Wardrobe as Collection

The Italian fashion journalist, Anna Piaggi (1931-2012) offered a potential response for prosperity fashion through her singular approach to self-fashioning. Her wardrobe collection, containing approximately 3,000 garments and accessories, contained museum-quality objects which could be likened to the holdings of major museum collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Victoria. Consequently, through my PhD thesis, I have argued that the wardrobe collection can be likened to the museum collection. The positioning of the wardrobe as collection then offers opportunity for intersections with broader ideas around slow fashion (Fletcher, 2010). For Fletcher, slow fashion need not solely be the slow manufacture of garments in an artisanal process but can incorporate broader ideas. This research proposes that Anna Piaggi offers a revised consideration of what the slow fashion wardrobe can be and that the wardrobe can become a slowly assembled collection, on par with or likened to a museum collection, that is continuously reinterpreted.