David Koma fell below the spell of Venice this season, hardly a shock given La Serenissima’s centuries-long behavior of seducing even probably the most clear-eyed guests. “It brings out the artist in me,” he stated, noting that he totally surrendered to the town’s mysterious nocturnal attract and shadowy glamour. Masked balls, elegant debauchery, a frisson of fetish, sensuality wrapped in opulence: Koma ticked off each Venetian cliché, weaving them into his darkish romantic fantasia for Blumarine.
A 1992 marketing campaign shot by Albert Watson in Venice served as a visible level of departure, whereas Helmut Newton’s imagery, one other touchstone for the label, hovered within the background. For Koma, Newton’s model of eroticism has by no means been about shock worth: fetish, he insisted, is “not provocation, however management.” That concept formed the emphatic hourglass silhouettes that have been an evolution of the corsetry Koma has launched since his first season on the label. Right here it blossomed into structured mini crinolines swathed in lace, tightly mounted with gilded buttons formed like masks and lion heads, Venetian emblems by the use of Blumarine.
The home’s signature sentimental roses skewed thorny and ferocious, spun into vertiginous 3D plissé rosettes scattered over skimpy minidresses or bead-stitched onto bias-cut, sheer georgette slips layered beneath sweeping capes that nodded to the tabarro, Venice’s conventional cloak. Fluffy shearling boleros, patterned within the Harlequin’s diamond intarsia of carnival costumes, have been worn over little greater than lace briefs, then casually reassigned as plush blankets, tossed over gondola seats.
Amping up the boudoir-mood drama, black lingerie bodysuits barely pretending to cover beneath sweeping lengthy coats have been staged in opposition to the crumbling decadence of historic palazzos or drifting out of the Venetian fog at dawn, when the town seems to be its most conspiratorial. Glints of flame crimson erupted right into a palette of black and white, pushing apart the occasional dusty pink and pale blue of fading Venetian stuccoes. For Koma, Venice isn’t about minuets of courtship or moonlit serenades on the lagoon; it’s about need, lust, and the hazard of getting misplaced in its labyrinthine, tortuous calli, ideally earlier than anybody finds you at daybreak along with your five-inch heels barely crooked.
