THIS WEEK: IF LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS - WEAR THEM
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday March 31, 2011
There's a new Anna on the fashion block - Japanese Vogue's Italian editor-at-large and creative consultant Anna Dello Russo.This is the woman all the style bloggers want to snap outside the fashion shows in New York/London/Milan/Paris - the twice-yearly outing she calls the Fashion Olympics - because she always looks nothing short of amazing. Well, beyond amazing and into extraordinary, actually, nosing up towards bonkers but in a totally fashion-fabulous way.Miss Dello Russo's idea of daywear - and she changes three times a day, with fresh looks for morning, afternoon and evening - would be a tightly belted, tomato-red, one-shoulder, micro-mini balloon dress, with towering Christian Louboutin shoes finished off with half a ton of costume jewellery.In the afternoon she'll slide into a sheer black-lace tube dress over bright-red underwear, accessorised with a veiled hat in the shape of two giant golden cherries.For the evening she really dresses. At French Vogue's recent 90th-anniversary ball she wore a vast feathered headdress Montezuma would have thought a bit OTT, over a white-lace mask.A living work of art, Miss Dello Russo has taken over the fashion world role formerly occupied by Isabella Blow, who died four years ago. And the two women have something in common quite apart from a passion for wearing extraordinary hats, very high heels and dressing at the pointiest end of the fashion spectrum.Neither of them could be described as a beauty, in the classic sense.It was something Blow was brutally frank about. "It pains me to say so," she once said, "but I'm ugly. I know that's subjective, so perhaps I should say instead that I'm striking. My face is like a Plantagenet portrait."She more than made up for it by dressing so extravagantly the whole became far greater than the sum of the parts. So even when surrounded by some of the most ravishing women in the world at fashion events, it would be Blow who drew the eye the admiration of that toughest of crowds.I haven't read any such quotes from Dello Russo about her own looks but while she has a marvellous figure - the result, she claims, of three hours of ashtanga yoga every morning - and gorgeous honey-toned southern Italian skin, she doesn't have the neat symmetrical facial features our culture defines as beautiful.But it's a strong face, more than up to carrying off the wildest adornments, which would swamp a merely pretty woman. And it seems to be Dello Russo's life work to celebrate this as a one-woman, non-stop fashion fiesta.There are many videos of her on YouTube and her own blog and she comes over as a most upbeat and likeable character, who believes people who wear black are depressed ("They are not well ...") and simply has a tremendously good time dressing up and posing for the fashion groupies who mob her each day."I'm a total fashion victim," she admits, laughing.No one seems to know how she funds her passion - she has two flats in Milan, one for her and her dog, another for the clothes and her 4000 (yes, 4000) pairs of shoes - although presumably designers are more than eager to get their looks onto her back.And you have to wonder about the emotional balance behind such obsessive exhibitionism but Dello Russo's sheer enjoyment of it all is so uplifting, none of that really matters.She's living evidence that you are what you wear.maggiealdersonstylenotes.wordpress.com
© 2011 Sydney Morning Herald
