Everyone who was anyone in the fashion community was there today to fête and support Giorgia Tordini and Gilda Ambrosio, who for the first time put their Attico collection on a runway. Ferragamo’s Maximilian Davis, Gucci’s Sabato De Sarno, Jerry Lorenzo, Remo Ruffini, the Caten twins, Francesco Vezzoli, and a long list of friends of the house sat on comfortable ’70s leather couches, lined up in the open air along the sidewalks of an elegant Milanese street—kids cheering from ornate balconies, onlookers peeking out from tall wooden doors. It was a rare moment of clear sky in an annoyingly rainy Fashion Week that had forced powerful brands much bigger than theirs to cancel plans of showing outside. But sometimes the universe listens, lending a helping hand to young designers with big ambitions but not so big budgets.
“We wanted our collection to happen in the street, which is a sort of cinematic set where people are both stars and voyeurs,” the designers said backstage. Every look was styled individually, without following restricting rules of coherence; the show’s flow wasn’t consequential, rather a free stream of characters “walking at a fast pace as if in a rush and dressed in haste, a bit undone,” they explained. They wanted to give the show the IRL feel of a tranche de vie, where possibilities are endless. The only nonpossibility when dressed in one of The Attico’s arresting looks is to go unnoticed.
Tordini and Ambrosio have come a long way from the languid, vintage-inspired, hot party frocks of their beginnings. Now their girls are vixens with tomboyish cool and streetwise cunning. At today’s show, they wore supersized masculine suits or slouchy utilitarian cargos over which they threw a feathered tank top and a bomber lined in a flurry of tremulous, exotic plumage—a sort of new breed of bird of paradise that will never be caged.
Supersized coats coiling up like huge sneaky scarves, regal cloaks for dark street-savvy princesses, and protective furry wool stoles for incognito queens of cool were worn over the sensuous, shapely, vintage-inflected, diva-esque evening frocks the designers are great at concocting. Glamorous jumbles of fringe, tassels, feathers, marabou pom-poms, and crystal drops, improbably held together by acrobatics of invisible threads, seemed ready to dissolve into barely there, alluring nothingness. Ensconced in their soft leather couches, the audience was in rapture.
Collection
This article was originally published on Vogue Runway.
