Mathilde Castello Branco is a fabulist, so when she decided that for Resort, she would work around cocktail, she didn t just work around cocktail—she narrated it. "What is cocktail for me?" she asked a visitor at her Faubourg Saint-Honoré atelier. "It s a woman at home having people over at 4 or 5 p.m." Her clothes are her cocktails. So she explained her palette: piña colada white, maraschino red, curaçao blue, whiskey gold. The kiss marks embroidered onto chiffon are "like lips on a glass." Her heels come with clear "ice pick" heels. "If I want to break my ice, I use my shoe," she explained. "It s a bit more glamorous."
Glamour is the Azzaro stock in trade, and Castello Branco delivers. She scatters crystals, drapes jersey, and insets sections of lamé. She s managed to loosen up the strictures of cocktail dressing a bit by inserting ease, and among her other options, she included what amounts to a lamé jogging suit. Still, what stands out here are the more elaborate evening options, the sort that Loris Azzaro himself created. Castello Branco has shown herself to be a conscientious steward of house traditions in small ways: Her lookbook photos for Resort, for example, refer back to a 1975 Azzaro perfume ad in which the founder looks on from a celestial window as a nun in lipstick applies her scent. But the truer homage may come from the exquisitely beaded gowns that closed out the collection, each painstakingly hand-worked for two weeks by a husband-and-wife team who have been with the atelier for 30 years. "They are the memoire vivant of the house," the designer said.
