Piaggi wearing a ball gown with the skirt spread open to reveal a large clock, or a knit sweater dress that showed Her eccentricity was awe-inspiring, sometimes surreally so, as evidenced by photographs that showed Ms. Giuseppe Aresu/Associated Press Franca Sozzani and Stephen Jones at the Anna Piaggi memorial in Milan. Jones, the great milliner,ĭescribed her as “a talisman for those who believe that fashion is a way of life and that freedom of expression should manifest itself in what you wear.” Each time she appeared, she would create a new startling picture.”Īmong the speakers were several designers – Carla Fendi, Rosita Missoni, Manolo Blahnik and Stephen Jones – who similarly expressed Ms. Anna simply did it with cloth, feathers, furs, jewels, herself. Piaggi as “fashion as art – how she dressed herself was really the same way a painter, with his tubes In a New York Times video that was played at the beginning of the service, the photographer Bill Cunningham described Ms. It was somewhat fitting that guests entered by walking through a major Picasso retrospective that opened in the museum this week. Piaggi, who died in August at the age of 81. More than 200 people gathered at the Palazzo Reale in Milan on Friday night for a memorial service for Ms. Piaggi who was a true originator, one whose aesthetic sensibility was informed by her own tastes, her remarkable collection of centuries-old vintage designs and her detailed While they are entertaining to watch, it was Ms. And she loved the sort of instant uplift or glamour, because you know, the thing about hats is that you get bang for your buck, it really stands out.Coverage from in and around the Milan shows. If she was feeling a bit droopy, her hat could be perky. She thought they were an armour of some description, you know, against the world. Jones reflects: “Was her life through her hats? She really loved hats, I have to say. In this exhibition, they ensure her legacy lives on. In their shared apartment she says: “My hats lived with his Leicas, my clothes with his Linhof, my earrings with his ‘21 mm’ or with his zoom.” In her own apartment, they lived with her. It was a nostalgic and personal affair, a sacred peepshow into the private domain of a woman whose eccentric public persona was physically undressed and strewn throughout the Milanese apartment she moved into after the death of her husband, fashion photographer Alfa Castaldi. The result was more than a recreation of the inside of Anna’s quirky home. He donned the hat of the curator, milliner and friend simultaneously to approach the process of conceptualising the exhibition. Stephen Jones described the pressure put on him to take on the role as curator: “The Piaggi’s were saying “Stephen you have to do it, you must do it, there’s nobody else who can do it.” He managed to do it with the same the zest he puts into his relentlessly fresh approach to millinery design. “Anna was one of Vivienne’s greatest fans,” reads the text label accompanying this piece, “frequently styling her advertising campaigns.” “Tweed Crown,” for Vivienne Westwood, created by Stephen Jones. She posits that the character of the narrator is so fundamental, that the question is not “ What is a curator?” but “ Who is a curator?”It was their intimate relationship, the inside story that Jones knew so very personally, that he has brought to this exhibition. When asked was she a celebrity to him, or his muse, or a close friend, he answered “All of the above.” In her article A Curatocracy: Who and What is a V&A Curator? Dr Linda Sandino argued that the curator is such a fundamental part of the process of delivering an exhibition’s message, that the narrative is in fact, inseparable from their own story. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.” (Oneself as Another, 147-48). To quote Ricoeur directly: “The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. But she was also the one and only Anna Piaggi the personality- adored by designers, celebrities, the press and the public- a collector who used her objects to define herself. Her ever-inventive Doppie Pagine’s ran in Italian Vogue for over 30 years, she was Vanity’s editor-in-chief and the subject of hundreds of drawings by Karl Lagerfeld (published as Lagerfeld’s Sketchbook). “Text Hats,” gave a nod to the career Piaggi designed for herself as a freelance journalist who wrote in seven languages.ĭrawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur, Elenour Hamilton argues “…that telling stories about ourselves mediates to configure (and re-configure) our human experience of time and life into narrative identities.” The museum narrative constructed by Jones as curator allowed the viewer to piece together a sense of Piaggi’s multi-facted position in the fashion world since the 1950’s.
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