Mar 10, 2002/ FWD/ --- Last season, Emanuel Ungaro personally witnessed the ready-to-wear debut of his dauphin, Giambattista Valli, at the house he founded so courageously four decades ago.

This season, Manny didn't even show up for the show.

Valli's big idea for his second collection was tough love, symbolized by the image of a rusty nail through a metal heart attached to the invitations.

But the show was disrupted halfway through by a series of jarring glitches.

First the hand-held searchlights mounted overhead kept breaking down.

Then the models began losing their accessories on the catwalk, forcing the editor-in-chief of German Vogue to scramble and politely pick up a cashmere scarf.

The setting itself was pretty: a tennis court-sized open white space dotted with ice blocks containing flowers and bamboo trunks, and a backdrop composed of a series of semitransparent curtains.

Valli opened with a quintet of looks in beige and sherbet floral dresses before moving on to printed silk jackets and caramel leather jackets with pailettes -- all of them rather Ungaro.

There was also a superb brown rabbit jacket, some excellent jacquard sweaters and an interesting selection of fluid silk robes.

Giambattista is clearly a designer of talent.

He's hip and young and amusingly funky.

But that's not quite the same thing as the tres respectable, haut bourgeois Ungaro customer who buys the line for a little polite fantasy.

Under Valli's influence, a large dose of modernity has been injected into Ungaro - from ads where dogs lick models' feet, to hip parties in lower Manhattan.

But does the Midwestern client really have naughty hounds in mind when she wears Emanuel out to an opera gala in Chicago?

Perhaps not.

Emanuel Ungaro

Emanuel Ungaro

Emanuel Ungaro

Emanuel Ungaro

Emanuel Ungaro

Emanuel Ungaro

Emanuel Ungaro