Capri, 1950–1970: The Island Where Fashion, Film and International Society Met

Capri had attracted foreign visitors since the nineteenth century: painters, writers and exiles who found on the island a freedom they did not have at home. Between 1950 and 1970 it became something more, a place where the people who set fashion went to dress informally, and where the informality itself became a fashion. Two products of the island, a pair of trousers and a pair of sandals, carried its name around the world.

Trousers named after an island

The narrow, calf-length trousers known as Capri pants have several claimed inventors. One account credits the German-born designer Sonja de Lennart, who named a collection "Capri" in 1945. Others credit a Capri tailor, Sebastiano "Nello" Spinella. What is certain is that in the 1950s the style was associated with the island and promoted by Italian designers, Emilio Pucci among them.

Pucci arrived on Capri at the turn of the 1950s. His first boutique, La Canzone del Mare, opened at Marina Piccola, on the island's southern shore; most accounts date it to 1951, though some place his presence on the island a year or two earlier. There he sold brightly coloured, narrow trousers, shirts and printed silks to a clientele that included Sophia Loren, Gloria Guinness, Consuelo Crespi, Mona von Bismarck and Maxime de la Falaise. In 1954 Pucci designed a print called Piazzetta di Capri, after the island's small central square; it was taken from the archive for a new boutique on Via Camerelle in 2016.

Sandals made to measure

The second product was the sandal. In 1946 Amedeo Canfora opened a shop on Via Camerelle, and his family still runs it. Canfora made flat-soled leather sandals to measure, and he is credited with being the first to decorate them with semi-precious stones and glass and metal beads. By the 1950s his sandals were popular with visitors; in the 1960s they became a status symbol.

Canfora's clients, according to accounts of the shop, included Princess Margaret, Grace Kelly, Princess Soraya, Maria Callas, Oona Chaplin, Sophia Loren and Anita Ekberg. In 1962 Jacqueline Kennedy, who had heard of the sandals, arranged to visit the shop at midnight. Her foot was traced in the shop's register, and a model with intertwined silver chains was made for her; known as the "K", it is still produced.

The island on film

Capri also appeared on screen. In May 1963 Jean-Luc Godard brought his crew to the island to film Le Mépris, with Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli, at the Villa Malaparte, the red house built on a promontory for the writer Curzio Malaparte. The film, released in Italy in October 1963 and in France in December, made the villa one of the most recognisable houses in modern architecture, and fixed an image of Capri as a place of sun, rock and sea.

Dressing down

What Capri gave fashion was a model of dressing down. Visitors who wore couture in Paris and Rome came to the island to wear trousers, shirts, sandals and headscarves, and to walk through the Piazzetta in clothes they would not have worn in a city. The island's boutiques understood this and sold it back to them: simple shapes, bright colours, local craft. The result was a resort style that spread from Capri to beaches across the world, and that remains associated with its name.