During lockdown, with time on his hands and having exhausted all of Netflix, Paul Andrew went on an Alfred Hitchcock binge. The Birds, Marnie, and Vertigo were at the top of his best-of list; he found out that the same obsession was also shared by director Luca Guadagnino, who in his film Io Sono l’Amore apparently referenced a lot of Hitchcock—the gestures, the lighting, the poses; a certain high-class look of enigmatic sophistication. Andrew wasn’t sure at that lockdown time if and when he would be able to stage a real fashion show, so he decided to go for a short film instead. Asking Guadagnino to work together on a project for the spring collection was just in the cards—and a thrilling opportunity.
The film, shot in an eerily empty and utterly Hitchcockian Milan at the beginning of August, opened today’s Salvatore Ferragamo show, which was staged in the open air in the hectagonal colonnaded courtyard of the late-Baroque period Rotonda della Besana.
Backstage before the show, which felt unusually serene, Paloma Elsesser was looking intently at one of Andrew’s mood boards, wearing an hourglass black leather number that could have come straight out of Kim Novak’s wardrobe in Vertigo. The dress signaled a more sensualist, high-gloss direction for the designer; he tried his hand on less-oversized proportions, favoring instead a shapely, more feminine, formfitting silhouette. The color palette, inspired by the chromatic quality of Technicolor, also added a hint of sensual vibrancy and visual punch. “That’s my favorite, Tippi Hedren’s green,” he said, pointing out a neat little tailleur with a waisted jacket in eau de nil; it would have actually looked slightly bourgeois if not for the off-kilter intervention of a fluid sarouel, replacing the more conventional pencil skirt.
While sticking to the refined linearity he has envisioned for Ferragamo, Andrew punctuated this collection with impactful staccato highlights—think a seersucker checkered fabric with a tactile finish; thick knitted and knotted pieces with an artsy flair; quivering feathers sparsely scattered on straight cotton pants or on a pinafore. A floral motif printed on a canvas trench coat was sketched from the abundant wildflowers growing everywhere in Tuscany during the quarantine.
The coed collection was edited down by Andrew to just 30 looks, which was surely beneficial to conveying a convincing rhythm and a focused message. “Less but better; it’s our way forward,” he said. “I’m really into it.” The Andrew-Guadagnino connection also proved a winning creative combination, to be hopefully continued in the future. “Lockdown has been dark, surreal, and mysterious, like a Hitchcock movie,” chimed Andrew. “But strangely, like in a Hitchcock movie, the ending is always somehow beautiful. I’m trying to celebrate the beauty that is going to come out of it.”
