Ken Scott: the fashion gardener from Fort Wayne

1918 - 1991

The start: George Kenneth Scott was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1918 by his foundation's account (a scholarly essay on the Rizzoli monograph gives 1919, and the bracket is named here rather than silently settled), and he began, as this section requires, as a painter. Parsons School of Design in New York trained him, he graduated in 1941, and in the 1940s he was a painter in the New York art scene with the strongest backing a young American painter could have: Peggy Guggenheim, who organized a painting exhibition for him in New York in 1946.

The turn: In 1946 he moved to Paris, and the painting went onto cloth. Working in printed fabric design, he drew the attention of Balmain, Lanvin, and Dior, and in 1954 Dior put one of his sketches into the spring and summer haute couture collection. In 1955 he settled in Milan and founded Falconetto with Vittorio Fiorazzo, then the Ken Scott brand, and in the 1960s launched his own clothing line in fabrics covered with large flowers and natural motifs in colors nobody had put on a body at that scale. Milan named the style before the decade did: he was the fashion gardener, and the flower prints anticipated flower power by years.

The standing: Scott worked in Milan until his death in 1991, having created his own foundation in 1988 to keep the archive, and the archive, drawings, fabric samples, clothes, and press, is what the revival of 2021 was built from, when Gucci's Epilogue collection brought the flowers back and a Rizzoli monograph followed. Fort Wayne's share in him is the first line of the biography and nothing later: the city gave the century one of its great colorists, and never saw the work. He stands in this section on the birth and the painter's start, both documented, as the clearest case of the second company, the ones it sent out.

Sources:

1. Ken Scott Foundation archive, as published by Inkiostro Bianco (the foundation biography: born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1918; Parsons; the New York painting career backed by Peggy Guggenheim; Paris 1946; Dior's use of a sketch in 1954; Milan and Falconetto in 1955; the 1960s clothing line; died 1991).
2. The artist's own site, George Kenneth Scott (the 1946 Guggenheim exhibition; the foundation created in 1988; the archive's contents).
3. "Ken Scott: How to Keep Flowers Alive," essay on the Rizzoli monograph, University of the Arts London research repository (the 1919 birth year reading; the "fashion gardener"; the 2021 Gucci revival).