the first time in non-woven clothes.
sartorial.

Communication becomes fundamental for the brand, so much so that the company's first advertising poster was created, designed in 1954 by Armando Testa. In the sixties and seventies Facis turns out to be the largest Italian house of men's clothing.

About artist:

Marco Silombria was a pupil of Emilio Scannavino, collaborator of Armando Testa in Turin, creator of all advertising for Fiat, Facis, Superga, Defonseca and other large Italian companies from the 70s to the 90s; creator of works with a strong Pop Art imprint.

Later he had been one of the founders of the CGSS agency together with other important advertisers such as Silvio Saffirio, Gagliardi and Giorgio Caponetti. He signed several successful campaigns: from the one for Gallo rice to the Fiat 127, to the posters for the Gruppo Finanziario Tessile.

In his turn he became a painter, in the 1980s, and devoted to an openly and decidedly homoerotic art, somewhere between the new Dadaism and pop art.

Always an active gay militant, Silombria had been the 'creative mind' of the first Italian homosexual association, the Fuori!
He was among the first to introduce the male nude in a pop-Dada key to Italy.