Schiaparelli and Prada at The Metropolitan Museum, NY

The Met's Spring 2012 Costume Institute exhibition, Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, explores the relations between Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada's work. Schiaparelli (1890–1973), who worked in Paris from the 1920s until her house closed in 1954, was closely associated with the Surrealist movement. Prada (1949), who holds a degree in political science, took over her family's Milan-based business in 1978, and focuses on fashion that reflects the eclectic nature of Postmodernism. 

Iconic ensembles will be presented with videos of simulated conversations between the designers directed by Baz Luhrmann, focusing on how both women explore similar themes in their work through very different approaches.

The exhibition, open from May 10 to 19 August 2012, will showcase designs and accessories by Schiaparelli from the late 1920s to the early 1950s and by Prada from the late 1980s to the present.

As a celebration of this exhibition, red carpet arrivals at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's renowned Costume Institute Benefit will be live streamed on their website on Monday, May 7, from 0:30 to 2:30 p.m, CET.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 - 1879) was a British photographer, whose subjects were the celebrities of the victorian era. She began photographing in a later age. Photography was her way of contacting writers, intellectuals, artists or scientists. Julia Cameron copyrighted, exhibited, and published her photographs and within some months, of starting, she sold prints to Victoria and Albert Museum. 

Some of her portraits are the only existing record of some historical figures. These records include personalities as John Everett Millais, Charles Darwin or Ellen Terry. One of the unusual characteristics of these portraits, for that time was the close crop around the subject's faces that are sometimes out of focus. The subjects appear with soft contours and is their look what gains the most intensity. 

Another part of her work are photographic illustrations that were often influenced from oil paintings or had as reference historical texts or Arthurian legends.

Margaret Cameron never built a commercial studio, also, she never made commissioned portraits. As she wrote:"I believe in other than mere conventional topographic photography—map-making and skeleton rendering of feature and form."

"My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty."

Julia Margaret Cameron

Pussycat, Pussycat - SHOWstudio April 2012

'Pussycat, Pussycat' - SHOWstudio April 2012

Photography: Nick Knight with instagram

Model: Cara Delevigne

Fashion direction: Alex Fury

Jewellery from Fabergé, Van Cleef and Arpels and Cartier

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