Industry | clothing |
---|---|
Founded | 1935 |
Founder | Lucilla Mara de Vescovi |
Successor | Randa Accessories |
Headquarters | Italy |
Area served | Worldwide |
Products | belts leather goods neckwear shirts sportswear accessories |
Countess Mara, founded in 1935 by Lucilla Mara de Vescovi, was an Italian menswear fashion label specialising in high-end pictorial neckties. The brand has been owned by Randa Accessories since 1998.
Lucilla Mara de Vescovi was born in Rome, Italy, in 1893. Daughter of a very wealthy medicine professor of the University of Rome, descendant of an ancient noble family from the Veneto, and, from her mother's side, from baroness De Gleria from Trieste, descendant of baroness Maria Hatvany from Hungary. Her brother Silvio, medical doctor and mining engineer, survived the sinking of the Lusitania and took care of the family's business interests in mining in Chile. She married Malcolm Whitman, an American singles tennis champion, in 1926. In 1930, following an argument about her husband's dull ties, his wife made him one from silk dress material. [1] Following Whitman's suicide in 1932, she travelled through Europe, purchasing fabrics that she brought back to New York with the intention of launching a career making men's ties. [1] [2] Vescovi Whitman founded Countess Mara, her men's neckwear company, in 1935. While Mara was her second name, the company name might have been inspired by an 18th-century Kneller portrait of the Countess de Mar wearing a loosely tied Steinkirk cravat. [3]
Countess Mara ties featured several novel marketing decisions. Vescovi Whitman had the C.M. initials featured on the outside blade of each tie, ensuring that they were instantly recognizable. [4] The ties were made in very limited quantities, typically only fifteen dozen per design, and they were comparatively expensive. [2] [4] This led to their becoming collector's items, sought after by celebrities and fashion-conscious businessmen. [4] As a designer, Vescovi Whitman aimed to make her ties colourful, interesting and artistic, while avoiding spectacular and showy designs. [5] She described her ties as "jungles" populated with trees, flowers and animals. [5] However, her ties also featured a wide range of other subjects, including astrological signs, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Devil, Lady Godiva, torn love-letters and safety pins. [2] Other tie manufacturers, noticing her success, copied her business model and hired artists to imitate her tie designs. [4] Vescovi Whitman did not mind this, saying in 1949 that being imitated had "expanded the acceptability of the pictorial tie". [5]
In 1944 Countess Mara was awarded the Neiman Marcus Fashion Award in recognition of the influence its ties had had upon fashion. Among their most high-profile wearers were Frank Sinatra, Eugene O'Neill and J. Edgar Hoover. [6]
The Countess Mara brand was purchased in March 1998 by Randa Accessories, a major manufacturer and distributor of men's neckwear. [7] Countess Mara belts, leather goods, neckwear, shirts, sportswear, and other products and accessories are retailed worldwide.
Costume or fashion jewelry includes a range of decorative items worn for personal adornment that are manufactured as less expensive ornamentation to complement a particular fashionable outfit or garment as opposed to "real" (fine) jewelry, which is more costly and which may be regarded primarily as collectibles, keepsakes, or investments. From the outset, costume jewelry — also known as fashion jewelry — paralleled the styles of its more precious fine counterparts.
Claudia Maria Schiffer is a German model and actress based in England. She rose to fame in the 1990s as one of the world's most successful models, attaining supermodel status.
A necktie, or simply a tie, is a piece of cloth worn for decorative purposes around the neck, resting under the shirt collar and knotted at the throat, and often draped down the chest.
A scarf is a long piece of fabric that is worn on or around the neck, shoulders, or head. A scarf is used for warmth, sun protection, cleanliness, fashion, religious reasons, or to show support for a sports club or team. Scarves can be made from materials including wool, linen, silk, and cotton. It is a common type of neckwear and a perennial accessory.
Cufflinks are items of jewelry that are used to secure the cuffs of dress shirts. Cufflinks can be manufactured from a variety of different materials, such as glass, stone, leather, metal, precious metal or combinations of these. Securing of the cufflinks is usually achieved via toggles or reverses based on the design of the front section, which can be folded into position. There are also variants with chains or a rigid, bent rear section. The front sections of the cufflinks can be decorated with gemstones, inlays, inset material or enamel and designed in two or three-dimensional forms.
Nicole Miller is an American fashion designer and businesswoman.
Malcolm "Mal" Douglass Whitman was an American tennis player who won three singles titles at the U.S. National Championships.
1840s fashion in European and European-influenced clothing is characterized by a narrow, natural shoulder line following the exaggerated puffed sleeves of the later 1820s and 1830s. The narrower shoulder was accompanied by a lower waistline for both men and women.
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The most characteristic North American fashion trend from the 1930s to 1945 was attention at the shoulder, with butterfly sleeves and banjo sleeves, and exaggerated shoulder pads for both men and women by the 1940s. The period also saw the first widespread use of man-made fibers, especially rayon for dresses and viscose for linings and lingerie, and synthetic nylon stockings. The zipper became widely used. These essentially U.S. developments were echoed, in varying degrees, in Britain and Europe. Suntans became fashionable in the early 1930s, along with travel to the resorts along the Mediterranean, in the Bahamas, and on the east coast of Florida where one can acquire a tan, leading to new categories of clothes: white dinner jackets for men and beach pajamas, halter tops, and bare midriffs for women.
Western fashion in the 1920s underwent a modernization. Women's fashion continued to evolve from the restrictions of gender roles and traditional styles of the Victorian era. Women wore looser clothing which revealed more of the arms and legs, that had begun at least a decade prior with the rising of hemlines to the ankle and the movement from the S-bend corset to the columnar silhouette of the 1910s. Men also began to wear less formal daily attire and athletic clothing or 'Sportswear' became a part of mainstream fashion for the first time.
Fashion in France is an important subject in the culture and country's social life, as well as being an important part of its economy.
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David Rappaport was an American fashion manufacturer, designer and painter.
Italy is one of the leading countries in fashion design, alongside France and the United Kingdom. Fashion has always been an important part of the country's cultural life and society, and Italians are well known for their attention to dress; la bella figura, or good appearance, retains its traditional importance.
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A lavallière, also called a pussycat bow or pussybow, is a style of neckwear worn with women's and girls' blouses and bodices. It is a bow tied at the neck, which has been likened to those sometimes put on "pussy cats".
Amanda Charlotta Christensen, née Svensson was a Swedish fashion designer and business person. She founded the firm Amanda Christensen AB (1885), which has a Royal warrant of appointment since 1949, and created the necktie label Röda Sigillet.
Vicky Davis was an American necktie designer based in New York.