Leave it to Gilda Ambrosio and Giorgia Tordini to serve the audience exactly what it needs at the end of a long fashion day. Guests stepping into the dark tunnel where the duo staged The Attico’s spring 2027 show were met with trays of martinis before taking their seats — or better, be invited to lie down on the beds (some undone, some not) they arrayed in two lines in the space.
The set up teased what was a nocturnal and sultry show, which the duo titled “Quando Nessuno Guarda,” or “When No One Looks” in English, and was loosely inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s quote stating that “everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life.”
The duo focused on the last one and zeroed in on the bed as the space where some of it unfolds. “It’s the place that marks the transition from night to day, it’s where you sleep, you cry, smile, where you can be yourself or not,” said Tordini backstage. “It’s a place of so many things. It’s the stage of a woman in total freedom, where there’s no judgment.”
This was a collection of no judgment, too, and that’s precisely what it made it appealing. The Attico’s flashy aesthetic might not be for everyone, but there’s no denying it expresses a sense of empowerment in the way it invites women to be unapologetically themselves and exalts the contradictions this implies.
Another of the duo’s seasonal explorations of different characters, this show was a glamourous parade of personalities, from the languid woman to the divas, passing through the kinky type, in a coexistence of liquid tailoring, feminine takes on utilitarian styles, lingerie pieces and high-octane eveningwear.
Either the models represented different women or the multiple facets of the same one, the collection delivered range in its mix of The Attico’s signatures — think cargo pencil skirts, velvet robes, chandelier dresses — and new ideas, the strongest of which was the introduction of a metal wire into fabrics that could morph silhouettes, ranging from blazer jackets to strapless frocks.
The effect added to the draping, twisting and crumpling techniques the designers leaned on to deliver a lived-in feel, as well to iridescent textiles and shimmering embellishments that further evoked the transformative nature of The Attico muse.
Transparencies, cut-outs, trailing hems and zips cheekily running on the back of leather skinny pants charged the lineup with fetish undertones, while the bold individual makeup choices added to the storytelling, suggesting hidden identities. Enter the dark, bat-shaped makeup popping up on a model cinched in a corsetry-like pink dress: if the Batman t-shirt Ambrosio wore backstage wasn’t enough indication, that was a sign there’s even a super hero in disguise in The Attico’s cool clique. The girls can sleep tight.
