Anna Pettenuzzo, Design Process

Anna’s collection was inspired by the mirror, which is the key element in the search for identity. The reflection, however, often lies to the observer and the mirror does not reflect an image that is faithful to reality, it tells a different reality, the self disintegrates and becomes something else. The inspiration also comes from the art of the photographer André Kertész. In 1933 he made a photographic series of 200 pictures of female nudes distorted through a deforming mirror. The series of photos is called “Distortions”.

Ego does not speak about the narcissistic vision of oneself; the collection communicates how the “I” in all individuals is not only one but it is composed of different faces, fragmented, distorted, deformed, far from the individual’s consciousness. Ego talks about the identity crisis in a vision that we can easly reconnect to Pirandello’s philosophy, in which our material existence is a trap that imprisons the thousand refracted and broken identities.The collection was therefore developed starting from the lasts deformation, in fact they are broken, duplicated and certain parts are enlarged, as if they had been mirrored and re-assembled. The right merges with the left, the outside becomes larger than the inside and the front merges with the back.

The collection, including shoes and bags, starts from simple shapes relaborated through the mirror; two color palettes have been designed, one dark and one light. The calfskin can be plain or, in shades of white and khaki, in craquelé (the pattern of the craquelé recalls the Achrome series by Piero Manzoni). The collection targets genderless young people; even the masculine and the feminine have no longer a real identity.