Have you ever experienced sleep deprivation? I certainly have, for various reasons, and it has made me yearn for sleep more passionately and ardently than ever. Sleep is, after all, a blissful state, the starting point of everything.
Consider this: Alice's adventures in Wonderland begin after she falls asleep, and a vivid dream filled with fantastic creatures unfolds in her mind.
However, sleep also represents the eternal sleep of death, a topic we've explored in previous posts over the past few days. So let’s look at the theme with a fashion and interior design post that starts with Cinzia Ruggeri's bed dress.
Originally created in 1988, this unique design was showcased in an exhibition at Kaufhof department stores in Cologne, Germany, where Ruggeri also presented her tablecloth dress, bodysuit adorned with suction cups, Italy boots, and Sicily and Sardinia bags.
In an interview published in May 1988 on Casa Vogue, Ruggeri described her creation: "My bed-dress was made with real blankets, real sheets, and a real pillow. I liked the idea of taking outside, 'institutionalizing' and giving dignity to that feeling one has before getting up, the feeling of dragging the blankets and sheets with you, extending the atmosphere and sensations of sleep and dream when awake. My bed-dress is exactly this - being suspended in a state between not knowing if you are dreaming or not. If you are dreaming of dreaming or of being awake..."
Over the years, the bed dress and the creations it spawned led to various interpretations, eventually evolving into a pillow dress.
The May issue of Casa Vogue also included an extensive interior design photoshoot dedicated to bedrooms, styled by Cinzia Ruggeri and Alessandra Zighetti, that featured a surreal tale by Ruggeri herself in the style of Dino Buzzati, an author she admired.
The photoshoot was entitled "Fairytale Nights: Who Got into My Bed?" and recounted a surreal week in Ruggeri's life: each night, returning home from a party or a dinner with friends, like one of the bears in the Goldilocks tale, she would find her bed occupied by rather unusual entities.
These included two televisions, a vacuum cleaner and pasta machine engaged in an intimate encounter, and a toy dinosaur named Dino (a nod to Buzzati?) offering a peach blossom flower to his girlfriend Saura, embodied by the portrait of a woman with a plastic proboscis (a reference that anticipated Ruggeri's "La leggerezza del peso" (The Lightness of Weight), her 1989 installation inspired by a fictitious story about the last elephant on Earth).
"My week consists of eight days, and I'm often out in the evenings for pleasure," the story began. "On Tuesday, returning from a ball at the British Embassy, I slowly open the door, and the king, the queen, Humpty Dumpty, and Huysmans's turtle are playing golf on my bed."
"On Wednesday, returning from a visit to a Greek friend (how we laughed!), I find a big TV and a small TV under the covers. On Thursday, coming back from Fontainebleau, there's a grandmother dressed as a wolf in my bed (or maybe it's the other way around? I don't care)."
"On Friday - after a dinner with Alsatian friends - I find three little pigs who have made themselves comfortable. Who's afraid of the big bad wolf? The next evening, returning from Bologna, I stumble into my bedroom; the vacuum cleaner and the pasta machine are embracing amidst my sheets, and he, with his long arm, sucks up all the egg noodles. On Sunday, I return and find Professor Pi dozing, disheveled and tamed; sometimes counting sheep hurts."
"The day after Sunday, a visit to the Natural History Museum; when I return home, I can't believe my eyes: if it weren't for that loving expression... It's a sticky and humid dawn when I reach my room, and maybe that's why they get caught. Valve and Fuse turn red and offer no justifications. But I don't ask for explanations. I gently close the door and go to sleep at the hotel. And to think that you have to lie down to see the sky!"
The shoot featured classic ‘80s moods and shades: from the silvery textiles, the robots and TV screens that embodied the decade's fascination with early technological devices, to moments of excess verging towards the kitsch, represented by the toy-like interior design pieces (spot Robert Venturi's "Cuckoo Clock") in the shoot.
Besides, it also featured quite a few tropes and symbolisms that characterized Ruggeri’s unique vision, from pigs and eggs to the spine of the dinosaur projecting a shadow on the wall hinting at a staircase, an iconic motif in Ruggeri’s imaginarium (dear me, how much I miss these subtleties).
It's worth noting that today marks the anniversary of Cinzia Ruggeri's passing in 2019, which adds a layer of contemplation about life and death to this narrative.
Sleeping and resting, living and dying - ponder about these themes, while I long for sleep and imagine doing so in Ruggeri's dress.
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