Anna Piaggi: Fashion-ology
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
2 February - 23 April 2006

'Fashion-ology' is a translation of moda-logia, a word Anna Piaggi invented to rhyme, or work graphically with – one is never sure which takes priority – mitologia ('mythology'). Mitologia was a Double Page spread in Italian Vogue in 1994, one of Anna Piaggi's famous Doppie Pagine (D.P. or 'Double Pages') on the classical references in high fashion that season.

Visually Mitologia was not as spectacular as some of the pages Anna Piaggi created. But the spread did encompass a lot of what Piaggi is about. It conveys the reason that I have been a reader of those pages for almost twenty years. Myths are associated with the historical and the classical; they assert the gravity of their claims, but without the weight of absolute truth. Myths have a suggestive ancestry, a transcendent one. This ancestry preoccupies Anna Piaggi, for its genealogies – or animism, as she sometimes calls it – convince us that equivalent words such as 'provenance' or 'reference' in dress miss, in their supposed accuracy, the point. As Wilde said, we run the risk 'of falling into careless habits of accuracy'.

Piaggi's references are inspired, cultured and unpredictable. One detail goes with another because at some point in history, the history of her browsing through images, they were juxtaposed. We are invited to join in. If curating is about putting objects together, then a broader cultural account of how this might be done can only be useful.

Mitologia led me to Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, his famous series of screens to which he attached fragments from pagan art and antiquities to the Renaissance and beyond. On his screens a stamp could go with a classical relief. As in Piaggi's work the reproduced images are scaled up or down for effect. Warburg described it as art history without words.

In 1949, James Laver, keeper of prints and drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, published a book entitled Style in Costume. The book links images of dress with architectural details. In his introduction, he writes a methodological disclaimer:

The method adopted in the present booklet is strictly non-scientific, which is a different thing from unscientific. We shall proceed not logically but analogically. There will be no attempt to prove anything, but only to bring related shapes together in the hope of firing the imagination to a perception of the reality behind pattern. The whole work, text and pictures included, is what a hundred years ago would have been called a 'suggestive inquiry'. It is hardly even that. Piaggi is also concerned with 'suggestive inquiry'. She is reluctant to spell out what she does and only very rarely shows her methodological hand. The –ology suffix which transforms the word fashion in the title is an attempt to capture her world of contradictions, her illogical logic as she calls it, as well as reveal systems of frivolity, patterns and angles in her work, her algebra of intuition.

Quotations are dotted throughout the exhibition, but the emphasis is on the visual, theming that is both consistent with Piaggi's free association and highlights a story of professional associations that span more than thirty years. An exhibition that would promise infinite variety is contained by the fact that it is the story of her own archive and the objects in the exhibition are drawn almost exclusively from her home in Milan where it is housed.

The exhibition is divided into thirteen statements, sometimes only the size of a text panel, sometimes a room full of objects. The logic of the layout is a series of intersecting As and upside down As which become Vs: Anna and Vogue, Anna and Vanity, Anna and her husband Alfa, and Vern, and the V&A. Bending the material to fit this system is in keeping with Anna Piaggi's loyalty to typographic design, each month bending words to fit Luca Stoppini's font in her Double Pages. The shape allows each section to open on to the next; her ideas are never contained or finished, but will be picked up at a later date. Chronology overlaps, punctuated by favourite themes, her love of Englishness, for example. The exhibition celebrates Piaggi's love of fashion illustration, the affectionate drawings by Karl Lagerfeld of her inimitable style, the dramatic spreads for Vanity magazine by Antonio Lopez, and a specially commissioned 3D tableau by Richard Gray, the British illustrator who for years contributed to her pages. Luca Stoppini, art director of Italian Vogue and the designer of her Double Page spreads, has with Piaggi created a dramatic work especially for the exhibition. The repeated presence of collaborators shows her loyalty and explains the thirteen 'favourite' outfits in the final section, created by the designers she promoted at the beginning of her career. They are displayed on a final A, painted in the bright red used by Ettore Sottsass for the 1969 Olivetti typewriter which Anna Piaggi uses daily – and of course the red of her lipstick.

Thirteen things I thought you should know about A.P. Jefferson Hack, co-founder, Dazed and Confused

1. A.P. claims that the work she does for Italian Vogue is 'purely decorative'.

2. A.P. has an Olivetti ValentinA typewriter she bought in the 1980s. There is a copy of it in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It has lost its number 9.

3. A.P. sees many things repeated in fashion, but understands that the carbon copy from a typewriter has a different look and feel from the original.

4. A.P. has written over 7000 editorial pages in her career.

5. A.P.arrives at the Milan fashion shows by taxi. She used to have a driver, but he suffered from amnesia and lost his way. She doesn't suffer from amnesia, but can easily adopt the look of amnesia if prompted.

6. A.P. is unable to distinguish between what's serious and what's funny, as she can be seriously funny.

7. A.P. was married for over thirty years to Alfa Castaldi, who passed away in 1995. She believes that in successful relationships you have to 'enjoy each other's noise'.

8. A.P. A 'silent movie star' is how Karl Lagerfeld described her. He drew over 250 sketches of Anna while she lived in Paris in the early 1970s. The first sketch was drawn on a paper napkin in a Chinese restaurant called La Route Mandarine.

9. A.P. often used to research locations prior to attending an opening or event. She regarded this process as a form of 'visual preparation' – essential planning for her outfit.

10. A.P.'s anachronistic approach to fashion is more a 'knack' than an act of anarchism.

11. A.P.'s first name is a palindrome, but her analysis of culture is not to look backwards, only forwards to the newness of now.

12. A.P. squeezes reviews into a few words: synthesiSing trends and fashion ideas into new forms. New expressions. She is a crossword without clues.

13. A.P. is at this moment in time into the idea of superficial advancement. But as we know, this moment has just passed.

Anna Piaggi's favourite number is 13.