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The magnificent ballroom of the old Palazzo Reale, a spectacular creation of the late-eighteenth-century architect Giuseppe Piermarini, bombed during the World War II and left in its state of ruinous magnificence, made for a surreal backdrop to showcase clothing from the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations” (opening May 10). Curator Andrew Bolton had arranged seven Elsa Schiaparelli originals from the 1930s in dialogue with seven Miuccia Prada ensembles—a delicious and irresistible teaser.
Schiaparelli’s diaphanous 1935 sari dress in orange organza threaded with golden filament was paired with Miuccia’s golden sari cocktail dress from Prada spring 2004, for instance. Elsa’s jacket with white rococo volutes appliquéd on tidily tailored black crepe (a model that was also ordered by the Duchess of Windsor for her 1937 wedding trousseau), was paired with Miuccia’s playful rococo singerie print dress from spring 2011, whilst the bugs embroidered on the otherwise conventional pink collar of tastemaker Millicent Rogers’s fall 1937 cocktail suit were reflected in the plastic bugs embroidered on Miuccia’s orange tweed skirt from fall 1999–a collection that Miuccia referred to as Lost in the Woods.
“I never would have thought of some of these resonances,” I said to Miuccia, who was wearing a coat in an Op Art print from last night’s runway show paired with ravishing eighteenth-century diamond-and-peridot earrings.
“Me neither!” laughed Miuccia. “The feather is the most obvious,” she added, referring to the finale piece from her fall 2007 collection, a short evening dress of bark-textured silk with a back composed of coq feathers and shiny black plastic fronds. Andrew Bolton had paired this with a ravishing 1934 Schiaparelli evening gown of textured black crepe; just the sort of dress that Man Ray photographed Schiap wearing with a black and white coq feather boa of her own.
In his opening speech, Milan’s commissioner of culture, fashion, and design Stefano Boeri said that the two Italian-born stylemakers “shared a unique bond with art, womanhood, beauty, and politics.” Emily Rafferty, president of the Met Museum, hailed the upcoming show as the “jewel in the crown” of the institution's historic engagement with Italian culture.
And Miuccia listened, rapt and inscrutable, to the Costume Institute’s **Harold Koda’**s and **Andrew Bolton’**s intriguing and thoughtful analysis of the two designers’ very different sources and paths to sometimes oddly similar—or at least echoing—results.
Both designers, in Bolton’s words, “used fashion to provoke . . . to challenge normative values.” He cited areas of mutual engagement, including “ugly chic” and “hard chic,” and explained that film director Baz Luhrmann (currently wrapping his remake of The Great Gatsby) is creating a series of video dialogues between the two exclusively for the exhibition, drawing on the “forthright and often vociferous opinions” that these otherwise shy women have expressed in print and on film.
Bolton ended by asking whether Miuccia and Schiap would have been friends if fate had made them contemporaries?
“I think so,” said Miuccia with her cryptic smile, explaining that since reading more about Schiaparelli—who apparently planted seeds in her ears as a young girl in the hope that it would make her unconventional looks blossom into loveliness—she had become for her “a woman I learned to like. The humanity of the whole thing interests me very much. She was protesting all her life!”