Falling for Venice once is unavoidable; refusing to move on is a choice. With his fall show, David Koma picked up where his pre-fall left off—still very much loitering in Venice, and still happily mining its most risqué nocturnal clichés: decadent baroque palazzi gone to seed, masked adventurers prowling dim backstreets, and the inevitable gondola-side indiscretions—handsome gondoliere very much implied.
The Blumarine femme, now less girly, more diva, with a taste for operatic mischief, scuttles through the darkness of Venitian calli in spectacular mini crinis and ballooning, shorter-than-short capes. The house rose, once sweetly sentimental, has grown thorns and an attitude: printed sharp, spiky, and faintly dangerous.
Koma’s Blumarine doesn’t flirt with drama—it orders it for breakfast at Venice’s Caffè Florian, preferably with a side of dark romance. Chainmail ultra-minis came studded with those now weaponized roses; the rosettes spun with vertigo-inducing twirls on a gold georgette lamé minidress gleamed with the subtlety of a Murano glass chandelier. In a fitting cinematic finale, a harlequin black-and-white goatskin coat swept the floor with theatrical gusto, flung over a black chantilly lace corseted ultra-mini and sheer garter stockings that left very little to the imagination, and clearly nothing to chance. Head-to-toe red sealed the mood: when subtlety steps aside, full-on red moves in like it owns the place.
Koma does not believe in half measures, nor does his Blumarine diva in Venice. She’s traded ingénue innocence for full-tilt showgirl bravado, and is having considerably more fun with it. Provocation here isn’t a risk, it’s the point.
