Umberto Tirelli

Who was Umberto Tirelli?

Umberto Tirelli was born in 1928 in Gualtieri, a town in Emilia near the River Po. He died in 1992. Tirelli was an Italian tailor, costume maker and designer, historian of costume and collector.

He was the oldest of four siblings and he spent his youth bottling wine with his father who was a wine and grains merchant. He wanted to become a teacher but this idea didn't last long. At the age of sixteen he discovered he had a love of clothing by frequenting the home of Luigi Bigi, a tailor who lived in the same town and who reproduced French fashion in Milan in the 1930s. In 1952, Giorgio Sarassi who, with Bigi's help, had made his fortune in the business of fabrics for high fashion, found Tirelli a job in Milan: a delivery boy and display designer for Marco, a fabric shop in the Via Montenapoleone. Almost directly across the street was the boutique of Mirsa where Beppe Modenese worked with Paola Carola. In order to save money, in order "to survive because our pay was minimal," Tirelli recalled in his autobiography, Vestire i sogni, Tirelli and Modenese decided to rent a place together.

In 1955, at the age of 27 he met Pia Rame and Carlo Mezzadri who had just purchased the theatrical costume maker Finzi. They offered him a chance to try out. There he met Mila de Nobili who was making the costumes for Maria Callas in La Traviata de Luchino Visconti staged at La Scala in 1955. Therefore he met Luchino Visconti and also Piero Tosi, who was also a costume designer and worked several times with Visconti, specially in the films Il Gattopardo and Death in Venice for which he was nominated to the Academy Awards. He was able to participate in La Traviata by making the costumes for the femminine chorus. Before his death he worked on the costumes of another version of La traviata, this time by Muti, with Gabriella Pescucci.