In the 2012 show, flowers were a leitmotif. Tulle gowns with hand-painted blossoms from that collection were on display at the haute gioielleria presentation at the San Domenico Palace (home of The White Lotus, season two) that kicked off the three nights of festivities for the 300-plus global VICs in attendance—four if you include the afterparty with an as-yet-unnamed special performer. Flowers were the big story here, too. Radicepura is already home to hundreds of native and non-native plants; the designers installed tens of thousands more: roses, hydrangea, petunias, and on and on. The result was a sort of hallucinatory garden, like Eden on a macro dose of acid. Senses blended: you could almost taste the colors.
As guests made their way to their seats, the models posed, some sprouting from the flower beds, others lounging on antique settees, at least one perching on a flower throne. One by one, when their names were called on the voiceover—Camilla, Claudia, Anna, Avishag—they began their winding circuit through the blooms. It took nearly an hour to unfold, many times the length of a typical runway show, and there were 100 looks in all—dresses for every kind of goddess and every kind of devotee. Sicilian widows in black laces, which are a house signature. Marchesa Casati types wearing silk dresses and velvet cloaks in gelato pastels. Debs in ballgowns of frothy Charles James proportions with hand-painting that conjured the 2012 collection. A goddess in pleated silk the exact aqua color of the Mediterranean Sea. Flowers came in many varietals: in three-dimensional rosettes, intarsia’d into fur, in embroideries on lace. On one especially extroverted look, dozens of bedazzled pistils spilled from a petal-like bodice.
The work involved was astounding, all the more so because the designers will pull off an Alta Sartoria equivalent tonight at Taormina’s ancient Greco-Roman ampitheater, and are already plotting a September ready-to-wear show. When an agog guest asked Gabbana how he kept going, he was as unequivocal as Dolce: “It’s my passion,” he said.
Alta Moda’s devotees—Jennifer Lopez, Christian Bale, and Monica Bellucci, whose 16 year old daughter Léonie Cassel opened the show in her modeling debut, among them, and many more lesser mortals with nonetheless eye-popping bank accounts—ate and danced late into the night. Transported, if not to Olympus then indeed to someplace quite magical for as long as the moment lasted.
