PAST FASHION EXHIBITIONS
Anna Piaggi: Fashion-ology
Anna Piaggi, photographed by David Bailey for Another Magazine. Dress designed by J C de Castelbajac, cape designed by Angela and Giovanni Grimoldi, hat designed by Stephen Jones (click image for larger version)
2 February 2006 - 23 April 2006
Anna Piaggi is unique. She is a fashion reporter, editor, divinor of trends, designers’ muse and self-styled icon. 'Fashion-ology' refers to her idiosynchratic way of looking at clothes. With her own take on scientific precision, an attitude rather than a method, she has for over 30 years told the new stories about fashion. Putting words to clothes, turning pages into shows, styling the future: this has been Anna Piaggi’s art of fashion. To see Piaggi at work is a rare glimpse into her fascinating career. London was a catalyst, and highlights from her personal archive in Milan detail her extraordinary trajectory on the world fashion stage.
The exhibition is divided into 13 statements, sometimes only the size of a text panel, sometimes a room full of objects. The logic of the layout is a series of intersecting As and upside down As that become Vs: Anna and Vogue, Anna and Vanity, Anna and her husband Alfa, and Vern and the V&A. Bending the material to fit this system is in keeping with Anna Piaggi’s loyalty to typographic design, each month bending words to fit Luca Stoppini’s layout in her Double Pages. The shape allows each section to open onto the next; her ideas are never contained or finished, but will be picked up at a later date. Chronology overlaps, punctuated by favorite themes, her love of Englishness for example.
Anna Piaggi's Olivetti Valentina typewriter, designed by Ettore Sottsass, 1969. Photograph by Bardo Fabiani, 2004 (click image for larger version)
The repeated presence of collaborators shows her loyalty and explains the 13 favorite outfits in the final section, created by designers who she promoted at he beginning of her career. They are displayed on a final ‘a’, painted in bright red, the red used by Ettore Sottsass for the 1969 Olivetti typewriter which Anna Piaggi uses daily – and of course the red of her lipstick.