Gianluca Saitto’s 2022 spring-summer collection runs through a cinematic film made up of encounters, moments, and characters that have been a part of the designer’s history since his beginnings as a couturier, from the great names in music to costumes made for ballets in the grand theatres. They are film reel frames that become unusual patterns with a retro feel, bringing life to the print of the trench coats, meandering along the pencil skirts, and dotting the tulle wheel skirts.
A design of lines and angles that intersect in a complex structure is also inspired by Fellini, with a nod to the immense and expensive set built by the filmmaker Guido, the protagonist of 81/2 played by Mastroianni, which may or may not be used for his science fiction epic.
“For this collection I wanted to recreate the dreamy atmospheres of Federico Fellini’s cinema, developing prints on various materials from the classic and precious silk, to cotton, to PVC. One of these prints with small strip frames has become a signature on skirts and jackets in which I retrace my ten years in this business and which tells the story of the different characters I met and collaborations with theatres”, explains the designer, describing the Cinema collection.
“A woman takes shape who embodies different characters and becomes the protagonist of boundless imagination. As uttered in La Dolce Vita: You are mother, sister, lover, friend, angel, devil, earth, home … That’s what you are: the home!” he goes on to articulate the facets of cinema translated into couture.
Stylishly fun by day, red carpet diva by night. The long garments are cloaked in lamé sparkles and lace between sculpted mermaid lines; flowing, fluid, and elongated silhouettes that enhance the physicality, short lengths alternating with trains. Angelically mischievous all-white enriched with feathers that adorn the profiles, luminous crystals, and ruffles: fanciful with style to shine between coloured lights and lounge music. Everything has a measured but always assertive sensuality, manifested in openings, necklines, and transparencies.
The colour palette is brought right back to basics, centring on the stylist’s untarnished pairing of black and white, but enlivened by flashes of metallic shades, grey hues and mother-of-pearl reflections. Saitto amalgamates apparently contrasting designer codes, condensing them with balance in his personal idea of elegance and refinement.
In this way, haute couture solutions, such as pleating, sumptuousness, and corolla lines, coexist with the immediacy of sleeveless tops, pencil skirts, floating pants, and chemisiers in textured cotton, and outerwear in macro houndstooth. An uninterrupted flow of fantasy that finds its continuity in the current of ideas, because, in the words of Maestro Fellini “Nothing is known, everything is imagined”.
A cura di Dafne Ambrosio