The latest designer to launch into the foreign cruise runway moment is Diane von Furstenberg who staged a charming show in a beautiful Florentine garden on Wednesday, June 18, as celebrity and sports greats mingled with enough Italian aristocrats to elect a new king.
Few things summed up Diane’s drawing power better than her front row where Tony Parker and Eva Longoria sat between princes and princesses of the Corsini, Torlonia, Borromeo and Pucci family, along with Western Europe’s greatest dandy Lapo Elkann.
It being Diane, this cruise also attracted the great and the good of fashion media: Vanity Fair’s Elizabeth Saltzman, Suzy Menkes and Hamish Bowles, plus a smattering of designers – Christian Louboutin, Eva Cavalli and ever elegant Eric Wright.
“It’s fantastic to be back here in Florence, a city which I have always loved,” beamed von Furstenberg, who graciously introduced to a score of editors Bruna Sequalino, the “modista” who actually made up the original collection of the designer’s most famous contribution to fashion, the wrap dress, in the nearby town of Montevarchi.
Russian uber beauty Natalia Vodianova wore one of those dresses from that first 1974 series as the final look in the show, splendidly staged on an elevated catwalk built between two lines of box hedges in the truly stupendous Torrigiani garden, completed with an extraordinary tower folly and a striking stature of an ancestor underneath which the 60 looks appeared.
“I never expected any of this to happen. Then la Diane called me last Friday out of the blue and I was stunned. She came here in the Seventies, and I was honored to work for this fashion princess. She had great creativity. She still has,” Sequalino said, sitting down post show to a candle lit “picnic” dinner for 400 below the tower.
The collection was a witty take on travel style entitled “La Petite Valise,” which contained lots of cool in-jokes, like a suede trench composed of a photocopy of von Furstenberg’s passport. Though, try as we might, we did not see the bit with the date of birth.
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