Peggy Guggenheim crossed the Grand Canal in her private gondola throughout the Fifties and Sixties with two dogs beside her and a pair of enormous winged sunglasses covering half her face, an image so persistent that Venice has never quite stopped associating her with it. On September 4, on her way out of the city after three days at the festival, Kendall Jenner appeared in sculptural shades with three flared points at each side, styled by Danielle Goldberg, and the reference landed instantly with anyone who has visited the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.

The Painter Who Carved Her a Pair of Wings

The original frames belong to a story that improves the more you learn about it. In 1948 the American painter Edward Melcarth, a friend from Guggenheim’s circle and a man better known for his figurative studies of the male body, hand-sculpted her a pair of bat-shaped spectacles from carved wood, painted them and fitted them with tinted lenses. He went on to produce several variations, each with its own silhouette, and Guggenheim placed them among her Tanguy earrings and her Calder jewelry as a signature possession.

The afterlife is even better. In 1949, with Peggy’s blessing, Man Ray carried the original pair to Los Angeles to photograph the actress Maila Nurmi, who liked them enough to adopt the shape as the defining accessory of her television character Vampira. A pair of sunglasses made for one woman in Venice ended up inventing the visual language of the American horror hostess. Safilo has since revived the design more than once, producing its Peggy Guggenheim model in 1994 and a limited edition twenty years later.

The Rest of the Look Was Doing the Same Thing

Jenner built the whole airport outfit on the same principle, pairing the sunglasses with an asymmetrical velvet poncho from Etro, dark denim and black ballet flats, a rose emerging from her black bag, and earrings made by Alexander Calder in 1955, which is the sort of detail that stops being an accessory and becomes a citation.

The week ran along the same lines throughout. In Venice as an Emporio Armani and Armani Beauty ambassador, she wore a gold floral gown from the house’s Fall 1995 archive to the premiere of Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, then took an Old Céline floral maxi from spring 2017 through the streets around San Marco. Method dressing usually means matching a film. This time it meant matching a house museum.