The writer wears a Blumarine cardigan, pants, and bag.Photographed by Mayan Toledano, Vogue, December 2021
While making the rounds of exhibits throughout New York Fashion Week in September, I made a decision to shake up my wardrobe: Gone had been the sweatpants I’d been cocooning in for what appeared like without end, and gone was my all-black, shiva-sitting uniform of the period earlier than that—I wished to bloom right into a butterfly, and I wished Blumarine to be my rhinestone-embellished wings. In its tiny, fake-fur-collared yellow shrug above low-slung cargos, I used to be out of the blue remodeled right into a Y2K principessa with slightly slice of midriff and an entire lot of perspective, whether or not on my method uptown to Batsheva or using a Citi Bike over the Williamsburg Bridge to Eckhaus Latta in Bushwick.
There’s simply one thing about Blumarine that makes a girl radiate saucy confidence. The Italian label, based by Carpi native Anna Molinari and her late husband, Gianpaolo Tarabini, in 1977, has all the time appeared to have a secret ingredient that makes males sweat. Molinari’s physique-skimming clothes and itty-bitty cardigans had been sensual and daring, and when Nicola Brognano, 31, was appointed artistic director in 2019, he injected some fashionable sass to the storied glam, which has been catnip for TikTok and Instagram. Blumarine’s teeny cardigans had been now tinier than ever, belt buckles got here with a fats, gaudy-stylish B, and peel-them-off pants sported trippy floral prints.
“I want the women to feel sexy, seductive, playful, and not so serious,” Brognano advised me over Zoom in his charming Italian lilt. “When she enters a room, everyone can see this girl—because she is fabulous.”
Model Liya Kebede, additionally in Blumarine.
Photographed by Steven Klein, Vogue, 2005
No doubt. Having been cooped up for months, I’ve wished to dwell on a midriff-exposing, bust-revealing, Rico Suave–glazed edge. No one needs to maneuver by way of life in boring sweats (and even drained-wanting cashmere sweaters)—particularly not me. Brognano’s Blumarine revival was the proper publish-pandemic sartorial recipe for many who wished to reenter this world with a bejeweled end. (We’re seeing extra flash like this elsewhere on the runway, too, from excessive-octane monograms at Fendace to Polly Pocket miniskirts at Miu Miu.) These are garments in sync with these of us who had spent the pandemic sifting by way of the archives of the early aughts and enthusiastic about actually brighter days—once we had been youngsters, feasting our eyes on low-rise Britney and bedazzled Paris Hilton.
