Gabriella D’Italia of Mirror & Lens: Second Chapters; How I Reinvented Myself In The Second Chapter Of My Life

An Interview With Pirie Jones Grossman

I am sensitive to the world around me. In art-making, styling, and costume design this has allowed me to make successful, intuitive choices about form and color. I am attuned to the ways the material world can effect both joy and suffering, in a personal way, but also in a communal way. It comes naturally for me to connect material decisions with abstract ideas and values. My Holistic Styling work and my business grew out of this very place. I formalized practices that help others make this connection by using their everyday things as a mirror and a lens. That is how the name of my business, Mirror & Lens, was born.

Many successful people reinvented themselves in a later period in their life. Jeff Bezos worked in Wall Street before he reinvented himself and started Amazon. Sara Blakely sold office supplies before she started Spanx. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was a WWE wrestler before he became a successful actor and filmmaker. Arnold Schwarzenegger went from a bodybuilder, to an actor to a Governor. McDonald’s founder Ray Croc was a milkshake-device salesman before starting the McDonalds franchise in his 50's.

How does one reinvent themselves? What hurdles have to be overcome to take life in a new direction? How do you overcome those challenges? How do you ignore the naysayers? How do you push through the paralyzing fear?

In this series called “Second Chapters; How I Reinvented Myself In The Second Chapter Of My Life “ we are interviewing successful people who reinvented themselves in a second chapter in life, to share their story and help empower others.

As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Gabriella D’Italia.

Gabriella D’Italia is an internationally-exhibited, award-winning artist, author, and holistic stylist who lives and works at the intersection of personal vision and the material world. Her philosophies, styling, artistic practices, and writing are contemplations of what it means to be an embodied spirit. She is the founder of Mirror & Lens where her bespoke offerings exist in service of personal transformation toward living a more whole and authentic life.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?

I grew up as a third-generation American in Morristown, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City. I was raised to pursue the American dream, most especially in terms of education. Even from the youngest age I can remember a great sensitivity to the material things around me: my clothes, the particular color of a room, the emotional fluctuation evoked by the shadow of a cloud passing overhead. Yet, the focus was always on the development of the mind, on the intellect. Instead of heading to art school after high school, I earned my BA in Philosophy and the History of Science and Mathematics through the Great Books program at St. John’s College. Upon graduation, I moved to Boston and worked a corporate job for a couple of, what were for me, deadening years. I always practiced art, whether in extracurricular pottery classes, life drawing sessions, painting courses at The Museum School of Fine Arts, or teaching myself quilting from a borrowed book. However, I relegated it to a hobby. After one too many grey, monotonous days at the office, I decided to throw the cards in the air and head to rural Maine for a summer job designing costumes for a professional theater company. That was the turning point for me because I not only took my first earnest step onto my creative path, but I accepted a lot of uncertainty by entering this uncharted territory. I spent the next fifteen years immersed in costume design, fiber art, and becoming a leader in a network of nationally recognized fine craft guilds. Almost a decade after graduating college, I earned an MFA in Intermedia from the University of Maine, Orono.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human. . . We, however, are not prisoners. . . We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accomodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. . . Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”

This quote is from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet, a book I’ve been given several copies of over the years. I think the first one came from my Aunt when I was just starting high school. Rilke’s words locate such agency in the interiority of the creative disposition. They offer assurance of our essential belonging and that we are up to the task of our own precious, idiosyncratic lives. They inspire me to find the freedom that lies just beyond my current way of thinking.

You have been blessed with much success. In your opinion, what are the top three qualities that you possess that have helped you accomplish so much? If you can, please share a story or example for each.

I am sensitive to the world around me. In art-making, styling, and costume design this has allowed me to make successful, intuitive choices about form and color. I am attuned to the ways the material world can effect both joy and suffering, in a personal way, but also in a communal way. It comes naturally for me to connect material decisions with abstract ideas and values. My Holistic Styling work and my business grew out of this very place. I formalized practices that help others make this connection by using their everyday things as a mirror and a lens. That is how the name of my business, Mirror & Lens, was born.

I honor my vision. When I have an idea, which for me often comes in persistent images or fantasies, I hold onto it like a North Star. I allow my unique reality to occupy space in daylight. For example, when I lived in Maine, I was looking to buy a home when I discovered a shell of a nineteenth century, one-room schoolhouse. It was fully inhabited by squirrels and other wildlife and being dragged to the ground by shortsighted structural interventions and the encroaching forest with a significant contingent of poison ivy. I was a suburbanite from New Jersey with a liberal arts degree and a Woody-Allen-style fear of the outdoors, but I fell in love with that house. I bought it for $60K and the beautiful, waterless, powerless arrangement of bones became my home for the next decade. I turned it into an idyllic living and working space on two acres of gardens. I could see the end from the beginning, but definitely nothing in between and it was frankly quite scary.

