Ocupação Zuzu is the 17th Ocupação exhibition organized by Itaú Cultural, as well as the largest until now. Comprised of an exhibition, performances, film cycle and meetings with fashion designers, it was conceived as an exhibition in motion as it is the first time that the project addresses the topic of fashion and the first time it takes over the entire institute. The previous Ocupação exhibitions were restricted to the ground floor. It opens at the Itaú Cultural on April 1st – the date of the 50th anniversary of the military coup d'état – and closes on May 11th, Mother's Day.

“This exhibition confirms the idea of fashion as an important segment for reflecting on culture and contemporary art and allows us to appreciate and analyze the life and work of one of the most exceptional women in our history, Zuleika Angel Jones”, says Eduardo Saron, director of Itaú Cultural. It also contributes to the events that are revisiting the Brazilian Military Dictatorship during the 50th year of the coup.

The exhibition contains more than 400 items and is co-curated by Hildegard Angel, Zuzu’s daughter, a journalist and founder of the Instituto Zuzu Angel and the Fashion Museum, Itáu Cultural (by means of the Audio Visual and Literature and Education and Relationship departments), and Valdy Lopes Jn, who is also the exhibition's art director.

Visitors can admire over 40 of the “looks” created by the designer. These items include four of Zuzu's creations for wedding dresses; nine outfits that she used during her mourning over the loss of her son; three items used by American models at the famous protest fashion show she organized in New York in the early 1970s at the home of the Brazilian consul; and two examples from the pastoral series. There are also 30 items such as t-shirts, handbags, eyeglass cases, buckles - all of them containing the little angels that became her iconic logo.

Zuzu designed the prints for the dresses she created and would have the transparent and bold lace for her wedding dresses brought from Brazil’s Northeast. She also created the logo, bags, writing paper, labels and marketing strategies. She launched a Brazilian collection in New York. She brought together Baianas, Lampião and Maria Bonita, working young ladies, pastorals and angels, and transformed them into products bearing her signature. Her research and embroidery creations on this theme are also in the exhibition, as well as over 20 sketches, dress patterns, prints and graphic material that she created to label and wrap her work.

During the search for her son, she wrote and sent letters denouncing his disappearance to friends, mothers of other missing persons, American politicians, such as Henry Kissinger, Brazilian military officers, such as the then-president Ernesto Geisel, and intellectuals and artists such as Chico Buarque. The exhibition displays the most important of her letters and documents – some have never been seen before and others are reproductions – as well as messages received from friends who encouraged her or extended their condolences, as well as articles published about her in the Brazilian and foreign press.

The exhibition also includes audiovisual material of great historical value, such as excerpts from the protest fashion show held in New York, and objects and photographs of her son, Stuart Angel Jones, who was murdered by the regime – many of them never before seen by the public.

An exhibition in motion around Zuzu
In addition to occupying the institute’s three floors of exhibition space, and its ground floor, the exhibition is set into motion by performances. Designer and consultant Karlla Girotto has created the performances. From Thursday to Sunday, from 2 pm to 8 pm, actresses will perform pop-up fashion shows for the public, wearing selected reproductions of Zuzu's creations. They will also read excerpts from her writings and letters.

Ocupação Zuzu encompasses other events, such as the film festival curated by Eduardo Morettin, professor of Audiovisual History at ECA/USP and director of the board of the Cinemateca Brasileira; a mini-course with João Braga, a specialist in Art History from the FAAP and in History of Clothing and Fashion from Fundação Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo; and meetings with designers Ronaldo Fraga, Isabela Capeto and Gisele Dias, as well as with celebrities that were part of Zuzu’s life, such as Elke Maravilha. On May 9th, Hildegard Angel herself will meet with the public to talk about her mother's main creations (program details follow separately).

The Education and Relationship department has prepared parallel activities, including design workshops for children - on prints, sewing and embroidery, creating paper patterns, talks about art and politics during the Brazilian military dictatorship, embroidery as art and fashion, and other topics (see separate information)

Creator, mother, businesswoman, militant, Zuzu
The designer, as she liked to be called, and entrepreneur Zuleika Angel Jones, an internationally known pioneer of Brazilian fashion, had one of the most remarkable careers in the field. She began volunteering at social work projects of the then-first lady, Sarah Kubitschek, where she would sew school uniforms. With three children and separated from her husband, Zuzu Angel would later opened a small sewing shop inside her own home. Always wanting more, she began to create her own dresses, accessories, prints and handbags. She built an international career, mainly in the United States. She opened her own store and workshop, becoming so successful that she once stated “I am Brazilian fashion”.

Zuzu created and produced fashion like nobody else at the time. And she sought to make high fashion affordable to all women. She used to say that her dream was to see people wearing her clothes at bus stops. She used colors, prints, embroidery. She mixed lace, silk, ribbons, fabrics printed with regional and folkloric motifs such as birds, butterflies and parrots. She was a “seamstress”, as women who made fashion used to be called, who designed dresses, handbags, scarves and bed sheets.

“Nowadays, look at mother’s dresses hanging on the displays, some of them already sixty years old, but ironed, all spiffy and looking young, ready for their moment of glory at Itaú Cultural’s Ocupação Zuzu, I ask myself, dumbfounded: ‘How did I manage to keep, preserve and collect all this?’”, says Hildegard.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the height of her profession, Zuzu and her daughters suffered the great loss of their son and brother Stuart Angel, a militant of the MR8 group who was arrested and killed by the military regime. From that point on, the search for her son became her great struggle. But this did not stop her from designing and making dresses that were true narratives against the regime's oppression, and organizing fashion shows that were political protests. She began wearing only black, but created clothes that were ever more full of Brazilian colors.

“My mother spent her last years of life gathering fragments of the memory of my brother Stuart, as if she wanted to reassemble the body that she could not find to bury”, writes Hildegard Angel in her essay for this exhibition.

Zuleika Angel Jones died in the early hours of April 14, 1976, at age 54, in a car accident in Rio de Janeiro, on Gávea Road while exiting the Dois Irmãos Tunnel that today is named after her. It was later proven that she had been murdered by the government, as was her son Stuart.

About Hildegard Angel
Zuzu Angel’s daughter and a social and fashion journalist. She became involved when she was a child, taking part in dance, theater and film. At age 18, she began her career in journalism at the O Globo newspaper, where she was a columnist until 2003. She also worked at the newspapers Última Hora and Jornal do Brasil. Her work as a social columnist made her become known by the foreign press as the “queen of social columns in Brazil”.

She wrote for Brazilian and foreign magazines, such as Vogue, Manchete and Contigo. In 1973, she produced, edited and presented Jornal Delas on TV Rio, the first news program made exclusively by and for women. She was awarded the Rio Branco Order by the Brazilian government for her work with culture.

She founded and heads the Brazilian Fashion Academy, with the purpose of maintaining alive the memory of the great names in Brazilian fashion, and the Zuzu Angel Fashion Institute whose motto is “Brazilian fashion can only be international if it is legitimate”, words by Zuzu. She also began in 1995 the first university course in fashion in Rio de Janeiro at the Veiga de Almeida University.