I can't deny it: one of my favourite Elsa Schiaparelli designs remains the 1937 lobster dress created in collaboration with Salvador Dalí (View this photo).
Yet Dalí and Schiap weren't the only artists who used the lobster in an irresistibly ironic and iconic way: legend goes that French poet and essayist Gérard de Nerval used to walk a lobster around the streets of Paris on a blue ribbon. Apparently he would do so to upset the bourgeoisie.
I've been trying to think about ways to recreate something lobster-related for a while, something less extravagant and more wearable compared to the lobster designs donned by Isabella Blow (View this photo and View this photo) or Lady Gaga (View this photo), but that could still be considered as a surreal tribute to Schiap, Dalí and de Nerval to offend not just the sensibility of the bourgeoisie, but also the sensibility of all those snobbish and fake people working in the fashion industry.
Being too busy working on something else, I abandoned the idea for a while. Yet the lobster obsession came back, especially since September when news of the upcoming "Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations" exhibition at the Met Museum started circulating on the Internet.
In the end a friend of mine, artist Patrizia Cacciatore, came to my rescue. Patrizia works with a range of different materials and came up with two medium-sized cold porcelain lobsters (this choice of material means that the lobsters still look real enough without being too heavy) that are currently happily living on my hat. We called this design the "Thibault" hat, after de Nerval's pet lobster (you can't see it in the picture, but the elastic band of the hat can be covered with a blue ribbon).
Since I attracted a lot of positive comments and smiles while wearing it, we have decided to make it available to the wider public. At the moment the hat (one size fits all) is only available in black with one or two orange cold porcelain lobsters (price on request - you can email me to have further information about it: [email protected]).
Special thanks to Luca & Peppino at the Pescara fish market for allowing Katsuo Mifreki to play with their stall and use it as the photographic set for the hat.
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