Any kid who spent afternoons around the millennium watching MTV will know that the girl group All Saints is the catnip of a generation. Once its members started harmonizing, your heart melted, and it still does. Add a young Leonardo DiCaprio to the mix and the effect is positively euphoric. Bruno Sialelli pushed all those nostalgic buttons with his second music-video-style short film for Lanvin, which followed February’s re-imagining of Gwen Stefani’s “Rich Girl” from the same era. And he wasn’t even trying to hide his tricks.
“Being a teenager, with all your hormones, seeing things through the lenses of blossoming and being ‘in-between,’ The Beach was something very emotionally engaging,” he recalled over coffee in his opulent Paris showroom, referring to Danny Boyle’s DiCaprio-starring film from the year 2000. Its soundtrack featured All Saints’s elating “Pure Shores,” which also served as Sialelli’s score. “Their music catches you by the collar. It brings you back to your teenage life and the beginning of your sexuality. That was the manipulation we wanted to bring.”
A pretty straightforward affair, Sialelli’s short film riffed on Boyle’s appetizing MTV-worthy camera work and the sizzling, sexual gap-year exoticism of The Beach in a way those who know would know. “It’s an aesthetic and field that attracts me, being 33 years old. We thought it would be interesting to give that dimension to a collection,” he said, noting how the tactility, trippiness, and stolen kisses of the film felt almost radical in a post-pandemic climate. “But being, sort of, politically correct.”
If the mood was mischievous, it matched the collection. Saturated evening florals gave a certain decadence to short-sleeved day shirts and negligees, or plissé dresses, which had a second-hand sensibility about them that was echoed in little frilly bouclé suits and oversized khaki suits. Graphic skin-tight bodysuits and sci-fi slides cemented the idea of a traveler’s wardrobe: a co-ed melange of things picked up in diverse locations and mixed with a generous generational dose of sportswear.
Speaking of generational, Sialelli answered the increasing social media-driven appetite for branded clothes by reissuing Lanvin’s JL monogram from the early 1970s, which kind of looks like an Art Deco skyscraper. Designed by Jules-François Crahay, whose creations informed other pieces in the collection, it had been tweaked and colored for added trompe l’oeil and splashed across sportswear and bags. Sialelli, who isn’t normally one for a loud logo, smiled: “It gives this vibe of jet-setting…but with us, it’s never first-degree.” Whether you’re the type to fall head-over-heels for nostalgia or for logomania, the bait that Sialelli puts out is effective.