My curiosity outweighs my fear. I have always questioned the status quo, personally and in my work. This ties very closely with my sensitivity to the world around me. When I experience dissonance, whether it’s socially or in reaction to a material circumstance, like clothing, landscape, or a constructed environment, I tend to move towards that space. Personally, this meant that I spent over a decade in a polyamorous marriage. In the context of art-making, I combine pattern, shape, and color in unexpected ways, with what I call elaborate specificity. I am striving to unify complex identities based on the truth of the material experience rather than inherited narratives, emotion, expectations, and cultural norms.

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about ‘Second Chapters’. Can you tell our readers about your career experience before your Second Chapter?

After a brief stint designing costumes, I began to pursue my own artwork. Although I always worked in different media, I became best known for my highly inquisitive, pro-craft, feminist fiber works and multimedia collage. I fell in love with quilting and used that vernacular to create functional pieces for many years before I pushed into fine art and eventually more conceptual territory. My work was published and exhibited in the Quilt National ’09 International Biennial. I received honorable mention for my work White Finery at National Fiber Directions. I was the Artist-in-Residence in Textiles at Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago. My work exhibited as part of the Art in Embassies program at the American Embassy in Doha, Qatar. I’ve been awarded several grants and my work lives in private and public collections around the country. While satisfying, this career lacked a kind of dimensionality that I longed for; I felt compartmentalized. I had to separate my passionate intellectual curiosity from my quilt-making and my quilt-making from my fine art. Once I entered the microcosm of these worlds, I began to define myself by the terms of the field. I was caught in between so-called art and so-called craft, to say nothing of my passion for my home, my gardens, and my philosophical contemplations. If in my quiet moments I felt whole, in the world I felt torn apart. What’s more, despite creative recognition, I did not feel connection. I would exhibit works, they’d live in a gallery for a while, they would sell (or not), and that was it. I had no sense of engagement with other people.

And how did you “reinvent yourself” in your Second Chapter?

In the crucible that followed a personal crisis at the end of 2016, my art practice evolved out of necessity. I had traded bountiful Maine studio space for a fifth floor walk-up that I now shared with my new husband, four dogs, and newborn baby. In order to heal, I intuitively marshaled my creative and professional history: costume design, visual art, styling, and quilt-making. I was looking at the world around me: my apartment, my clothing, and the city itself, as what I have now coined “material mantras,” in other words, opportunities for personal transformation. In a rock-bottom kind of way, I no longer wanted to feel fractured in my work. I realized that from the beginning my journey had been one of moving from an intellectual, head-centered life, to a more embodied, heart-centered one. I founded Mirror & Lens and began offering Holistic Styling services to others who also wanted to live more authentically and beautifully. In this work, I finally created a living way of practicing art that I’d always longed for. I could practice in connection.

The global challenges of 2020 felt like a too-recent echo of the fear and uncertainty I felt in 2016, not to mention firmly two-steps-back territory for my fledgling business. I took a deep breath and decided to trace my own journey in a now-finished memoir.

In my portrait of an artist’s journey home, I describe growing up in suburbia to fully choosing and living an artist’s life. After a three-year search spanning hundreds of miles, I ultimately returned home, transformed, having, as I say in my story, “rearranged the furniture.” This book itself traces the revelation of my own Mirror & Lens, Holistic Styling journey. By looking at my relationship with the world around me, I was able to see myself. By making creative choices, guided by love instead of fear, I was able to transform from the outside in.

Can you tell us about the specific trigger that made you decide that you were going to “take the plunge” and make your huge transition?

At the end of 2016, my life as I knew it ended. In the span of less than eight months my grandmother, with whom I was very close and served as a muse for my artwork, died. At the same time my husband, a man I’d been with for twenty-two years, was having an affair with a young friend of mine, a woman in her twenties. The betrayal was complicated by the fact that we’d been in a polyamorous relationship for the last decade of our marriage. I felt not only betrayed by my husband, but by a world that largely refused to sanction my grief because it wrongly conflated our polyamory with a version of infidelity. My husband left me and we went from talking everyday for the better half of my lifetime, to never again, as if overnight. I moved from rural Maine, where I’d been living for fifteen years, to New York City. I turned forty and became pregnant for the first time. I remarried. While there were personal ramifications for my identity, there were countless practical ones in terms of the way I worked, the space in which I worked, and my networks.

In my memoir, this crisis is the lens through which I look both backwards and forwards at a life that begins fractured and, through art, becomes whole.

What did you do to discover that you had a new skillset inside of you that you haven’t been maximizing? How did you find that and how did you ultimately overcome the barriers to help manifest those powers?

