Recently the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York City put up an interesting exhibit of the historic textiles that inspired Veronica Etro’s Spring/Summer 2018 Tree of Life collection.

While I’ve owned the odd piece (a hair turban, a bikini, a silk chiffon scarf, a pair of velvet flats . . . ) I’ve never been fully at home with Etro.

On one hand I so enjoy the school of fashion design they embody: multigenerational Italian family business; super-luxe textiles; intense and intricate details and trim, always. Though the company was founded in the 60s and sourced its signature swirling paisley in India, it very much gives me those Renaissance Venetian trade goods vibes.

The Etro DNA that doesn’t flatter me personally includes the palette (olive, mustard, merlot and lime always reappear), and the tendency of the garments to “wear me”. For those reasons, it’s much easier for me to incorporate the Etro home collection into my life than the womenswear.

To be clear, these are not criticisms! Etro is beautifully designed and produced, and perfectly focused for a specific woman, I’m just not the Etro woman in terms of coloring/personality.

I still enjoyed the exhibit, which showed how artifacts in the Etro archive directly influenced the silhouettes, prints and embellishments in the S/S 2018 collection.

Paisley provokes such strong associations: the wall hanging purchased during a gap year, the shawl on the piano in spaghetti Westerns, the underside of patio umbrellas in the 70s.

There’s no symbolism with paisley, just abstraction. Paisley gets you thinking! And the more time you spend staring at the intricacy of the iterations, the more likely your brain will leap from thinking to dreaming . . .