Anna Molinari
MILAN, February 24, 2004
By
Bette Midler playing Janis Joplin in The Rose meets Virginia Woolf. Such are the entertaining tropes being used backstage to explain the outbreak of individualism in fall's fashion; that combination specifically was Rossella Tarabini's brief for the collection she designs under her mother's name.The reality was thankfully much simpler. The house of Molinari always finds a way to do pretty dresses, whatever the mood of the season. This time, it was ragbag antique glamour with a seventies accent. Close up, the dresses—highly worked amalgams of dévoré velvet, chiffon, and outcrops of sparkly beading—could almost have been the trophies girls boast about finding at Saturday-morning flea markets. Aged and crinkled gold lameés, apparently retrieved after decades in great-granny's attic, reappeared in smocks and tiered skirts tied around the middle with silver sequinned belts.
Something always comes along to break the suspension of disbelief, of course; here, it was the decidedly contemporary colorways (from chrome yellow through violet and purple) and multiple variations on the theme. But when these drifty, faux-moldered frocks turn up in shops this fall, they're exactly the kinds of things the young Secondhand Roses and would-be Virginias will fall on with gusto.
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