FACE TIME: Andrés Velencoso, who fronts the current Cerruti 1881 ad campaign photographed by Peter Lindbergh, joined former faces of the house Atesh Salih and Lambert Wilson front row for the brand’s 50th anniversary show on Friday.
Photographer Paolo Roversi, who has produced many of the house’s campaigns over the decades, shared his memories of working with Nino Cerruti. “Nino was a major fashion designer but he also became a close friend, we worked together for many, many seasons,” said Roversi. “It was so exciting because it was always about new ideas, and a kind of new elegance. He taught me so much about elegance and style.”
Salih, who appeared in three of the campaigns shot in the mid-Nineties, said the shoots never took him to any exotic destinations, but that Roversi’s studio in the South of Paris was “very atmospheric in itself.”
“There is something very cinematographic about it with these huge, powerful lights that he puts on you,” he said.
Salih, who has since become an interior designer, said he was currently working on a project for the Kuwaiti foreign service as well as an historic house in London’s Kew Gardens.
Wilson, who is best known in the English-speaking world for his roles in the film trilogy “The Matrix,” is currently touring in a musical show honoring the late French singer and actor Yves Montand.
Among other guests at the show, English actor and rapper Ed Skrein said he has just finished shooting “Alita: Battle Angel,” produced by James Cameron and Jon Landau.
Fellow front-rower, dancer Jérémie Bélingard, revealed that the current season at the Paris Opera Ballet would be his last, meanwhile, but that there was no shortage of rising stars to take his place. Two young dancers, Léonore Baulac and Germain Louvet, were promoted to the rank of étoile in December. “I’m so happy for them, I know and love them both. Germain has a real poetry to him, it’s so rare,” said Bélingard who is a longtime collaborator of the Paris Opera Ballet’s director Aurélie Dupont, with whom he has two children.