Emilia Wickstead was consumed by the cinematic vision of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy for Fall 2019. The designer found her mafia muse in the guise of Mary Corleone, the Italian-American mob boss’s daughter, as portrayed by Sofia Coppola in The Godfather Part III, from 1990. Though Coppola’s performance was widely panned (first choice Winona Ryder had fallen ill), the film’s costuming, by Milena Canonero, was a triumph. The trilogy spans from 1901 to 1980, and it was from this broad sartorial well that the New Zealand designer drew, dressing her sirens for the emotive moments—marriages, deaths, and reunions—to create what she termed, “a wardrobe for life.”
“I wanted to draw people into the nostalgia of that world,” said Wickstead of the intimate restaurant setting she chose for her show. “Le Caprice is one of the oldest Italian interiors in London.” The black marble floors and cane-backed chairs haven’t been touched since 1981, when it was a favorite haunt of Lady Di. The clothes were of a similarly high-wattage timbre. Flanked by her own “la famiglia,” Wickstead presented models in cropped-top bouclé wedding gowns, hair slicked back into buns, with coordinating Sicilian crochet gloves and neat little tone-on-tone caps that borrowed from the photographs of Erwin Blumenfeld.
Even the more mannish offerings here felt voluptuous: Oversize herringbone check overcoats came with huge, sweeping scarves in black pleather (“I love its lightness,” said Wickstead), and in creamy wool gabardine with cascading pearl embellishments that encased the torso and trailed the floor. Dresses in textured leopard prints and Godfather vintage florals were given plunging backs and necklines that lent a modern sensibility, as did the giant croc bags slung under models’ arms.
Many of these sumptuous designs had a couture-like finish—the folded and pleated velvet fabrication of one particularly glorious scarlet gown was so dense it had to be hand-stitched. Yet even the show’s richest confections were designed to be stripped back, layer by layer, to create lighter looks. “Even though you’re entering this fantasy world,” said Wickstead, “it should be wearable.”
