The best looks from 72nd Venice Film Festival

The 72nd annual Venice International Film Festival took place from 2 to 12 September 2015. 
 Jury member Diane Kruger display great style and fashion during the 10 days of the competition, in and off the red carpet. The same for her fellow jury member, american actress Elizabeth Banks. Another one who stole the show was the rising star Dakota Johnson. Here are some of my favorite looks from her and other actresses in Venice.

 Diane Kruger in Valentino

 Diane Kruger in a custom Prada gown

Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda spring/summer 2014

Floral fantasy at Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda spring/summer 2014

The impressive salons had been transformed into a nineteenth-century rose garden, with pergola frames and arbors twined with soft pink and mauve roses and greenery. The girls wafted through this poetic garden, with silk flowers of course as topknots in their Ingres hairstyles—like figures in an Impressionist painting.

 The Dolce & Gabbana  duo has developed real atelier art pieces—elaborate and playful patchworks of textile and embroidery used to create delightfully naïf “flowers in a vase” pictures. Meanwhile the superb cutwork lace effects, cut out of stiff silks and then laboriously hand-stitched, remain another house signature, in tea rose, beige, and jet black.

There was even an hourglass minidress of purple velvet-covered wire clustered with posies of violets. And then there were Persian lamb suits, in idiosyncratic colors like chrome yellow, prune, and mushroom gray, with double golden sable collars.

Armani Prive Spring 2014 Couture

Anyone knows that Giorgio Armani’s best eveningwear is masterful — refined, interesting and, most importantly, celebratory of a woman’s beauty. With the Armani Privé collection that mastery was in full force.
Called Nomade, it encompassed strains of the exotica he loves.  He described the collection as a "mélange of things — not typically Indian or African or European. She moves with an Armani spirit in her head."

Of course, that Armani spirit has men’s wear roots, which have impacted the designer’s women’s aesthetic from the start. Here, he flaunted the connection by day, transforming necktie foulards and stripes into statement daywear, typically small jackets over voluminous skirts and pants. The prevailing sober-toned shine and numerous arabesque embellishments suggested nonspecific Eastern influences. 

Not so with the magnificent eveningwear. Armani delivered options of look and mood — the elegance of a tailored jacket over pants; the danger of a glittering mesh shawl over transparent blouse and plissé skirt. But it was his gowns that captivated most. Obviously, Armani was thinking Oscars, and why not? He turned that too-often mundane classic, the strapless ball gown, memorable many times over, layering crystal-embroidered crinolines and laces over rich silks — jacquard, gazar, organza — often in mesmerizing shades of deep blue. Always he varied the line and details to make each dress unique — just as couture should be.

Valentino Spring 2014 Couture

Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli have developed into couture’s most unabashed romantics. 

For the Valentino collection their starting point was opera. Chiuri and Piccioli opened with a literal nod to their musical muse — a wisp of a tulle gown, its skirt embroidered for graphic pop with a section of the “La Traviata” score. This had a surrealist vibe, at once enchanting and wacky. Yet that charmer proved one note, as the designers moved on to other flights of fancy. 

In line with their platform of individuality, the duo showed variety of shapes — ethereal ballgowns, airy golden lace caftan, thicker blue-and-brown lace sheath. One gown featured a Lucas Cranach-inspired pictorial of Adam and Eve before the fall, reveling in the glories of nature.

Such distinctive pieces didn’t negate significant themes. Richard Wagner’s “Lohengrin” inspired the first of several ballerinas, this one pale and wrapped swanlike in feathers. Another theme — jungle! Here, the designers proved their bravado with bold, verdant imagery starring giant cheetahs and lions. 

While some, including a pair of cashmere coats, were amazing, a silk lion-face dress looked like a head shot of Disney’s Simba. And so as not to ignore women with simpler tastes, Chiuri and Piccioli included inviting, monastic simplicity for day and evening. 

Elie Saab Couture Spring 2014

In his spring couture collection, Elie Saab showering a cascade of fabric petals on evening gowns inspired by the painting “The Roses of Heliogabalus” by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Rendered in several layers of silk chiffon, the blossoms took on a soft-focus quality on a powder-pink Empire-line dress with sheer long sleeves. They appeared to sprout three-dimensionally from a hydrangea-blue bustier gown with an ample skirt.

The painterly effects were most striking on a trio of gazar dresses with a multicolored floral print that gradually faded into white.

Dresses with extra voluminous skirts were guaranteed to make an entrance, but Saab knows how to engineer an exit, too. His Grecian-pleated gowns, in alluring shades of pale blue, yellow and coral, wafted long strips of chiffon in their wake.  

