Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood may be divisive, but there’s one thing we can all agree on, right? Margaret Qualley, who plays Pussycat to Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth, is its breakout star; she’s can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her irresistible. Though Alberta Ferretti didn’t quote her specifically, elements of the designer’s new Spring show could’ve been taken from Pussycat’s playbook, among them the coveralls, the midriff-exposing crop tops, and the rainbow palette.
For the last couple of years, Ferretti has been reorienting her label around daywear and giving it a determinedly youthful aspect. That came across more than ever in this new collection, with its retro ’70s lean. It’s the kids that didn’t experience an era the first time around who embrace its second and third iterations and so on down the line. Ferretti worked to modernize the show’s ’70s impulses, by, say, pairing a suede mini with an of-this-moment striped button-down. But the pieces that stood out were the ones that bore her signature crafty detailing: a whipstitched suede jacket, a butterfly motif slip dress pieced together from many different colors of silk, the intensely embroidered half-shirts. Nobody needs Alberta Ferretti pleated chinos, however. The abstracted black-and-white animal print pieces also felt like outliers.
Ferretti’s evening grouping came in dégradé shades of blue and black. She claimed the artist Fabrizio Plessi, who made the video installation of moving water that played at the end of the runway, as inspiration. Here, too, it was embellishment that lifted certain pieces above others. It’s not hard to picture one of Ferretti’s young models off-runway in the belly-button exposing embroidered capelet and fully beaded stretch pants. Or maybe Qualley herself on her next red carpet sortie.