Every season for many seasons Antonio Marras has unearthed a compelling story from his home island of Sardinia, then spun a collection around it. This time was no different, but the story was even better than usual. It concerned Anna Maria Pierangeli, a Cagliari born actor who was “discovered” and went to Hollywood in the 1950s, where she met and fell in love with James Dean. The story is much better told here, but the short take is that there was no happily ever after.
Marras put us in a club, complete with in-house doo-wop band on a glittery stage and an energetic bunch of guys and dolls jiving enthusiastically during a typically overlong introductory section. The collection blended all of Marras’s highly appealing standard techniques and modalities with a this-season layering of 1950s teen fashion and tropicana (a vibe justified by references to Pierangeli s apparent love for vacationing in Acapulco).
Pompadoured boys wore handsome South Pacific khaki fatigues with articulated sleeves and prints or patches of orchids and pearls. There were jacquard organza animalia short-and-shirt sets, print-patchwork short-and-shirt sets, embroidered Sardinian postcard motif shirts (for Pierangeli’s imagined postcards from home) and some great tropical print sets featuring rolling surf and rumbling red motorcycles.
The womenswear featured rattan parasol hats, multicolored many-tiered fringe dresses, and cinch-waisted and bodiced swing dresses in a Marras-typical multitude of pattern and texture. The knee-high, mid-denier stocking-socks worn by most models featured a back seam that morphed into the designer’s name midcalf: clever. Shaggy fringe feather-wrap dresses and car coats came in soft rainbow tones. Leathers in eggplant purple or olive green, and a cool swing skirt and bomber in incongruously fluoro green—a pleasant jolt—were among the many other highlights in this highly evocative show.
Fashion currently lacks great runway storytellers: Many houses with wonderful histories seem barely aware of them, let alone how to articulate them via shows and clothes. Marras is an absolute maestro at spinning yarns through garments—even if he could sometimes use an editor.
