Lorenzo Serafini turns up the volume at Alberta Ferretti
For Spring-Summer 2027, Lorenzo Serafini pushed Alberta Ferretti beyond its romantic ease with theatrical silhouettes, saturated prints and a sensory clash of textures. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
Lorenzo Serafini shook things up at Alberta Ferretti on Thursday afternoon. Presented in the Palazzo Donizetti – with its white walls and opulent carved wooden ceilings – the collection took a leap from the earthy whispers of romanticism that often embody the brand and got loud. Serafini went on something of an odyssey over the summer – from Iceland to Greece and everywhere in between – and got inspired by the cross-cultural feeling of summer. “The carefree mood, the freedom, the sensuality of summer. The title is The Beautiful Escape,” he said.
He found the silhouette for that escapism in the early-20th-century world of Léon Bakst, whose fantastical costumes and stage designs for the Ballets Russes drew on mythology, antiquity and exoticism, and in the illustrations of Erté, who rendered women as elongated, decorative figures wrapped in theatrical glamour. He found the prints to go with it in the work of Matisse, whose cut-outs and paintings turned organic forms into bold fields of colour and rhythm.
“The prints were printed over this liquid Japanese fabric that’s like water. Then we put this cellophane silk, which is like glass – crispy – over it, which gives the feeling of activewear but it’s completely feminine,” Serafini explained. The layers of silks, cellophane and prints generated a sensory overload that felt like a big bang against the white-walled Palazzo Donizetti. Tasked with pushing Alberta Ferretti into a new era, Serafini isn’t afraid to experiment and make a bold proposition.
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