For her spring 2026 Emilio Pucci present, Camille Miceli summoned her loyal tribe of family and friends, and anybody else tempted by the promise of Sicilian daylight, just a few cannolis, and plates of pasta alla Norma, to Ortigia, a jewel-box island dangling off Siracusa, the place mythology lingers. It unfolded beneath the grand, brooding arches of the Grotta dei Cordari, a setting so theatrical, one expects a Greek refrain to emerge at any second. Miceli, being half Italian, is aware of moderately properly the best way to wield the appeal of the picturesque. However she’s additionally Parisian, that means she refuses to be completely seduced by it. “Let’s be trustworthy,” she deadpanned, “Sicily is a development. Everybody needs to return right here.”
After 4 years steering the Florentine home, Miceli has discovered her footing. She seems completely à l’aise, tossing collectively archival prints and new riffs with a breezy, understanding hand, spiking the entire affair with a cool, bohemian sensuality, and a sure “unpretentiousness.” “Pucci shouldn’t be pretentious,” she insisted. “We’re not snobby. We’re approachable.” Certainly, hers shouldn’t be the form of style that requires a decoding handbook: You see it, you need it, you attain for it. The garments are female, infused with a buoyant pleasure that’s usually missing elsewhere. Miceli’s recipe, which is equal components appeal, readability, and a studied lack of hauteur, seems to be working.
Emilio Pucci clearly obtained to Sicily first, sketching Fifties prints impressed by the island, immortalized in a now-mythic picture shot in Palermo’s Piazza Armerina, the place a younger girl in a Pucci bathing swimsuit virtually merges with the mosaics beneath her. Miceli was drawn by Ortigia’s light grandeur: balconies looping round palazzos like crinolines, theatrical and barely crumbling. “I really like the disused, decadent aspect,” she says, which in Sicily is much less an aesthetic than a civic dedication.
She referred to as the gathering Alba, which is Italian for daybreak, solely in Miceli’s world, daybreak doesn’t a lot break as refract. There’s the literal Sicilian dawn; colours had been lifted straight from Mount Etna. There’s additionally a conceptual dawn; Olafur Eliasson’s synthetic solar on the Tate Trendy, which bathed viewers in a form of glowing transcendence, may’ve impressed a collection of sensuous loose-knitted tunics shimmering with a barely hallucinogenic glow. After which there’s the daybreak that arrives after a protracted night time out, when the music fades and the eyeliner smudges. Time for free-spirited, daring Pucci en deshabillé.
Miceli’s heroines oscillated between yogi and rave woman. It’s 2026, and duality is sort of a costume code. Fringes of sequins flickered like managed flames, a home signature reimagined with further voltage, and “Fiamme” prints rippled throughout the gathering. Elsewhere she explored Pucci staples: foulard clothes, pareos slung throughout well-honed hips, and tops generously revealing equally disciplined abs, some with a darker undercurrent.
Slip clothes recalled ’90s minimalism and liquid jerseys revived the Marmo print, whereas fishnet, sequins, and flashes of vintage gold stored issues anchored firmly in after-dark territory. The finale arrived with Angelina Kendall clad in a high composed completely of bijou. Alba, in Miceli’s fingers, was much less a few light new starting and extra about that ambiguous second between endings and prospects, if you’re not completely positive if you happen to’re going house to mattress, or beginning over with a solar salutation. Pucci, for the time being, does each.
