What I wrote in jest as an April fooler and on March 21 only partly seriously about Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi of Libya as a would-be fashion designer may after all have some truth to it.
Horacio Silva, the fashion editor of the New York Times, has carried an intriguing letter from Zainab Bint Abu Talib, an aide to Moussa Khalid Wahabb, Libya’s new Minister for Cultural Affairs. In that letter Talib apparently seeks Silva’s help to curate Gaddafi’s collection for possibly exhibiting it at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts’ Costume Institute.
The letter describes Gaddafi as a “cultural innovator” who has been “at the fashion forefront of the African/Arab world.”
On March 21, I wrote “If only the Parisian haute couture would have let him join their ranks in the 1960s, we would not have to bomb Libya today. And the world would have been gifted a quirky fashion designer.”
On April 1 I carried fake sketches (done by me) of what was purported to be Gaddafi’s early work like the one below.
If there is indeed someone called Talib who has indeed written to Silva, then I suppose what I wrote was not all that ludicrous. The colonel does indeed have an unfulfilled desire to be recognized as a fashion designer. Not that different from Adolf Hitler’s lifelong passion to be an architect.
The letter says, “A contact from our UN staff has been in dialogue with Mr. Harold Koda's people at the Costume Institute at your Metropolitan Museum in New York. There is intense interest in our proposal for a retrospective in 2013 of Colonel Gaddafi's four decades of superior dress sense. In the last month the compound next to the presidential palace was badly damaged in a bombing raid and we are very concerned should the same happen to the palace the result might be the destruction of over 3400 items of breathtaking sartorial magnificence: Decades of Military uniforms and leisure wear mostly hand made from the finest fabrics on earth that show not only President Col. Gaddafi's strong commitment to leadership qualities but his relaxed and informal side as a devoted family man who loves to entertain.”
