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Antonio Berardi's Best Yet
By J.J. Martin
Photos by Gruber-FWD
MILAN, Mar 5, 2003/ FWD/ --- It’s great to see a young designer hit the jackpot.
Antonio Berardi, who has been somewhat of an unpredictable creative talent in the
last few years, found a focus this season that sent his normally wacky designs down a
sharp path of hardened sexiness.
Berardi’s head was all over the place. Backstage, the 34-year-old British designer said
“there’s a little bit of Patti Hearst, my mother, Orson Welles, as well as touches of Film
Noir and the ‘60s” as points of his inspiration.
Luckily, things were more focused onstage.
Some might call it tough-girl chic, but we’ll be bold and give the ladies on stage their
true name: bad-ass babes.
Berardi took the best of the best circulating around tough-girl Milanese runways and
gave it his own artistic flair.
No one, including Berardi, is saying the obvious, which is that these hard-core girls,
with their slim black silhouettes and heavy silver hardware, are perfect to ride shotgun
in one of Mad Max’s doorless, roofless dirt-spraying moon buggies.
But the clothes are much more important than any words dreamt up for press use.
Berardi’s were dark, hard and edgy. Save for a flirty brush with sparkling silver, black,
off-black and sparkling black were nearly the only colors in the show.
The shortest of skirt hems were counter-balanced with over-the-thigh wool socks, while
shrunken jackets had bunched up sleeves.
Berardi is Italian by heritage, but owns a British passport. So it’s no surprise to see
the envelope pushed with inventive volume and creative flair.
Ruffle wings and voluminous corset-style body suits paired with capes looked fresh, as
did satin roses, which grew in patches from tight jackets.
It’s still a mystery what rows and rows of buckles will do lining skinny legs or jacket arms,
but the important thing is that they just look really good and really of-the-moment.
So did the oversized buttons, which seam together arms and legs.
We hope to see more of Berardi’s designs “in giro”, as they affectionately say here in Italy.
With Franco Pene of Gibo (the Italian company behind Viktor & Rolf, Hussein Chalayan, and
Paul Smith) now handling the manufacturing and distribution of his label, and continued
collections of this caliber, things are sure to take off soon.
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