Tonight sees the premiere of Gianni Amelio’s Battleground in Venice, a First World War drama described as “an unrelentingly bleak viewing experience” about “the sheer volume of human suffering” during large-scale combat. “There’s a chance,” reads the Screen Daily review, “that audiences might not wish to expose themselves to this much violent coughing…”–but it takes more than a Spanish Flu subplot to put Emily Ratajkowski off a red-carpet premiere, especially when she’s truffled out a fall 2004 Gucci look in the brattiest shade of green imaginable for the occasion.
Those up on their fashion history will know that fall 2004 wasn’t just any Gucci collection, it was Tom Ford’s last for the Italian house. Soundtracked by Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and featuring showers of fragrant rose petals, the show revisited the designer’s greatest hits of the ’90s and ’00s: the bestselling velvet blazer worn by Kate Moss on the fall 1995 catwalk; midriff-flossing Elsa Peretti-inspired gowns; the iridescent dress in which Nicole Kidman cohosted the 2003 Met Gala. (The theme that year? Goddesses.) One by one, the Platonic ideal of each of Ford’s Gucci signatures was marched down the plushly carpeted runway, a sensual parade of fur trims and jewel tones, plunging necklines and bamboo handles.
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And then there was EmRata’s dress. The look is one of two mermaid gowns from the collection rendered in what Vogue described as “a fantastically evil shade of green,” modeled on the runway by Eugenia Volodina 20 years before marketing teams coopted the phrase “brat summer.” Ford, the magazine declared, had “outdone himself” with the eveningwear. As fashion critic Sarah Mower wrote in her emotional dispatch from the front row: “There is no doubt who the Gucci woman is: the embodiment of sexual confidence, burnished to a high gloss.” Which, it has to be said, isn’t a bad way to describe Emily Ratajkowski.