ANTONIO MARRAS SPRING SUMMER 2013 WOMEN’S COLLECTION – MILANO FASHION WEEK

THE VIVIAN GIRLS HAVE WON!
The monsters are defeated! Giants, spectres, fears, weaknesses, doubts, dangers within and without ourselves. Elsie is vindicated and Simonetta triumphs.
She marries in white. There’ll be a grand celebration.
Starting at dawn, a joyous ding-dong of bells summons everyone. There’s something new, the air is sweet, an air of other places and other times. The breeze sways red, yellow, purple flowers; silvery spines shimmer. The table sparkles: crystal, platinum, silver, silk, flowers, cakes. Everything’s a bit heaped together, but in a good way, with elegance and harmony. They’ve decided that today the world must be made romantic. That’s the only way it will regain its original meaning.
So a poet says. And he’s right. Today they celebrate!
One of them is a young bride and they all dress up in her honour. They’re all here, they’ve come from faraway places and times, very faraway. Daisy, Elsie, Anna, Joyce, Jenny, Catherine, Anna, Vera not forgetting Sailor Moon, lively Teresa as well as Andrée, Rosemonde, Albertine and Cate and Luna… They are young women in the bloom of youth, bellas mariposas, multicoloured butterflies that love flowers and a little shade, too. They want to play some more; they dress in their finery to say that the world can change, become sunny, enchanted, unreal.
Bouclé fabrics, textural tweeds, damasks in various thicknesses and colours, pink, milky-white, peach-pink, apricot, lilac, pale green, pastel shades, ceremonial colours, golden threads. Long-forgotten Chanel jackets, military jackets taken apart and reassembled. They project con- trasts, ambivalence, dreams, illusions, hopes, darkness and light the stuff of life. This is why jackets, duster coats and dresses have duality, they become “others”. At the back, black, white, ecru cotton in geometric, floral, dotted patterns; in front, hand-executed decorations and embroidery, extravaganzas of flowers, branches, buds, butterflies, storms, joins, showers of pearls and Swarovski crystals. In a passionate urge to see clearly, emerge from the shadows, from the darkness and, amidst songs and silence, go towards a shining horizon.

TINY VARIATIONS IN SPARKLES
Swarovski crystals speak of other things, they take us by the hand and lead us elsewhere.
They take us to roads covered in light, they tell us that sun-dust will always filter through even the tiniest chink.
The road is covered in pebbles and stones, dark and radiant presences, as sweet as oboes, green as pastures or seabeds, as white as ice lances melting in the sun. Precious, intense light chases the shadows away and gives courage, energy and joie de vivre.
It emits from every fragment, from every thread, it radiates intense rainbows, small, large, endless luminous labyrinths in a thousand directions.
Flooded with light, objects, fabrics and people are transformed, they become something else, magic narrations with vaster, more universal meanings.
And so Swarovski crystals live and speak;
simple, sophisticated, elegant atoms that send luminous messages, they invite us to look for hidden beauty and light.
They remind us that real things are enlivened and ordered according to a logic that defies reason, dictated by pure wonder, to illuminate and colour the journey of our present.