Le Siciliane is a clothing and accessories brand born in Sicily

Our brand does not come from people who studied economics and marketing. We have spent our lives in fine art academies, photography studios and sculpture workshops. We want to bring something different, something that has matured for decades in the art galleries of our island and that for the first time moves to enter, albeit in a different way, everyone’s homes.

Le Siciliane was born in 2021 with the idea of ​​creating a version of the works that the photographer Raffaele Rinaldi gave us, which was more accessible and suitable for a young audience. Therefore, drawings inspired by his most famous photographs are created among those that deal with the theme of Sicilianness and island traditions, leaving the underlying theme unchanged, that surrealism that pervades all his shots.

Our illustrations suggest a completely new way of making images, presenting a mix of photographic elements and graphic elements. We started from the original photographs and added only a few graphic elements, such as the eyelashes and the nose.

Raffaele Rinaldi’s portraits are predominantly female and interpreted by Sicilian women who live in Sicily or who travel the world. Rinaldi’s surrealism is noticeable in his unusual combinations, in which he associates elements with the human figure that would usually be normal to expect in other contexts, such as sweets, fruit or more; he is not satisfied with this, however, but changes the meaning of these, transforming them into something else, that is, changing their function and meaning: here the sweets or fruit become hats, curlers, unlikely earrings or other clothing accessories; sometimes instead it is the woman herself who transforms, for example, into a cream puff with chocolate dripping on her forehead, or wrapped like an Easter egg. There is no shortage of Sicilian “Moor’s heads”, typical anthropomorphic ceramic vases, this time interpreted by his real-life models.

The operational headquarters are in Palermo, but Le Siciliane are now distributed throughout Sicily and beyond, with over 50 retailers.