Almost every fashion designer sooner or later mines Luis Buñuel’s iconic film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The legendary Spanish director served the bourgeois style quite well, revealing the très chic perversity underneath its conformist surface. Erika Cavallini just joined the bandwagon of Buñuel fanatics. In her Pre-fall collection, references to the movie abounded. She didn’t elaborate on its surrealistic, depraved side, though; rather, she explored its safer, more conventional attitude. “It’s about a sense of restrained elegance, almost severe,” she emphasized. “The idea of dressing up for social occasions—the foyers of theaters, receptions at home in well-furnished drawing rooms. A sense of formality.”
Elegance is a volatile and opaque concept these days; nobody really knows what it means anymore. For this reason, perhaps, the designer reverted to a fundamental sense of sobriety, almost of modesty. “I call it turtleneck elegance,” she explained, “austere, put-together, soigné.”
To make her point, she put white turtlenecks under almost every dress, blouse, jacket, and jumper in the collection. She even layered a masculine shirt under an evening dress. She kept the silhouette controlled and elongated; collars were buttoned down and cuffs were carefully finished with cuff links; prints were wallpaper-inspired and discreet. Cavallini softened and tamed her signature oversize volumes in favor of smoother, more feminine shapes, as in the riding coats with accented waistlines. Although bourgeois-inspired, the clothes didn’t look unassuming or sedate; on the contrary, they expressed the designer’s idiosyncratic sensibility and assertive personality. “I favor a restrained, ‘covered-up’ look not because I’m shy or because I want to conceal my flaws,” she said. “Quite the contrary. It’s because I’m confident of my femininity—it cannot be measured by the centimeters of skin that a plunging neckline leaves exposed.”
