Prêt-à-porter Donna
Spring/Summer
“The sense of the year 2000 vibrating through this collection is not revolution. On the contrary, it is a spirit that allows one to think about women’s dress – and the body – with great feeling and equal rationality, through forms and gestures that belong to an acquired, noble culture, yet one that is deliberately simplified. Preserving traditional values, freed and revitalised by contemporary techniques and logic, can in my view give the figure grace, allure, beauty and sensuality. It can enable a more authentic, deeply felt revolution: that of a new glamour”.
Gianfranco Ferré
2000
Soft architectures. To an almost immaterial lightness of fabric corresponds an extremely precise structure of the garment.
Versatile structures. The jacket, held in place by a pin, becomes a tailcoat, a waistcoat, an unlined shirt with a mischievous godet at the back.
Airy volumes. Organza and tulle fastened with ties construct hourglass dresses, sheer like lampshades, or swell into near-balloon skirts supported by light structures.
Civilised natures. Deep, strong colours, from brown to dark green to black. Warm straw hues, so light they form basket-like structures enveloping the body. Precious pastels blending sand and stone: jade, rose quartz, pale aquamarine in lustrous silk-and-nylon brocades. Raw-edged ostrich revealing organza linings. Python lending fabrics a crisper texture.
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Prêt-à-porter Donna
Fall/Winter
“I like to imagine a woman who is still a little girl, at times almost childishly unripe in rediscovering lost refinements. A woman who carries opposites and contrasts within herself, to arrive at that disordered yet freely structured order which, for me today, is modern elegance. An elegance made also of bold and marked propriety, of cleanness and precision, of severity. With the will to make everything personal”.
Gianfranco Ferré
2000
An allure often born from the elementary design of simple pieces: squares cut or pierced to create unusual volumes; raw-edged navy cloth; emphatic rectangular skirts forming asymmetrical tails at the side. A swift, lean clarity of line is underscored by the blue vicuña Chesterfield worn over tone-on-tone duchesse jeans; sumptuous dandy robes-de-chambre over mannish grey flannel trousers with the most Ferré of white shirts. Long leather skirts paired with a black nappa painter’s smock for a high-style evening; but also ribboned sable pullovers that heighten the importance of the moment – even when the consistency of time has dissolved and one no longer asks when or how a dress should be worn. The languor of morning-suit-style dresses, low-cut and decorated with fox fragments. Myriads of cascading taffeta ruches inflate the most improbable of crinolines, softly rumpled.
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