A year and a half into his tenure at Emanuel Ungaro, Fausto Puglisi is picking up on the challenges of brand revivals. "The risk of looking too closely at the archives," he said today, "is that the clothes don't look down-to-earth enough for a real girl." The trick, he knows, is hitting a woman where she lives, and Puglisi has an increasingly good handle on that, as evinced by pieces like short A-line cocktail dresses and flowing maxi dresses in zebra stripes and micro-florals, respectively. Also spot-on: loose-fit jeans worn with an embellished bra top and a printed blazer slightly eighties-ish in its proportions. A sweatshirt printed with the likeness of Madame du Barry (Marie Antoinette's arch rival) and the word Wyoming, on the other hand, was a bit of a stretch, not to mention a little tired, even if we appreciated Puglisi's reasoning: "It represents freedom." It was the exception to the rule here. Other things we liked: a versatile and sexy jersey dress that draped a multitude of ways from an elastic band on the inner waist, and a long printed dress gathered and draped at the hip with a small ruffle that Ungaro himself would recognize. Maybe the archives aren't the enemy after all.
