Luisa Beccaria is expanding her résumé. Come April, she’ll launch a homeware collection of tablecloths, cutlery, plates, and candles. It’s a natural evolution for the designer, who rehabbed her family’s Sicilian castle to splendid effect, and last year looked on with pride as three of her children opened a popular Milan restaurant, LùBar. Season to season, Beccaria conjures a very rarefied vision of the Italian good life. In their frocks of embroidered lace and hand-painted velvet, her models looked like guests at a lavish wedding in the country. True to form, there were plenty of softly waisted, billowy-sleeved, floaty dresses in today’s show, the most captivating in that lustrous painted black velvet.
But it was the daywear she emphasized—that’s the potential growth area for her. Beccaria took her cues from Marianne Faithfull in her Rolling Stones days, when she might’ve borrowed attenuated tailoring from Keith or Mick. The designer cut her jackets close and cropped, her vests fitted, and her pants flared. Many of the models wore versions of Faithfull’s signature floppy felt hat. The menswear influence infiltrated softer, more feminine pieces, like a 1930s-ish silk dress in a pied-de-poule print, and a slouchy cardigan whose front featured a natty check. With Beccaria working to grow her design vocabulary, it seems a shame that a similarly expansive view wasn’t reflected in a more diverse casting. That’s something Beccaria can rectify next time.