Dolce and Gabbana Alta Moda/Alta Sartoria 2025

Wow, please take the time to watch the video of this jaw-dropping show of Dolce and Gabbana's most recent Alta Moda collection for women inspired by the culture, architecture, and imagery of ancient and 1950s Rome, presented at the Roman Forum itself! At sunset, a hundred-plus extras dressed in costumes from Fellini's "Satyricon" filled the show space where models paraded looks made of breastplates and sections of Roman soldier armor or skinny cocktail dresses from the Dolce Vita era when Rome was reborn after WW II and Anita Ekberg frolicked in the Trevi Fountain. Each piece is literally a one-of-a-kind work of art...if a client buys one, it is the only one in existence.

And not to be outdone by the spectacle, D&G showed their Alta Sartoria collection (the men's version) the next evening, also at sunset, at the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome. Inspired by the Catholic Church, the collection is a wild riff on ecclesiastical clothing surpassing anything even the Vatican could produce! Models, each wearing glasses and hair set in pincurls like cherubs, walked out of the Castel and down a gold carpet shaped, appropriately enough, like a cross while assembled cardinals in red watched from plinths on the Ponte Sant'Angelo.

And take a look at this short glimpse into the making of one of the looks...the quality is mind boggling.

https://altamoda.dolcegabbana.com/

I would bet money that D&G have seen--and were inspired by--the famous (infamous) Vatican fashion show segment from Fellini's incredible mockumentary travelogue "Roma." It is at once hilarious and absolutely terrifying, quite on purpose.

Fendi In The Trevi

OH. MY. GOD.
For the end of the women's Paris Fashion Week, Fendi shuttled guests via jet to ROME where they staged their Fall-Winter '16-'17 show at--in--ON--that city's iconic Trevi Fountain. Which is appropriate since Fendi just funded a multi-million dollar cleaning and renovation of the breathtaking landmark. The translucent runway was mounted at water level and made it seem as though the models were literally walking on water. The clothing was reminiscent of Italy in 1890 with some Aesthetic Movement and Art Nouveau touches here and there. And of course how can one stage a show with an Italian motif without using the music of Nino Rota from classic Fellilni films: here we hear excerpts from Fellini's films "Casanova," "Roma" (appropriately from the Vatican Fashion Show sequence, previously here), and possibly my all-time favorite Fellini, "Juliet of the Spirits." But of course the ultimate Fellini-Trevi reference is the legendary fountain scene from "La Dolce Vita" (previously here and here) featuring Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg romping in the water in the middle of the night.

Karl Lagerfeld and Silvia Venturini Fendi came out for bows at the end of the show both for the beautiful collection and for the gloriously renovated, now-pristine Trevi.

http://www.fendi.com/

Federico says...

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.”
--Federico Fellini

“I don’t like the idea of 'understanding' a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.”
--Federico Fellini

“I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.”
--Federico Fellini

“Life is a combination of magic and pasta.”
--Federico Fellini

R.I.P. Anita Ekberg

Legendary Swedish film actress Anita Ekberg has died at the age of 83. She romped in Rome's Trevi Fountain for Fellini's iconic film "La Dolce Vita"...and then touchingly reunited with the director and her co-star Marcello Mastroianni for the 1992 film "Intervista," Fellini's faux-documentary about himself (previously here).

Witness the bittersweet moment when Ekberg and Mastroianni watch their younger selves on screen, in this clip from "Intervista"...

R.I.P. Anita Ekberg. Your beauty lives on.

Fellini's Vatican Fashion Show

In preparation for my upcoming return to Italy, I have dusted off my copy of "Fellini's Roma" and am swooning--again--over the bizarre and truly terrifying Vatican Fashion Show that comes out of nowhere in this surreal travelogue.

http://www.federicofellini.it/

Just watched...

...Fellini's "Intervista."


