This ability to interpret life, the times one lives in and history can all be found in the exhibition “Bob Krieger imagine. Living through fashion and music. ’60 ’70 ’80 ’90”, at Palazzo Morando in Milan, with architect Carlo Colombo’s installation of the exhibition and with curator Maria Grazia Vernuccio.
Every room, which is able to suggest a most special emotion, unveils the secret archives of the author’s memories, a sort of gift from the artist, who is usually reluctant to show himself. I decided to do it because one night, while I was sleeping, it was as if I was hearing some screams from the closed suitcases where I have gathered my works”. On display are works recovered from Bob Krieger’s precious private collection, images shot between the 60s and the 90s, among which the publicity campaigns for the greatest Italian fashion designers: from Armani to Ferré, from Missoni to Valentino, Versace, Biagiotti, Gucci, Fendi, Dolce & Gabbana… In brief, all the protagonists that determined the boom of Made in Italy products in the world. Faces, geometries, colors and lines that, as Krieger himself points out, “do not represent only the essence of my work, but also the story of the Italian designers who managed to break through in the United States”.
The tale of the explosion of an unparalleled phenomenon that paved the way for the excellence of Italian design, food and lifestyle.

We were able to dethrone France in the fashion sector, turning all Italian fashion into a brand recognized in every corner of the planet. We built a united family, although a bit quarrelsome from time to time.

Bob Krieger has hundreds of memorable moments to remember, among which Time’s cover dedicated to Giorgio Armani, in 1982, which he himself shot: “It was the first time that an Italian fashion designer was on the cover of such an important publication.
It was a form of consecration, almost like winning the Nobel Prize. Fantastic!”.

His style is from a different era, as Maria Grazia Vernuccio stresses, heightened by the difficulties that were part of an adventure that its protagonists remember with a touch of nostalgia.
“The iconic image of this exhibition – says its curator – the image that I strongly wanted despite Bob’s reluctance (‘I look like a homeless person’, he kept telling me), the one in which he is lying down on the ground in order to photograph a model with New York behind her, represents the beginning of everything, the evidence of a most humble photographer to whom the whole world of fashion, and not only that world, really owes him a lot”.
When we ask him what place he feels most connected to, he has no hesitation in replying: “Alexandria, my hometown, which has taught me how to live and how to live with others, and which has pushed me towards gentleness”.
Bob Krieger thanks everyone during the vernissage of the exhibition, because – he says – he strongly believes in ‘take & give’, in the most concrete idea that it is others who help us be what we are and therefore one’s own merits are not worth much, while those of others are worth much more.

“Bob Krieger imagine. Living through fashion and music. ’60 ’70 ’80 ’90”

Open untill 2019, June the 30th at Palazzo Morando in Milan