THE ITALIAN JOB

Last night was the opening ceremony for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations."  And of course with this opening comes the annual Met Gala, an exuberant red-carpet affair that brings out the fashion elite (designers with their model muses around their arm) and a plethora of actors, musicians and even some athletes.  I love inspecting the fashion choices the next day and seeing who went for bold and who played it safe.  But what I was more excited about this year was the exhibit's two amazing subjects, Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada.  

The two Italian designers, whose fashion houses were created a good half-century apart, have very common parallels in both their lives and their sense of design.  While Schiaparelli (known as Coco Chanel's biggest rival) began designing during the Jazz Age and at the height of Surrealism, Prada began designing clothes in 1988 after taking over her grandfather's Milanese luggage company.  The two women certainly have similarities, but it's their differences that also make this pairing quite unusual and exciting.  Andrew Bolton, co-curator at The Met, states that each woman used "fashion as a vehicle to provoke, to confront normative conventions of taste, beauty, glamour, and femininity."   

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