This penultimate film by The Maestro Fellini is what you would expect from the master of Surrealist Cinema, but the manic imagery and the dizzying rush of the story from his earlier days had mellowed by the time he made “Intervista” (or “Interview” in English) in 1987. Like a wine whose flavors have blended and smoothed with age, Fellini’s imagination too had blended and become more complex. “Intervista” is an intimate glimpse into the thought process of one of the most creative figures in film history and it could only have been made by a mature, skilled and experienced Fellini. The film shows the understanding and acceptance of a man who has lived, a man who has cultivated a life and been cultivated by life, a man who is wise; this is not to say a man who is perfect and understands life in toto, but one who has reconciled himself, one who has acquiesced to all that life is and can be.

“Intervista” is a bit like a set of Russian nesting dolls with films within stories within films within preparing to make a film. It starts with a simple enough premise: while Fellini is directing a film, a Japanese camera crew arrive to interview him for a documentary. But that premise quickly takes on an additional layer as Fellini tells them the story of the first time he came to Cinecittà, the Roman studio compound where he ended up making most of his films. This story turns out to be something that Fellini is filming. We become immersed in watching the construction of sets, and casting actors for this memory, only to seamlessly enter the memory itself without any warning. From there we bounce back and forth between Fellini’s interview, his memories, his directing the filming of said memories, Fellini casting for and shooting an adaptation of Kafka’s AMERIKA, and a film about it all. Fellini’s actual entourage and crew play themselves in the film, including his real-life cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli and assistant director Maurizio Mein. But the most surprising cameos come from Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, the two stars of Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece “La Dolce Vita.” At Cinecittà, Fellini stumbles upon Marcello who is making a commercial for a brand of detergent. Fellini and entourage whisk Mastroianni away to the Roman countryside where they arrive at the home of Anita Ekberg. An impromptu party ensues and Marcello magically conjures up a sheet on which is projected scenes from “La Dolce Vita.” From the privacy of the opposite side of the sheet, Mastroianni and Ekberg reunite to watch their iconic Trevi Fountain scene, and to watch themselves frolic in the water nearly thirty years before. It is a lovely, poignant, heartbreaking, and heartwarming moment in cinema history, one which makes us yearn for other such reunions. Imagine Bogart and Bergman, as themselves sometime in the 70s, watching themselves in “Casablanca.” It gives me goosebumps.

The mood of “Intervista” is tender, loving and surprisingly upbeat and buoyant. Fellini allows us to slip effortlessly with him between memory and current life, between film and reality, in front of and behind the camera. It is a loving ode to cinema, to this kind of storytelling, and to a life dedicated to this pursuit.

Recommend? I am a huge Fellini fan so of course I am going to respond with an enthusiastic “Yes!”

http://www.federicofellini.it/

Just RE-watched...

...Fellini's masterpiece "La Dolce Vita" from 1960.

Hot on the heels of my recent trip to Italy, I just watched “La Dolce Vita,” Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece and bridge between his Neo-Realism roots and the Surrealism fueled by dream logic and dream imagery that he later explored and embraced. I watched this film twenty-some years ago, at a time when I had yet to visit Rome (I had somehow managed to skip Rome and see only Florence and Venice). I thought that seeing the film now, after a fresh trip to the Eternal City would be fun and allow me to see familiar sights. But Fellini was very careful to limit shots of ruins or anything that identifies the city to the rest of the world. Instead, he shows us row after row of sterile, concrete apartment buildings—many still under construction—and entire new Mussolini-style areas on the desolate outskirts of Rome in an effort to show the financial revitalization that was taking place in an Italy that had been devastated by the war (and also, I suspect, as an effort to remove himself from the squalid concerns of Neo-Realism). There are however, some shots that are memorable and identifiable such as the opening sequence with helicopters flying an enormous statue of Christ over some ruins, the city, and finally to the Vatican. And then there is the iconic scene of two main characters in the Trevi Fountain (you can't get much more Roman than that) in the middle of the night. So all is not lost.

