“I will never forget her. Her huge curious and velvety eyes.” Amedeo Modigliani—yes, that Modigliani—was the scion of a Tuscan family that became wealthy through mining and that brought the young artist-to-be to Sardinia, where they operated their business. While he was there, he painted a portrait of Medea Taci, a local hotel owner’s daughter, for whom it is believed he developed a youthful crush.
This fantastic Antonio Marras collection was built around an imagined letter—imagined by Patrizia, Antonio’s wife—sent from Modigliani later in life to an old friend who had shared that time in Sardinia. The idea was that it mixed memories of the Sardinian coal miners and their partners taking their passeggiata with a sense of nostalgic longing for Taci (who in real life died early).
A quick Google search shows that Modigliani’s juvenile portrait of Taci—while excellently executed—was conventional in style and nothing like the proto-modernist technique through which the artist found controversy and fame. Marras re-created Taci in that style on an illustration on knee-high socks and reflected the look of Taci herself in the short bangs worn by the female models.
All this background was the creative context for a collection that beautifully showcased the virtuosity of Marras’s jackdaw maximalism. The menswear looks mingled vintage finds with new garments and even ties that were originally the property of Marras’s father: The idea was to give a sense of clothes nurtured, patched, passed down, and cherished afresh. Camo was mixed with corduroy. Quilted arms were stitched onto tweed jackets. The men wore German army trainers—the greatest surplus sneaker—and Vibram-soled work boots.
The womenswear was less reliant on vintage—a long section of olive drill army jackets and liners tricked out with frogging and embroidery apart—but it was just as intensely various. Lace, embroidery, crystals, and tulle were arranged in apparent disharmony to make intensely attractive wholes. We were in the studio space next to Marras’s gorgeous south-of-town store, and it was a tight fit. The models came down from the store, then crossed one another’s path again and again as they made their way around the studio. At first the photographers howled at each obscured shot, but after five minutes or so, they gave up. To cap this, a troupe of actors was reading Modigliani’s “letter” in increasingly melodramatic tones as the show went on. By the end of it they were running around clutching coupes of Prosecco and roaring with memories of the imagined good old days. As well as a tolerance for histrionics, one needs both patience and a pre-Instagram attention span to get into Marras, but the clothes that emerge from his and Patrizia’s huge and curious conceptual spin cycle of Sardinia-seeped bohemian mythologizing are well worth that price of entry.
