There was a certain tragedy in watching luxury fashion sabotage itself at the Venice Film Festival, as luxury houses, one after the other, played their most important card — the debut of a new designer — on one of fashion marketing’s most fragile and uncontrolled terrains: the red carpet.
No one should judge a film based on a single scene or reduce a play to a single line. And yet some of fashion’s top brands have invited consumers to do exactly that.
The logic seems seductive: a top star wears a look by a new creative director before their debut collection hits the runway, and the flashbulbs of the red carpet turn the moment into a teaser seen around the world. But the strategy can play out very differently in practice: garments presented out of context are devoured and judged with the speed and superficiality of social media.
Case in point: Versace sent Julia Roberts down the red carpet in a look by the talented Dario Vitale that appeared to nod to the house’s optical collection of 1986. It was a deliberate echo of a key moment in Versace’s history, but instead of reading as a declaration of continuity and renewal, it felt like a fragment plucked from memory, judged in isolation, stripped of its symbolic force and instantly compared to its earlier incarnation.
Even more disorienting: the first look unveiled on Roberts was nothing more than a jacket-and-denim ensemble — to be repeated on Amanda Seyfried only a few days later. (Stylist Elizabeth Stewart, who works with both Roberts and Seyfried, called it a “sustainability” moment, writing on Instagram that “sharing is caring,” but it came across as applause-bait in an industry that has yet to seriously confront its waste problem).
Dior, under Jonathan Anderson, fell into a similar trap. Anderson is a designer with an extraordinary command of nuance, of cultural layering and subtle symbolism. His decision to show Alba Rohrwacher in a pannier dress could have resonated with extraordinary depth, because the pannier is not an incidental silhouette but a through line in the history of Dior, appearing during the eras of Gianfranco Ferré’s majestic architectural couture, Galliano’s theatrical excesses, Raf Simons’ sculptural minimalism and Maria Grazia Chiuri’s “global atelier.” To return to it is to engage deeply with the brand’s past, but what might have been read as a fresh twist on a lineage, looked instead like a technical study stripped of its narrative power.
At Cannes, Bottega Veneta under Louise Trotter dressed Julianne Moore and Vicky Krieps. The looks were poised, elegant, undeniably refined but they vanished into the blur of festival imagery, and this is where the analogy with cinema becomes striking. No director would ever release the ending of a film before its premiere, for to do so would destroy the narrative structure, the suspense, the very grammar of storytelling. And yet, this is precisely what fashion now insists upon: revealing endings before beginnings, showing fragments before the whole.
The Transparency Society (2012) is a slender volume by South Korean philosopher Byung Chul Han that fashion communication directors should keep on their bedside tables: Han describes our age as one in which exposure replaces meaning, where everything shown too soon becomes flat, robbed of depth.
It would be easy, almost comforting, to describe these red carpet operations as marketing spectacles, but that would suggest a coherence they do not possess. The truth is far harsher: they manage to achieve neither the pathos of spectacle nor the efficiency of marketing.
What we have seen in Venice is devoid of strategy, an act of exposure without calculation, urgency without purpose, because behind this compulsion there is not vision but fear. The fear of not making headlines, of failing to go viral, of vanishing into the algorithmic churn that reduces every image to a few seconds of attention before it is replaced by the next. And fear is the worst foundation on which to build an identity: it produces gestures that are anxious, reactive, defensive — never myth-making.
Simone Cotellessa is the content creator behind the Instagram account Ecce Homo.
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