I had to come to see myself as whole. It wasn’t so much discovering new skills as no longer compartmentalizing the old ones for existent roles I saw out there. I searched for my own continuity of vision and drive. I asked myself what I truly cared about. When I work with my Holistic Styling clients, I find that they usually think of style as a form of expression. I work to shift their motivation from expression to being. Once I was aligned with what I cared about and what I wanted to do, (what I consider the terrain of being), expression came naturally. I came to understand that style is about how we see, not how we’re seen. I have the ability to connect intangible values with material things. I can trace this thinking back to that Rilke quote; we are not prisoners because we can always step outside of the way we’ve been seeing the world. We can change our lens.

How are things going with this new initiative? We would love to hear some specific examples or stories.

My clients become incredibly discerning and decisive when it comes to the things they put on their bodies everyday. This has profound outcomes. For example, one woman was going through a very painful divorce. At the start of our work together, I had her create a list of the activities she most wanted to engage in; she listed hiking among them. In going through her closet, we came across several tennis outfits. She’d worn these when playing with her now ex-husband. She had no hiking boots. Trading the tennis clothing for a pair of boots was such a simple way to redirect the energy and activity of her life, to align her values with her material experience. Another woman picked up a lovely black skirt and as she did, I noticed the expression on her face become tense. After a moment she explained, “I want to reclaim my power.” She’d been assaulted on a night she’d worn this particular garment. Her rationale for keeping it was perfectly plausible, however, the reality was that she felt powerless. This example is a powerful one because it highlights the ability for our storytelling, our heads, to be at odds with the truth. This can keep us stuck. Combing through our clothing is an intimate process of looking at ourselves and looking at the way we talk to ourselves everyday.

Once people start to change the way they view their relationship with the material things closest to them, their clothing and their homes, it starts to shift perspective in other realms such as self-worth, agency, and personal boundaries.

Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

There are countless people to whom I’m grateful, but in a very direct way, my friend Kathryn, a fellow artist and entrepreneur, asked me for help styling when she was on the cusp of personal and career transformation. Our sessions included many practices that I’d been using for years as part of my interdisciplinary visual art, namely: divination, meditation, psychometry, visualization, and shamanic journeying. These practices strengthen intuition on the one hand, and strengthen embodiment on the other. She was my first client. Our meetings were so revelatory and moving and the results so sustainable, that I streamlined and formalized the practices in order to offer them more widely. I’m thankful to all of my clients who’ve trusted in me and in this unique process. It is truly collaborative work and I’ve been blessed to work with extraordinary people.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started in this new direction?

My memoir started as a how-to guide for Holistic Styling based on a workbook I created for my clients. The more I used personal storytelling to anchor the practices, the more the memoir emerged. I ended up tracing my own life’s journey through the mirrors and lenses of my material experiences, through everyday things. The how-to-guide is still there, however. The memoir is a prequel, but the next book is already underway.

Did you ever struggle with believing in yourself? If so, how did you overcome that limiting belief about yourself? Can you share a story or example?

In the darkness of my personal devastation, I was bereft of internal resources. Faith, confidence, and identity were fairly shattered. One of the key philosophies in my Holistic Styling practice is that our stories and our emotions are not the truth. Our bodily sensations and our intuitions are the keys to our authenticity. Holistic Styling work is about cultivating practices that put us in touch with those things. I don’t try to change my own heart or mind directly, I change what I do and the things around me so that they reflect who I want to become. I allow them to “speak” to me in the language of my desired life, to impart a new perspective. I accept my doubts and limiting beliefs as transient. I cultivate practices that allow me to recognize the quality of my own energy in relation to the material world so that I can transform from the outside in. A simplistic way of saying it that we are familiar with: “dress for success.” Another famous example: Marie Kondo’s “spark joy” credo. Holistic Styling digs deep and formalizes these ideas into practices. It tailors them to the specific needs of specific people.

In my own work I usually encourage my clients to ask for support before they embark on something new. How did you create your support system before you moved to your new chapter?

My work was born out of personal and creative crisis. It could not have happened without personal healing, new learning, and the development of new networks. First, I sought conventional therapy. I also leaned into unconventional modes of practice that I’d been researching and using in my artwork, like shamanic journeying. This is a practice that allows one to tap into a wellspring of personal sovereignty, to feel part of something larger, and to glean wisdom from that space. I also went on my first ten-day, Vipassana silence retreat and continue to practice that form of meditation. I joined a women’s networking group called Dreamers & Doers and took advantage of countless offerings and events to learn and to meet other entrepreneurial women. Through that organization I joined a subgroup of professional coaches. I reached out to a friend from graduate school and joined a professional writers’ group that she’d founded. After reading an essay I wrote, she responded: “You’ve got a memoir here.” A seed was planted and I’ll forever be grateful for that reflection. I don’t know of anyone who does exactly the kind of work I do, but I made a point to study with people who practice in adjacent fields, for example, I worked with Elissa Weinzimmer, an expert on voice-body connection. I also worked with Julia Frodahl, an expert in yoga, dream tending, and training people in compassion.

