While Coach delivered the funniest fashion film of this season, Antonio Marras appears to have come up with the dreamiest. The 15-minute, 57-model-and-actor-cast mini movie was a set-in-Sardinia riff on the flight described by Boccaccio in The Decameron about seeking sanctuary in nature from sickness. Here, that sanctuary was represented by Barumini, a UNESCO-protected Nuragic-fortified village dating from the second millennium B.C.: “It’s Sardinia’s Stonehenge,” as Marras noted. Even without understanding the detail—the pilgrims are seeking the protection of a mythical queen figure named Nuraxamanna, played with magisterial strangeness by Lia Careddu—the landscape, cast, and clothes make for a beguiling lockdown escape. The Barrittas-soundtracked denouement punctures any possible pomposity.
Marras’s idiosyncratic Sardinian mix of folklore and fantasy consistently conjures collections that are specifically distinct yet happily translatable beyond his shores. De Innui Ses, or “Where do you come from?” in the Sard language, was this collection’s motto and a quote from the local archaeologist, Giovanni Lilliu, uttered on his discovery of Barumini. In this collection Marras excavated his own roots by unearthing afresh the multiple structures of design that have long served him.
These included overlaying vintage black velvet shepherd’s jackets with upcycled swatches from his womenswear stash, or piecing together women’s tailoring from multiple source fabrics and sprinkling them with embroidery. Climbing roses clustered in more embroidery over pinstripe suiting or on croc-pressed bikers, and knitwear included an agglomeration of upcycled elements from collections past (on sale, buy-now style, shortly).
To dig deeply into all of it would represent a long-term expedition beyond these means. Yet even when seen fleetingly from afar—as per Barumini itself on a hoodie showing its mapped contours—this was a compellingly dreamy collection that evoked the ancient and eternal through Marras’s authentically rooted and finely calibrated mixology. With that dreamy film attached.
