Blumarine’s Spring/Summer 2024 Ready-To-Wear Collection

Blumarine’s show space today was an immaculate white box. Gone were the mounds of sand and blazing pyres of the Joan of Arc collection, or the dark underworld where livid mermaids were circling around heaps of broken shells. Or the red Lamborghini smacked in the middle of a catwalk surrounded by sashaying skimpy pink Barbies that were “resurrected from their dusty boxes,” as Nicola Brognano put it. Had Blumarine mutated its genes and gone minimal? “No,” was his answer. “I just felt it was time for more light, more lightness, more butterflies.”

Butterflies, which in a previous collection were emblazoned on a sold-out skimpy top that was a TikTok sensations, came out in force this season, together with a parade of feathered wings à la Victoria’s Secret, making the case for Blumarine’s Lightness of Being new course. Butterflies are synonymous with frivolity. And angels, well, they’re angels. Blumarine’s were languid, lanky, handsome winged Adonises strutting down the catwalk in low-rise gold-leather trousers from which emerged smooth, naked torsos dusted with glitter—you couldn’t take the eyes off them, so lightness of thought wasn’t an option here. As for the butterflies, they seemed to have lost their impalpable, fluttering innocence, rendered as they were into heavily sequined thongs, barely covering the no-fly zone. “They’re pussy butterflies,” joked Brognano. To emphasize the concept, butterfly-shaped tiny rubber bags were part of a collaboration with a label (aptly) called For Bitches. And to make the waters even murkier, models walked to the beat of The Idol’s Lily-Rose Depp’s World Class Sinner/I’m A Freak.

Brognano’s (rather peculiar) idea of purity and airy luminosity expanded into other literal translations: colors were pale, jerseys were flimsy like hosiery, ribbons and trains trailed breezily on the back of ultra-short sexy numbers; shiny gold leather lit up pedal pushers and corsets. Bustiers and pencil skirts in clear PVC, studded with an abundance of rhinestones and crystals, were the pinnacle of Blumarine’s ode to lightness—or better said, nakedness. They didn’t leave anything to the imagination. There’s nothing lighter than the (almost) absolute absence of clothes.