John Donne’s famous line “No man is an island” is an apt one for fashion designers, who tend to be insular creatures inhabiting peculiar worlds of their own, dense with layered images and personal memories. “Memories take you on a journey,” Antonio Berardi said at a Resort appointment, emphasizing the point. “I’m a nostalgic.” Nostalgia doesn’t really come to mind when thinking about the designer’s aesthetic; he’s known for his sculptural body-con silhouettes. Yet memories are powerful tools for Berardi, so much so that he made his new collection around a treasured 19th-century French globe de mariée, an antique miniature Wunderkammer in which couples displayed their most cherished souvenirs. In Berardi’s own globe, pictures and family memorabilia were piled up in delicate chaos around an ormolu floral cutout.
A sense of intimate storytelling and the designer’s signature tailoring formed the foundation of his new collection. “It’s my British side, a strict cutting technique of almost military precision, but then there’s my Sicilian sensual side,” Berardi said, pointing out a crimson silk double-breasted jacket, which at the back revealed a feminine, fluid asymmetrical tail. That play of opposites was carried out throughout the collection: softness and rigidity, severity and a sense of drama. A case in point was a stark white see-through organza dress with a built-in bodice in woven lace, weighted at the hem by a stiff flounce in thick bonded cotton. Paired with a short asymmetrical skirt in broderie anglaise, it conveyed a structured sense of lightness.
“I like strong, powerful women—feminine but in control,” he said, highlighting a vest with Velcro straps that looked like a luxe version of a bulletproof jacket and a black knee-length tailcoat embellished with golden doves. Geometric flourishes gave a lively, sexy vibe to the architectural rigidity the designer favors. Flashes of dramatic colors such as cardinal red and purple were definitely not suited for wallflowers, which anyway have never been an option chez Berardi.