In a season where many designers are giving couture a youthful spin, Saab clung to a more traditional approach to the craft. Yet he displayed a light hand with creations such as a poppy-colored Fifties-style tulle cocktail dress. Who can argue with tradition when the result is this enchanting?

Giambattista Valli Spring 2014 couture show

Gleaming metallic shards stacked on the runway for Giambattista Valli’s sixth couture show signaled a more modernist direction, in keeping with an emerging mood this high-fashion week.

The Italian designer went mainly short, sharp and sculptural.

Building on a base of ivory brocades, Valli gave each minidress an individual character by color blocking with fabrics or strategically placed panels of embroidery. He drew additional attention to the hips by wrapping and twisting contrasting silks and rich brocades around them. Alternatively, he miniaturized his fetish fishtail gowns to create a host of short-yet-sloping hemlines.

Valli kept his treasured floral and botanical motifs, but rendered them in more artificial ways: blurring them, recoloring them in neon shades or obscuring them with geometric embroideries. While the allure was sometimes reminiscent of Raf Simons’ first collections for Dior, the combinations of texture and tone were often striking. Ruby crystals looked terrific nestled around the neckline of a soft pink satin bodice, yet Yves Klein blue cherry blossoms were borderline jarring on a hot pink gown.

Chanel Spring 2014 Couture

Karl Lagerfeld conceived the space in which he presented his Chanel couture show on Tuesday morning as “a futuristic nightclub” and not, he stressed, a “disco. That’s démodé.”

 He pulled off an ingenious fusion of serene and sporty, one swathed in otherworldly iridescence while shod in sneakers (albeit made by the specialty atelier Massaro, and elevated by applications of lace, tulle or beading). Every girl wore them, the better to skip merrily down those stairs, no matter how gussied up her look.

The collection was hyper-focused yet diverse. One major theme was the intense corsetry exposed between cropped jackets and belled skirts as well as breathe-freely waistless looks as different as divine diva gowns and a sheer T-shirt-and-bicycle shorts ensemble.

Such touches of overt sportif (that also included knee and elbow pads) integrated within a glorious lineup. Holding it all together: exquisite fabrics embroidered or hand-loomed and aglow with iridescent, transparent, holographic effects. Mesmerizing — yes. But practical, too, in that haute kind of way, a point driven home by thefootwear. Because Lagerfeld is nothing if not grounded.

Ulyana Sergeenko Spring 2014 couture

Ulyana Sergeenko said her couture collection was inspired by a train trip, but the journey ended up taking her to that most intimate of destinations: the boudoir.

The Russian designer loosened her famously buttoned-up collar with dishabille looks that contrasted hourglass corsets, some peeling open at the back, with slinky negligees.

Sweetheart-neckline corsets punctuated the lineup, raising the heat on a pair of chic powder-pink wide-legged pants and serving as the basis for everything from a frothy ivory cocktail dress with a lamp-shade skirt to curvy evening gowns in jewel-colored satin.

Though she cited Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan as the destinations for her imaginary travels, Sergeenko worked with chinoiserie accents such as embroidered blossoms on a scarlet silk jumpsuit. Beaded fringe swung from the capelet back of a midnight-blue, dressing gown-inspired evening dress. Billowing quilted skirts looked as snuggly as comforters, while a satin ballgown skirt had an almost-casual feel when worn open over striped silk pajama pants.

Christian Dior spring 2014 couture

Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week is taking over the French capital as the industry's luxe labels showcase their lavish crafts across 5 days.

Raf Simons is a modernist at heart.He described this show as honoring the connection between the women who make the clothes, the gifted artisans of the Dior atelier, and the women for whom they work, the clients. He sees that connection as one of intimacy, here expressed in a mood of graceful calm. 

 Simons eschewed his inspirations’ typical structure for softness, cutting light fabrics in clean, breezy shapes. His primary decorative motif: repetitive patterns — circle, eye, heart — embroidered onto the fabric, half of each shape cut out and often sewn with jewels for a 3-D effect.

The tone-on-tone graphics in white, black and navy looked lovely, and particularly fresh in white. Cases in point: the show opener, an asymmetric A-line affair that countered circles on top with horizontal pleats on the bottom; a strapless wisp of a dress done up with feathers and a half-hem flounce.  As a change of pace, Simons made a case for chic tailored jumpsuits and matching trouser-and-top ensembles. 

Though much of the collection played beautifully into the concept of haute reality, it was not without difficulty. That’s because Simons hedged his bets. While an embroidered blue-and-white party dress with off-kilter half-apron read as genuine, other dresses featured retro appendages — overlays, poufs, peplums — that felt antithetical to Simons’ primary message.