Elsa Serrano
Elsa Romio de Serrano, commonly known as Elsa Serrano, was an Italian-born Argentine fashion designer.
Biography
Serrano was born as Elsa Romio in Corigliano Calabro, province of Cosenza, Calabria, Italy on 13 July 1941, the daughter of Checchina Malavolta and Espedito Romio. At the age of fourteen, Romio arrived in Argentina on 7 December 1955 with her parents and nine siblings.Self-taught, Serrano did not carry out formal design studies; she started in fashion with a boutique that offered imported garments in the Belgrano neighborhood. In 1968, she began to design using her own style; for several years she designed four collections per season, haute couture and ready-to-wear. She later devoted herself exclusively to haute couture. In 1977, she organized the first show in her collection.
In forty-five years of experience, Serrano's designs were used by several well-known people, highlighting the wedding dress of Claudia Villafañe who was the wife of Diego Maradona. She also dressed important figures of Argentine cinema, such as Mirtha Legrand, Susana Giménez and Norma Aleandro, and foreigners such as Sophia Loren, Joan Collins, Gina Lollobrigida, Catherine Deneuve and dancer Maya Plisetskaya. Serrano had also dressed figures of Argentine politics, such as Zulemita, the daughter of former Argentine president Carlos Menem with whom she traveled in the tours abroad accompanying her father when he was president, and María Lorenza Barreneche, the wife of former Argentine president Raúl Alfonsín.
Serrano had a period of economic difficulties in 2001, coinciding with the December 2001 riots in Argentina, which forced her to close the doors of her company and finish off a home she owned located on Calle Mansilla, in Barrio Norte, but managed to recover. In 2020, she made her last television appearance as a jury in the program Corte y confección hosted by Andrea Politti.