The winners of the 68th Venice Film Festival will be announced at the awards ceremony taking place in just a few hours' time.
In the meantime, let's have a look back at the films screened at this edition that displayed some connections with fashion.
Apart from Madonna's film about Wallis Simpson (definitely banal from a storytelling point of view, though as stylised as a fashion photo shoot – more about it, hopefully, in a future post...), there were two documentaries with strong fashion connections as they focused on Emilio Federico Schuberth and Diana Vreeland (well, there is actually even a connection between Wallis Simpson and Vreeland since the latter used to own a lingerie shop in London and Simpson was one of her clients...).
Last year a retrospective exhibition at Venice's Luna Hotel Baglioni about Schuberth that also included photographs by Angelo Frontoni, traced back the life of the “couturier of the Dolce Vita years” whose famous gowns were donned by Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth and Soraya among the others.
This year Antonello Sarno's documentary Schuberth - L’Atelier della Dolce Vita, was showcased in the Controcampo Italiano section of the Venice Film Festival.
Born in Naples in 1904, Schuberth started making hats in 1938 in Rome in a small shop in Via Frattina.
He opened his first tailoring house in 1939 and owned a popular atelier until 1970 in Via XX Settembre.
Famous for dressing the divas of those years and for providing costumes for films such as Carlo Lastricati and Vittorio De Sica's Anna di Brooklyn (Fast and Sexy, 1958) starring Gina Lollobrigida, Schuberth used to create collections characterised by fancy names such as "Schuberth's Heart", "When Schuberth Dreamt of Chopin" or "Summer at the Pole", that included gowns in luxurious fabrics covered in rich embroideries incorporating different materials.
Schuberth was also the first Italian designer to behave like an eccentric and flamboyant “divo”: he often donned furs and jewellery and regularly wore make-up, things that were rather unusual for a man at the time.
The documentary chronicles through archive images and interviews with actresses such as Sophia Loren and designers like Pierre Cardin and the Sorelle Fontana's Micol Fontana, the heydays of Schuberth's atelier that closed down after his death, in 1972.
Despite the good intentions of the director, the documentary has one problem: it seems as if it were shot as a promotional stunt to help revamping Schuberth's name, recently bought and relaunched with a line of clothes and perfumes as well (including the famous “Schu” - advertised in 1955 with illustrations by René Gruau).
"As this is entirely a visual age": this sentence by Diana Vreeland was very aptly chosen by Christopher Hemphill who used it in the introduction of Allure, a volume published in 1980 that tried to capture the particular atmospheres and moods that, according to Vreeland, defined the concept of "allure".
Yet this particular sentence seemed to be also one of the inspirations behind Lisa Immordino Vreeland's documentary Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel.
Immordino married Vreeland's grandson Alexander in 2000 and, fascinated by her acquired family's history, she started researching for a book (that will be out in a few weeks' time). The title of the documentary and of the book actually come from a sentence featured in Allure, but the documentary is characterised by all the power of that "visual age" Vreeland talked about.
Fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar from 1937 to 1962 (it was editor Carmel Snow who offered her a job after seeing her dancing at the St Regis Hotel in New York in a white lace Chanel dress) and editor-in-chief of American Vogue from 1962 to 1971, Vreeland may not have been a conventional beauty, but she had vision, elegance, taste and, above all, knowledge.
Famous for her "Why Don't You...?" columns on Harper's Bazaar, she created some of the most iconic fashion magazine covers and shoots collaborating with photographers such as Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Richard Avedon.
After she was fired from Vogue, she became the creative consultant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, coming up with striking exhibitions such as "The World of Balenciaga", "Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years of Design" and "Inventive Clothes" (with designs from Umberto Tirelli's collection).
The Eye Has to Travel tries to rediscover Vreeland's image through her own voice: the director used indeed taped recordings of Vreeland's voice from interviews she did with George Plimpton, recorded while she was working on her autobiography, D.V..
Archive images are also featured in the documentary, together with interviews with family members like her sons and grandsons and with celebrities, from Anjelica Huston to Carolina Herrera, Manolo Blahnik, Veruschka and Diana von Furstenberg.
Vreeland comes out as an unconventional and visionary character with a lot of fantasy and imagination, an extensive collection of quotes that have now entered the best collections of fashion aphorisms ("Style: All who have it share one thing - originality") and a strong desire to take her readers on a journey around the world in the photo shoots featured in the magazines she worked for.
Think you may not be able to catch the documentary as it is screened at different film festivals around the world? Don't worry, you can still check out Immordino's book, out on 1st October on Abrams Books.
'Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel' teaser from Know Wear on Vimeo.
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