Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Anna Dello Russo On Selling Her Fashion Archive: "I Had To Make Space For Life"

Anna Dello Russo, the original fabulous street-style maven, is selling almost everything in the personal archive she has amassed over the last 30 years. Yes. Really. The peacock of fashion week is paring it right down.

A series of private sales for friends will culminate in a flash sale of 150 pieces on Net-a-Porter's Instagram Stories, and a Christie's auction of 30 of her most-precious archive pieces on February 24. The price? Peanuts. The reason? Love.

Falling for boyfriend Angelo Gioia put her clothes-packed second apartment and her bonus remote archive into perspective. "When I met him, I asked, 'Angelo, where should I put my clothes?'. He said, 'No space, sorry!' And I knew in that moment that I had to give space to life," she tells Vogue. "I think sometimes my life in fashion can be really insane, it gives no respect to the real life, the real relations."

"I waited for the right moment," she explains. "A collection of clothes is good when you're younger, but when you get older collecting stuff can be a little macabre. You know, like the bone collectors in those terrible horror movies."

She has chosen not to profit from her "manic and extreme" collecting - Net-a-Porter prices will start from £15 for accessories and reach £700 for outerwear, with all proceeds donated to the British Fashion Council Education Foundation - because, she notes, "My clothes are like my children, I don't want to sell any children!"


Did sustainability cross her mind while ruthlessly editing down 4,000 pairs of shoes? "Oh yes," she says. "If I'm born again, I want to do things properly. Garbage is no good as a message. Before I used to say, 'Wear what you want.' Now I say, 'Recycle clothes!' Times are changing."

For Net-a-Porter, she chose to focus on the Noughties. "That was my real street-style era," she recalls. Her boldest fashion week looks worked well for web. "When I edit fashion, I make pictures, I make stories, so I wanted to reflect my street-style story," she says proudly of her "best flashy, splashy items."

Ask her to pick her favourite and she can't. "It's like furniture," she sighs. "You can't say one piece, because it works as three pieces. And, like children. You want to say my daughter is better than her brother? No!"

The sales precede the publication of AdR Book: Beyond Fashion, Dello Russo's first ever book, published by Phaidon, which Net-a-Porter will sell exclusively for two months prior to its April release. Conceived with the help of her long-time friend and collaborator, Vogue Italia art director Luca Stoppini, it charts Dello Russo's career so far and the friends that have helped her build it.

Does a stripped-back wardrobe mean no more shopping? "I mean I can die for catwalk pieces any season," she says. "But, for the next obsession, who knows what's next? This project sucked the life out of me, but when I'm ready I'll tell you." We'll hold her to that.

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