Not wanting to sound petulant but...I hate it when I hear about interesting exhibitions that I have very little chance of getting to see...the latest is "Valentino a Roma: 45 Years of Style" at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome. It's going to be running through October 28th but I don't see a trip to Italy in my near future so some images of the exhibits will have to suffice.

In the past I've found that some displays of clothes can be a bit (I'm going to be heretical here) dull. Case in point, an exhibition called "My Favorite Dress" at The Fashion and Textile Museum in London a few years ago. Designers' selecting their favorite dresses should have been interesting but was, in the main, uninspired...and a way for some designers to market their latest designs (I may be cynical but I fail to believe that 4 or 5 designers "favorites" happen to be the very dresses you could go to Harvey Nichols and buy at that very moment).

The curators for the Valentino exhibit seem to have got over the "dull" hurdle...I'm especially fond of the dummies gazing at themselves in the mirrors like modern day Narcissus, and the choir of dummies in red, obviously rejoicing at how well dressed they are.

Anyone lucky enough to attend the exhibit will receive a complementary exhibition catalog, published by Taschen, which will include a detailed analysis of the garments and materials on display and critical texts written for the occasion by the curators, the Mayor of Rome Walter Veltroni, and figures from the worlds of journalism and fashion criticism. For the rest of us, here are some photographs...


Images from IGN