The fashion flock got a glimpse of the newly revamped Picasso Museum — site of the Berluti show — on Friday night, with luxury titan Bernard Arnault pulling out his iPhone to snap a photo of two of his sons: Antoine, Berluti’s chief executive officer, and Frédéric, posing next to the painting “Bather With a Book.”
Artistic director Alessandro Sartori conjured a collection in direct conversation with the Spanish painter’s work, while throwing Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, a modernist concrete project conceived by the architect in the Fifties in Northern India, into the equation. Though cerebral in origin, the collection intrigued with its lightness and very dynamic run of relaxed, single-pleat bottoms matched with a variety of knit tops as well as the label’s deluxe sneakers, imbuing Sartori’s spring effort with a decisively more youthful character.
“Where is the look book?” asked Amar’e Stoudemire’s wife, Alexis, after the show. The 6-foot, 10-inch New York Knicks All-Star forward, sitting front row, said he was eager to have some styles custom-made for his height.
Backstage, the designer explained that each garment was initially dyed gray and subsequently overdyed in color. Bright lilac, turquoise, lemon, emerald and scarlet with a matte finish were among the most brilliant hues.
Sartori kept the fabrics as lightweight as possible, proposing a roomy parka in waterproof kangaroo leather.
Elsewhere, workwear-tinged linen shirts and voluminous half-button sweaters in paper-cotton blends and soft leather looked fresh and unusually urban for the luxury cobbler-turned-high-end-tailor.
The collection’s laid-back attitude continued off the catwalk. Before the show, the museum’s cobblestone courtyard got hijacked by a group of bare-chested models (“We cast 85 in total,” grinned Sartori), lounging in deck chairs reading an edition of the Berluti Times. After, guests and models lingered for a picnic à la française with the sweet smell of fresh baguette and raspberries filling the hot summer air.