Vanessa Noel - Dream Shoes

A journey through extraordinary creations and surprising stories that span different eras and countries, bringing fashion, culture, and imagination into dialogue.

Curated by Vanessa Noel, Luca Lo Sicco, and Giulia Innocentini, and organized in collaboration with the Noel Shoe Museum in New York and The American University of Rome, the exhibition at the Casa Museo Boncompagni Ludovisi offers a broad and evocative reflection on shoes. They not merely an accessory dictated by fashion trends, but objects imbued with aesthetic, artistic, and symbolic values that, over the centuries, have helped define identities, social roles, affiliations, and collective imaginations. Art, craft, and memory unfold across the rooms of the House Museum, interacting with the objects in the collection and highlighting their various aspects and details.

The exhibition presents a selection of the most iconic creations from the forty-year career of American designer Vasessa Noel, along with several historic shoes from the collection of the Noel Shoe Museum, which she founded to preserve, study, and promote the culture of footwear in its many historical, artistic, and sociocultural aspects. The result is a narrative in which the shoe is revealed, in turn, as a symbol of authority and a representation of power, an instrument of emancipation and freedom, a testament to technical innovations, and a lens through which to understand the relationship between the individual and self-representation.