A loose narrative follows Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), a photojournalist, through the celebrity and jet-set littered landscape of mod-era Rome. Often at his side is a photographer named Paparazzo, ready to snap pictures of celebrity fights and trysts. With this character, Fellini actually (and inadvertently) invented the term “paparazzi” to mean annoying and intrusive photographers.

We follow Marcello from the glamorous Via Veneto, to his stifling relationship with the suicidal Emma, to his affair with wealthy, world-weary Maddalena, to his flirtation with international sex symbol and actress Sylvia. Along the way, he realizes his life is not what he intended it to be. Longing for the life of a genuine writer and not a gossip columnist for newspapers, he sees the decadence and futility of the slick, glittery life surrounding him, but is unable to escape its pull. Along the way we encounter some truly magical episodes and imagery such as a sad clown in a nightclub being followed by a herd of balloons, two children literally leading a huge crowd of pilgrims on a wild goose chase around a field as they pretend to see an apparition of the Madonna, and a party of aristocrats in tuxedoes and Balenciaga gowns hunting ghosts in a dilapidated villa. At the end of our time with Marcello, we see that he has devolved into a bitter, cruel and helpless man. Like the dead sea monster the party-goers find on the beach at dawn in the final scene of the film, he is dead inside, bloated and useless, unable to communicate.

Recommend? YES! It is a classic film with iconic imagery and plays a huge role in the history of cinema. SEE IT!

Just watched...

..."La Strada" directed by Federico Fellini.

I saw my first Fellini film when I was sixteen. I forget how I found out, but I became aware that KQED, our local PBS station was going to show “Juliet of the Spirits;” perhaps the commercial intrigued me. Seeing as it was certainly nothing that my parents were interested in seeing, I watched it on my little black and white television in my room. And my world was expanded, enriched and made better for it.

I became a Fellini fan then and there and have since seen many of his films, but with this viewing of “La Strada,” one of his earlier films, I realize that I have been a fan of the surreal Fellini, the Fellini who was greatly influenced by the work of Carl Jung (as was I—yes, I was reading Jung at sixteen). I have seen and loved “The Nights of Cabiria,” “La Dolce Vita,” “8 ½,” “Juliet of the Spirits,” “Satyricon,” “Roma,” “Amarcord,” “E la nave va” and “Ginger and Fred.” But I hadn’t really watched the Neo-Realist Fellini until I watched “La Strada.”

Italian Neo-Realism concerned itself with life among the poor and working class in the decimated climate of post-war Europe in the ‘50s. And “La Strada” certainly aligns itself with those concerns. It is a story that explores a mentally challenged young woman (played quite broadly—like Charlie Chaplin, as Martin Scorcese observed—by Giulietta Masina, otherwise known as Mrs. Fellini) who is sold by her mother to an itinerant circus side show performer called Zampano (played with flexible brutality by Anthony Quinn). The resulting tragic journey has a few tender spots along the way (thanks mainly to Masina’s stubborn optimism), but ultimately this is a dark story full of regret. The full import of the fate of these characters doesn’t sink in until well after the film is over.

(As an interesting aside, I recently read a book by Joris-Karl Huysmans called À REBOURS. Huysmans started out writing in the literary genre known as Realism, championed by writers such as Balzac, Flaubert and Zola and dedicated to showing the ugly and poor, but soon grew tired of the inherent limitations of subject matter and setting. He broke with Realism and wrote À REBOURS in the literary genre of Decadence, a style that valued artifice over any kind of interest in the natural world. The Gothic novel, French Symbolist poetry, and the work of Edgar Allen Poe were major influences. So I find it very interesting that both Huysmans and Fellini broke with genres that were only invested in showing poverty and squalor—and both called Realism—and gravitated toward something more fantastical and lyrical.)

Recommend? Yes. “La Strada” won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1956.

http://www.federicofellini.it/