Starting a new chapter usually means getting out of your comfort zone, how did you do that? Can you share a story or example of that?

I was definitely thrust out of my comfort zone by the events of my life. However, I knew there was no going back and that I couldn’t rely on the person I was in the past to get me where I was going. I dove into learning new things and meeting new people. In one instance, I worked with a group called Ultracultural Others in a micro-residency designed as a mystical self-study and wellness immersive for interdisciplinary creatives by artists Katie Cercone and David Williams. In one late-night, interactive performance at a small matcha shop on the Lower East Side, I found myself not only leading a full moon ceremony, but part of a hip hop cypher. As someone who historically lip sync’s Happy Birthday, even at small family gatherings, this was definitely uncomfortable. It was also beautiful and I’m ever grateful to both Katie and David for their work.

Moving out of my comfort zone was more about reinterpreting my “discomfort in uncertainty” as “curiosity in mystery.” This allowed me to see that uncertainty is a prerequisite for both opportunity and creativity. Learning to become present is the greatest tool in transforming experiences of uncertainty. Holistic Styling means using style as a practice of presence. I tended to the details of my everyday material experience in ways that brought me joy. I found abundance in caring for my home, my family, and myself.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me before I started leading my organization” and why? Please share a story or example for each.

Leaders need clarity of vision in uncharted territory, which is ultimately a very human predicament. The things that helped me most were practices that cultivate self-trust and the ability to shift perspective.

1. Meditation

2. Spending time in nature

3. Gratitude

4. Learning something new

5. Holistic Styling. I created this practice out of my own need to forge a new path. It is a practice aimed directly at connecting one’s vision with their ability to manifest results. I strategically shift the material environment of my home, clothing, and/or office in order to refresh my point of view. I believe the world around us is a lens and when we change the lens, we see differently. It is a great tool for nurturing creativity.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I would love to see people living their style. In Holistic Styling, style is how you see, not how you’re seen. It is the ability to change form and in so doing, to take on the vision or perspective, as well as the power, of the form you inhabit. Personal power, creativity, and peace are possible when we honor the truth of our most authentic experience, the one at the intersection of our vision and the material world. When we lose our sense of this connection, we experience a ripple effect from the imbalance. These effects happen on a personal, cultural, and environmental scale.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them. :-)

Gwyneth Paltrow’s work as the founder of Goop, for me, captures the intersection between spirit and the material world, which is where I locate my work. She embodies the spirit of a seeker and has created a platform for others to engage their own curiosity. She embraces wellness and materiality. Similarly, Elise Loehnen, formerly of Goop. She has the added allure of being extremely literary minded (or perhaps I should say, literary hearted.)

Martha Stewart once said “All the things I love is what my business is all about.” I’ve thought about that for a long time. I think it’s taken me quite the learning curve to get to a point where I can say the same. As I continue to love, I continue to work.

Glennon Doyle practices living her truth in such a vulnerable and public way, she makes me feel personally encouraged to do the same. She’s not afraid to own her mistakes, to change and to grow, and by inviting us into that world, she makes the world a little safer for the rest of us. In her words, she’s used her pain to become her power. Through her organization Together Rising, she connects the one to the many, the small to the large, one woman to a community.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

People can follow me on instagram @mirror_and_lens or read more about my work at www.mirrorandlens.com, where they can sign up for the latest news about the release of my memoir.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!

About The Interviewer: Pirie Jones Grossman is a certified Life Coach, TedX Speaker, influencer, best selling author and co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “Own Your Throne”. She has shared the stage with speakers such as Deepak Chopra, Elisabeth Gilbert, Marianne Williamson, Kris Carr, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. She coaches women on focusing on self esteem, and helping women reignite the second chapter of their lives!

She’s a writer for Thrive Global and Huffington Post. She’s a former TV host for E! Entertainment Television, Fox Television, NBC, CBS and ABC. She was Co-Chair for the Special Olympics International World Winter Games in Idaho and spoke at the UN on behalf of Special Olympics. She is the founder of the “Love is Louder” Brain Health Summit with Suicide survivor, Kevin Hines, focusing on teenage depression and suicide. She gave a TedX talk about, “How To Heal A Community from Suicide.”

Pirie has her Masters in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica, California. She is a Sun Valley Wellness Institute Board member and lives in Sun Valley, Idaho with her two teenagers where she has a private Life Empowerment coaching practice.