English novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett once wrote, "We are never as different from other people as we could or ought to be".
Drawing inspiration from this dictum, the Ferragamo Spring/Summer collection for next year focuses on a cultivated woman with a sensitive heart and a youthful appearance, a woman who wants to dress for others and for herself in a modern self-enhancing style.
She loves experimenting with pictorial motifs, tribal elements and evocative atmospheres, innovatively deployed in fantasies of spellbinding femininity.
The collection is a complete Ready to Wear interpretation of the themes that make up the Ferragamo personality: coherence, elegance, care for detail, innovative fabrics and combinations, masterful and original use of leather.
The traditional strengths are all there.
First, the choice of fabrics and other kinds of materials, often contrasting, eloquent and intriguing, such as solid or see-through, embracing, airy, shiny, matte, plain, printed, embroidered, fret-worked and trimmed, with delicate or more visible weaves.
In the tops, for example, laser-finished leather with wide horizontal slashes and in the jackets wave motifs made of alternating vertical strips of nappa and suede.
Whilst in the leather jackets, raffia or pony skin inserts alternate with thin, diagonal cut-out leather applications. Culminating in the jade-coloured leather shirt-jacket with tiny cork and gold decorated enamel medallions.
Second, and fundamentally, the study of form. Rigorous, stylized and geometric forms blend perfectly with more feminine, romantic forms, techno and ethnic go hand in hand.
Third, the colour palette, based on three themes: black, ivory and bougainvillea in various compositions, jade and ebony contrasting with black and cork, and a range of copper tones lightened by optical white and beige.
And lastly, that which could never be absent from a Salvatore Ferragamo collection, the spectacle of creativity offered by their leather accessories, featuring craftsmanship, hand-stitching and hand-brushing of the hides.
The material for the 2003 spring-summer collection includes pinstripe, painted bamboo and tattoo printed suedes and warm hides in tones of ebony, ivory, cork and jade.
(Shanghai Star November 25, 2002)
