Elegance is back in the creations on show at the 2010 Rome Fashion Week and Lorenzo Riva, who showed yesterday, pays homage to the 1970s heyday of actresses such as Monica Vitti.
His collection includes some very feminine skirt suits which have circular skirts with discs attached to them. These look as if they are about to fly. There are lots of large, black and white patterns and there are gowns with big – and we mean big – bows at the waist. There are also glamorous, fringed hats worn at jaunty angles. The hats remind one of a pre-Mary-Quant era when a woman wasn’t considered dressed without one.
Riva cut rather a glamorous figure himself when he walked down the catwalk to huge applause at the end of his show and we learned that the former Balenciaga designer hopes not only for the return of elegance but for the return to Italy of some of his colleagues: “Haute Couture must stay here”, he told Corriere della Sera, adding that when he worked in Paris he cried every day. Now, he says, if only one “big name” designer would return to Rome, the other Italian stylists would come home too.
Lorenzo Riva started designing clothes at the age of eleven, when he created a gown for his elder sister. His mother, who had been a model, sewed his designs in the early days while his sisters modelled them. He soon achieved his ambition of showing at the Pitti and it was there that the Balenciaga team noticed him. In Paris he exchanged ideas with French designers such as Cardin and when he returned to Rome he opened his own fashion house with his associate Luigi Valietti. In 1991 he showed his first haute couture collection.
