Sometimes it is simply bizarre how one day you see on a runway an accessory inspired by something and the next day you actually manage to see the original piece that may have inspired that design.
So, for a twist of destiny, on Sunday there was a bag shaped like a Papal tiara on Dolce & Gabbana's runway, and yesterday the press presentation held at Rome's beautiful Galleria Colonna for the Met Museum's Costume Institute's Spring 2018 Exhibition"Heavenly Bodies" (May 10 – October 8) about fashion and the Catholic imagination, featured the tiara of Pius IX (1846-1878).
Made with a cloth of silver embroidered with gold metal thread, gold, blue enamel, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and semiprecious stones, the headdress was one of the five pieces on display celebrating the Vatican loan of around 40 ecclesiastical pieces for the exhibit.
There will be more about the preview in a later post, but for the time being it's enough to say that the most interesting presentation came courtesy of Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi who dissected the fashion and religion connection in less than 10 minutes and much better than professional fashion critics and tried to take the discourse to a higher philosophical level.
The most iconic picture of the afternoon isn't the one featuring American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour with some of the designers involved in the event, that is Donatella Versace (her house is also one of the main sponsors of the exhibition) and Valentino's Pierpaolo Piccioli (Thom Browne was also around), but a picture taken while exhibition curator Andrew Bolton was talking, with fashion devil Anna Wintour on one side and Cardinal Ravasi on the other.
The image, with Wintour's bob on the left and the cardinal's red zucchetto on the right, could have been a poster for a film about Heaven and Hell, and it somehow perfectly summarised the themes of the exhibition and the strange Felliniesque mood that hung in the air yesterday in the Galleria Colonna.
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