A bolder shoulder
Why this violinist’s got skin in the game
Nothing comes between Anne-Sophie Mutter and her violin — literally. Some 30 years ago, she pioneered the art of making gorgeous music while wearing one glamorous strapless gown after another. It’s not the fashion that concerns her, says Mutter, who plays Carnegie Hall on Sunday, but the friction. “I realized that fabric is my enemy,” the 54-year-old tells The Post. For years, her fiddle slid around on her (clothed) shoulder until she finally realized that nothing succeeds like skin. She’s since inspired a legion of musicians to ditch their dowdy black concert dresses for the right to bare arms — and shoulders.
But Mutter didn’t discover her look alone. Dapper conductor Herbert von Karajan, with whom she made her concert debut at age 13, went beyond talk of tempos in later years to address her dresses and hair.
“He was married to a gorgeous model and he was wonderfully elegant himself,” says Mutter, who listened when he said her hair looked like “a German shepherd’s” and had it styled.
And then there were her clothes. By age 18 or so, Mutter says, she was shopping bridal stores, seeking something “youngish but serious” to wear onstage. Not good enough, von Karajan said. “He told me to go to Paris and get a decent dress,” says Mutter — and she did.
Her first gowns came from Chanel. “They had a sale and I was able to get a few dresses and had them shortened,” she says. “That’s when my love for custom-made started.”
From there, she moved on to Givenchy and then John Galliano of Dior, until his anti-Semitic outburst a few years ago caused her to cut ties. After a few “no-name German designers,” she settled on British couturier Nicholas Oakwell.
“The way he uses fabric is quite interesting, the graduation of color,” she says of Oakwell. “I choose ones that go well with the Strad — red is very good, and orange, and green,” referencing her Stradivarius violin.
Mutter says she’s not sure how many gowns she has in all, but is “shameless” about wearing the same ones, again and again, shipping them to Paris for cleaning. And while she’s yet to suffer a wardrobe malfunction, “zipper issues” have required her to be sewn into her dress. Just don’t ask her to sit down. “I can only stand in them,” she says.