A few photos from the stunning Valentino exhibit at Rome’s new Ara Pacis Museum. The exhibit opened to the public yesterday and can be visited through 28 October 2007. We can’t say that we loved every one of the fancy frocks, but the show is a spectacle not to be missed.
A procession of women clad in white appears to enter the museum as a chorus of red-dressed women pay homage to the Ara Pacis, an Altar of Peace, built for Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, between 13 – 9 BC.
The exhibit – which features 300 dresses designed by Valentino over the course of his 45-year career – defines Valentino’s place in Rome’s long visual history, for it juxtaposes his oh-so-classical fashion with the idealized figures featured in the relief sculptures on the Ara Pacis.
Just as the Ara Pacis was created to celebrate Augustus’s triumph return to Rome after an empire-building campaign in Spain and Gaul, so the Valentino exhibit honors Valentino’s return to Rome. For the first time in seventeen years, the emperor of style presented his new haute couture collection in the Eterna rather than in Paris.
And, just as the Ara Pacis – with its elaborately carved relief sculptures – was meant to celebrate the Golden Age that was the product of the peace brought to Rome by Augustus in the first century BC, so too the Valentino show is a reminder of the dolce vita years in which Valentino began his career.
For more photos of Valentino’s retrospective at the Ara Pacis, visit Rome With A View
