ANNA DELLO RUSSO

ADR, as she's fondly known in the industry, is the maximalist fashion director of Japanese Vogue. She's larger-than-life, the latest fashion phenomenon and my heroine. She did look like a transvestite at first glance but the character she paints of herself, somehow grew on me and seeing her outfits every time she is photographed out and about incessantly amuse me and the same goes with her zany comments. Read through and you'll understand why I LOVE this woman.

She's wearing an inky-black, sheer lace evening dress, thigh-high leather boots and a dramatic Philip Treacy feather plume headpiece. It's not even 11am. But then the Italian-born Dello Russo thinks nothing of wearing Worth couture at breakfast, a gold brocade Rocha jumpsuit to a 2pm fashion show and a sequined Balmain minidress for afternoon tea. [telegraph UK]

She presents fashion as a visual fiction, working it as a metaphor for escape. She will catalogue the scores of looks she gets through in New York, London, Milan, Paris, and finally Tokyo as long as six months in advance. She uses her car as a changing room between shows (her driver, she insists, is now almost un-shockable when it comes to the detailed aspects of her anatomy) in one of an endless succession of beautifully adjudged set pieces. “The point is not that I wear things that people have never seen before,” she says. “It is that I wear things that people have never seen me wear before.”  

For Dello Russo, if you’re not new, you’re about as good as dead. “I hate vintage clothes,” she says, referring even to last year’s Prada. “I love the smell of a new store, not an old dress.” [W Magazine] 

'I like the brand-new stuff. I grew up in the 1980s and was obsessed with Versace and Armani. I was so spoilt. I like statement. I like to show off. I like Monograms. I like brands.'

 For her 13th birthday, her father, a psychiatrist, took her on a shopping spree. At the time Fendi was all the rage and Dello Russo insisted on a Fendi-logo handbag and matching umbrella, tissue-holder, wallet and key chain, which she carried all at once. 'My father couldn't understand why, since we lived in Bari where it

never rained, I would want an umbrella. I said, "But, father, it's part of the look."'

 [Hilary Alexander]

She once also had to choose between a husband—whom she wed in 1996 in a dress with a 60-foot train designed by his best man, Stefano Gabbana—and more closets. “It barely lasted,” she says of her marriage. “He said, ‘Isn’t there some closet space for me?’ And I said, ‘No.’ In her typical easygoing way, Dello Russo laughs at the comedy of the situation. Now her companion in this fashion temple is Cucciolina, a mini­ature pinscher who shares her owner’s wiry frame and golden mane but thankfully hasn’t attempted to lay claim to any storage space. “The only thing she’ll ever wear,” Dello Russo says, “is her Hermès dog collar.” [W Magazine]