Cinema remains one of the main fashion inspirations for many designers: quite often designers borrow ideas from a colour palette, the personalities of the main characters or the creations made by a costume designer for a specific film.
Erika Cavallini looked in her Pre-Fall 2018 collection to Luis Buñuel, while she called her A/W 2018 collection "Miseria e Nobilità" (Misery and Nobility), a title borrowed from the eponymous 1954 Italian film by Mario Mattoli (taken in turn from a 1888 play by Eduardo Scarpetta).
For her Pre-Fall 2019 collection Cavallini went back to the '60s by rewatching Antonioni and his "Deserto Rosso" (Red Desert, 1964), the director's first colour feature.
Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma's light and colours inspired the main palette. The colours in this film are very evocative: the smoke of the factory seems to wrap up buildings and characters in a depressingly suffocating way that mirrors the state of mind of the main character, Giuliana (Monica Vitti).
Married to Ugo, the plant manager of the factory that dominates the landscape around them, Giuliana is locked in a depressed and mentally tortured condition, an alienation and emotional isolation made worse by the polluted landscape of the factory belching steam and sinister yellow smoke in a bleak sky.
Beige and brown appear a lot in the collection, but there are further references to the industrial landscape in the powdery green fluid jackets with wide-leg trousers and in the motif reproducing branches of trees, like the ones seen in the movie, representing the ghosts of an abandoned and forgotten nature.
Cavallini also referenced the blue of the abandoned fishing cottages and applied it to jackets and thick scarves, while the neurotic yellow tone of the factory smoke was used for sweaters and coats, but also for small accessories like belts.
One of the most famous quotes from "Deserto Rosso" - "Mi fanno male i capelli, gli occhi, la gola, la bocca" (My hair hurts, my eyes, my throat, my mouth), that was actually taken from a poem by Amelia Rosselli - was also reprinted on the back of an ample hoodie.
And while this collection didn't feature more interesting creations such as shredded and recombined clothes as seen among Cavallini's A/W 18 designs (in the style of Margiela, where the designer worked for a short time at the end of the '90s), this quote could be the perfect statement to express our collective and unbearable pain of living in our modern and complex times.
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