David Koma fell under the spell of Venice this season, hardly a shock given La Serenissima’s centuries-long habit of seducing even the most clear-eyed visitors. “It brings out the artist in me,” he said, noting that he fully surrendered to the city’s mysterious nocturnal allure and shadowy glamour. Masked balls, elegant debauchery, a frisson of fetish, sensuality wrapped in opulence: Koma ticked off every Venetian cliché, weaving them into his dark romantic fantasia for Blumarine.
A 1992 campaign shot by Albert Watson in Venice served as a visual point of departure, while Helmut Newton’s imagery, another touchstone for the label, hovered in the background. For Koma, Newton’s brand of eroticism has never been about shock value: fetish, he insisted, is “not provocation, but control.” That idea shaped the emphatic hourglass silhouettes that were an evolution of the corsetry Koma has introduced since his first season at the label. Here it blossomed into structured mini crinolines swathed in lace, tightly fastened with gilded buttons shaped like masks and lion heads, Venetian emblems by way of Blumarine.
The house’s signature sentimental roses skewed thorny and ferocious, spun into vertiginous 3D plissé rosettes scattered over skimpy minidresses or bead-stitched onto bias-cut, sheer georgette slips layered beneath sweeping capes that nodded to the tabarro, Venice’s traditional cloak. Fluffy shearling boleros, patterned in the Harlequin’s diamond intarsia of carnival costumes, were worn over little more than lace briefs, then casually reassigned as plush blankets, tossed over gondola seats.
Amping up the boudoir-mood drama, black lingerie bodysuits barely pretending to hide beneath sweeping long coats were staged against the crumbling decadence of ancient palazzos or drifting out of the Venetian fog at daybreak, when the city looks its most conspiratorial. Flickers of flame red erupted into a palette of black and white, pushing aside the occasional dusty pink and pale blue of fading Venetian stuccoes. For Koma, Venice isn’t about minuets of courtship or moonlit serenades on the lagoon; it’s about desire, lust, and the danger of getting lost in its labyrinthine, tortuous calli, preferably before anyone finds you at dawn with your five-inch heels slightly crooked.
