Entre l’art et la mode: la collection Carla Sozzani (Between Art and Fashion: the Carla Sozzani Collection), opens at Galerie Azzedine Alaia, Paris, this month. Selected by Fabrice Hergott, Director of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, from the oeuvre started 40 years ago. The event is in search of the conversations made between multi-disciplinary practices: art, design, fashion and photography, and how all of these continue to create connections with each other.
Born in 1947, Mantua, Italy Sozzani graduated from Bocconi University, Milan, where she began to work as editor for a variety of Italian fashion magazines, later to become editor-in-chief for Italian Vogue – working with Robert Mapplethorpe, Sarah Moon and Paolo Roversi amongst others – and founding the Italian edition of Elle. Sozzani was at the heart of the Italian Renaissance and the centre of the developing humanist traditions within all art forms.
In 1990, the cultural icon – who has been involved in many designers’ creative lives – opened the Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan, and then 10 Corso Como, internationally. These endeavours were the hive of activity for culture and commerce, highlighted by Hergott’s collection of major works by Helmut Newton right through to Alfred Stieglitz. It was in these constructed venues that the concept of beauty, aestheticism, gender roles and art forms were debated: where femininity was something presented and discussed through the medium of the lens.
This new exhibition, opening on 10 November, is a record of Sozzani and the search for finding composition, balance and structural harmony within each and every single image. Documenting the avant-garde, the imaginative and the everyday mysticism, this unique show immortalises the multi-strands of culture and a snapshot of stylistic innovation.
Between art and fashion: the Carla Sozzani collection, Galerie Azzedine Alaia until 26 February.
Credits:
1. Nude with shadow pattern, 1948 / Louise Dahl-Wolfe © Courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York.