This immersively anarchic, chaotic, and extremely long show came with some challenges. To get into the 20-years-closed Teatro Lirico, you had to undulate through a crowd of folks who share the perverse recreational pleasure of just standing around in front of fashion shows to which they have not been invited. Once through the clot, it was down a dusty gantry and into the bowels of this five-story, cracked, and scaffolded husk of a performance space.
Having already checked in with famiglia Marras backstage, I knew this was a collection inspired by Fellini’s 1965 movie Juliet of the Spirits, which starred Fellini’s real-life wife Giulietta Masina as a woman who turns to spiritualism to discover her husband’s philandering. Real life and inspiration blurred in a Fellini-esque moving tableau of air-kissing and posturing as the local crowd was delighted to see—and be seen in—this precious, famous place.
A spotlight revealed a trapeze artist poised above us in a white top hat, a bodice, and pantyhose. Released, she arced—slightly shakily—aloft. A red curtain raised to reveal a huge, Marras-clad cast on more zigzagging scaffolding gantries. Hyper-real housewives in check housecoats and devastating ingenues in plissé and lace-strafed party gowns wafted down the yellow-stained wooden runway. Models were mixed with friends and performers, some of whom received generous whooping from pals in the crowd. A chap in a blazer and shorts waved a silk scarf at the crowd, as if disturbed. A mature and buxom woman in an olive palm-print pajamas-and-robe ensemble was serenely attractive. A fellow in an embroidered suit and T-shirt walked as he read a book, while a woman in a net fascinator and a long, pale lace dress studded with blue and green baubles twitched and started as if plagued by spirits only she could sense. Embroidered jean jackets with cut-in panels of jacquard; micro-check full, asymmetric dresses; and a great long knit dress in stripes of red, blue, and beige were a few of the many highlights that raced by. The clothes competed with the performers for your attention—it was easy to relate to the male model/performer who kept pausing to put earplugs in and squint in confusion—and there were a great many to digest, all orbited by some notably great shoes and a profusion of bags and hats to boot.
At the end—or nearly the end—couples from the cast (men and women, women and women, men and men) danced out onto the runway to kiss and canoodle. We whooped. The curtain had quietly come down and was lifted again to reveal a uniformed brass band that started up with gusto as all 99 looks came out and around us again. This was a great show, packed with a whimsical multiplicity of characters, all united by Marras multitudinousness.
