No. SI1 (2025): Special Issue
Essays

The Wardrobe as Collection

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  • Paola Di Trocchio
Paola Di Trocchio
Queensland University of Technology/University of Melbourne
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/fh-3197

Published 14-07-2025

Keywords

  • wardrobe,
  • collection,
  • prosperity,
  • fashion

How to Cite

Di Trocchio, P. (2025). The Wardrobe as Collection. Fashion Highlight, (SI1), 44–50. https://doi.org/10.36253/fh-3197

Copyright (c) 2025 Paola Di Trocchio

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

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.

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