Everyone from the fashion community was present today to celebrate and support Giorgia Tordini and Gilda Ambrosio, who took their Attico collection to the catwalk for the first time. Ferragamo’s Maximilian Davis, Gucci’s Sabato De Sarno, Jerry Lorenzo, Remo Ruffini, the Caten twins, Francesco Vezzoli and a long list of friends from the house sat on comfortable 1970s leather sofas, arranged in the open air along the sidewalks of an elegant Milanese street: children cheering from graceful balconies, spectators peeking out through high wooden doors. It was a rare moment of clear skies during an annoyingly rainy Fashion Week, which had forced powerful brands far bigger than their own to cancel their plans to exhibit outdoors. But sometimes the universe listens and lends a helping hand to young designers with big ambitions but not so big budgets.
“We wanted our collection to take place on the street, a kind of cinematic set where people are both stars and voyeurs,” the designers said backstage. Each look was styled individually, without limiting the rules of cohesion; the flow of the show was not consistent, but rather a free flow of characters “walking at a brisk pace as if in a hurry and hastily dressed, a little undone,” they explained. They wanted to give the show the IRL feel of one tranche de vie, where the possibilities are endless. The only impossibility when dressed in one of The Attico’s arresting looks is going unnoticed.
Tordini and Ambrosio have come a long way since the languid, vintage-inspired, hot party dresses of their beginnings. Now their girls are vixens with tomboyish cool and streetwise cunning. At today’s show, they wore oversized men’s suits or sloppy functional cargos over which they threw a feather tank top and a bomber jacket, lined with a flurry of vibrant, exotic feathers—a new breed of bird of paradise that will never be locked in a cage.
Oversized coats that rolled up like enormous slinky scarves, regal cloaks for dark, street-savvy princesses and protective furry wool stoles for incognito queens of cool were worn over the sensual, shapely, vintage-esque, diva-esque evening gowns that the designers do so well. . invent. Glamorous tangles 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, seductive nothingness. Nestled in their plush leather couches, the audience was enraptured.
