Speaking of womanity. An aquatic to botanical collection, leaving the land to reconnect with the plant kingdom. The images by Alice Rosati and a fashion review by Lampoon Editor in Chief
Louis Vuitton future archeology: the images by Alice Rosati and Niki Pauls – transforming the legacy of the Isola Bella to a modern casket
An introduction by the Editorial Team
Until 1630 Isola Bella was a rock inhabited by fishermen, with two small churches and a few vegetable gardens.
Owners of Isola Madre since 1501, the Borromeo family from the first two decades of the seventeenth century with Julius Caesar III and Charles III concentrated their interests on the island, beginning the project that would lead to the creation of a palace and a garden.
This intent would be continued, expanded and defined by Vitaliano VI in all respects considered the founder of Isola Bella. The works that led to the present layout continued without interruption even later throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until 1948 when with Vitaliano IX Borromeo the Salone Nuovo, the northern facade and the pier were built. Isola Bella – often named the casket of Baroque – holds art treasures unknown to most. It rises as a symbol of mystery that keeps its possessions hidden.
Starting from this symbolism, the photographer Alice Rosati working with stylist Niki Pauls, pulled out of a casket all the potential beauty of the contemporary world, lies on the discarded fabrics that come back to new life. The editorial, staging a black goddess surrounded by recycled cloths, metaphor of possibility and rebirth, just like the peacocks that populate Borromeo Island.
Rain on the lake: the Louis Vuitton fashion show took place at the Borromeo Palace
A fashion review by editor-in-chief Carlo Mazzoni.
Isola Bella, May 2023 – Italy
The kiosks had been repainted and cleaned. The restaurants, the bars were refurbished. Peonies and roses were arranged on iron tables – there was no plastic anywhere. Florists’ shops at night had remained open, newsstands instead of magazines laid out LV travel guides. From the fronds of the linden trees, the bulbs of a festival descended among the leaves. More than a thousand people had come from all over the world to attend Nicolas Ghesquière’s fashion show for Louis Vuitton at the Major Lake, Italy.
Everything was wet from the rain that was falling incessantly. It seemed that the celebration was for the water creatures of the Lake – rather than for human beings. Arriving on the island by boat, the water mixed with the calm, storm-free air.
We were entering the domain of the Major Lake – or Lago Maggiore, in Italian – land of legends, fairies and mermaids appearing in the mists of a May at Isola Bella. The water level, after months of drought, is returning to its usual and comforting levels. Water from Lake Maggiore is the water that bathes Milan, flowing into the Ticino River and circling the city’s canals. May – as well as November – is the rainiest month of the year for statistics in Italy – and it can also be the most beautiful. In May the rain energizes flowers and the greenery that is mirrored in the meadow flooded in a puddle. In May there is that early light that we recognize just before summer begins and that we already miss in July, the light that Manzoni recounted.
For the first time in Italy, Louis Vuitton presented the Cruise collection at Isola Bella
The collection that takes this name, cruise, was once dedicated to European tycoons who wanted to spruce up their wardrobes in December before sailing off to the Caribbean or Egypt for Christmas. Because of those ones that used to winter on yachts, the cruise collections can mix garments for every climate. They stay in stores for almost six months in a year. The Cruise Collections have a strong commercial value, where the creativity of those who design them can range over every material, every combination, with no limit of seasonable logic.
The Fashion show begins with lyrical music in the soundtrack: models are wearing head covers as papal tiaras, capes with tucked-in sleeves, masks that cover the eyes and the cheekbones like alien scales. Maybe, these ladies are just girls on a weekend in a villa, wearing short boiled wool shorts. Not so slowly the beat speeds up and the lyric turns to house. It is at this moment that the Mermaids of the Lake take center stage. Having surrounded the island with the fresh, silver water of the lake and the rain – now the Mermaids join the models parading in the salons of an Italian baroque palace.
The baroque of Isola Bella: Mermaids are an inspiration for Ghesquière’s Cruise for Louis Vuitton
The shores of the lake are like poems – and so the scales of the mermaids are leaves bathed in gold and ochre. The legend of Lake Maggiore refers of mermaids landing at Isola Bella, among the stuccoes and gardens. Every feature of these anomalous entities is draped with green and blue velvets. The Mermaid is covered in liquid fabrics, where peonies and azaleas become brocades on her breasts. Her hair is strands of platinum; her eyelashes sprinkled with sapphire dust. Veins and arteries are glimpsed in the hollow of the forearm, like streaks of ivory in glass. The nails are silver, the shoulder blades protected by metal shields.
Ghesquière plays with volumes as if he were still working with whale bones: Ghesquière maintains a fashion identity even in the context of global branding. In other cases that a designer’s creativity was diluted by commercial power – that is not happening here at LV. Ghesquière’s fashion remains complicated, difficult, and risky for the breadth of the audience Vuitton wants to address. It seems like a paradox, and it works in reverse: Vuitton’s diffusion power manages to decode the complexity of Ghesquière’s intellectual design. Put more simply: few understand it, but everyone wants it. If Ghesquière did not design for Vuitton his line would be an intellectual niche topic, instead he invades the planet with images.
The parade was supposed to take place in the Italian-style gardens, in the terraces rising like an Aztec pyramid in the middle of the lake, amidst flying white peacocks and the mermaids remaining quiet with their seaweed fans – instead, the whole show was moved inside the castle where Napoleon slept a single night in 1797.
Louis Vuitton, Isola Bella and the Borromeo Palace
The Borromeo family is s a royal family titled to the lordship of the lands around the lake, from Verbania to Arona and Angera. The reason for their power: wealth brought them property, land palaces. A kingdom that had no legal boundaries, but economies of property. In a land, Italy, that for more than three centuries was the object of conquest. Spaniards, Austrians and French on several occasions. For a noble family, having property in different lands, gave more guarantees than a fief obtained by sovereign order. Security also came from garrisons in the church.
A legend in Lake Maggiore, Isola Bella, mermaids – and the story of Carlo Borromeo
Carlo Borromeo was among the architects of the Counter-Reformation, and he laid the foundation for the industriousness that still marks the bourgeois soul of Milan today. The dedication to work, the distrust of conversations, the public relations by which fashion lives and survives today. The Borromeo is the matrix of that industrial pragmatism that belongs to the blood of anyone born here in Milan. And in my small way I feel it: a will to do that comes before the desire to learn, an intention to work for the community that annihilates rivalry. A commitment to leave a trace, rather than to enjoy one’s own pretty face.
The saintly and deadly archbishop planned the distribution of the waters of the Ticino throughout lower Lombardy, between Arona and Pavia. The irrigation ditches in the canals gave energy for flour and for weaving wools and cottons. Borromeo was the man who turned Lombardy into the richest land in Europe, booty for others. He foresaw how, in the centuries to come, Austria, Spain and France would slaughter each other over the possession of Lombardy, effectively leaving its control to the Church.
Legend has it that the reason Borromeo was so attentive to the water management of the Lake Maggiore was not just rational. His dedication to the waters of the lake was due precisely to the mermaids that still dwell there. Borromeo did not want the mermaids to run away, easy prey for ordinary people. The mermaids, lost among canals, irrigation ditches, canals, and rivers would find themselves distressed among the snakes of the plains, and finally, worse, among the jellyfish of the sea, and among so many other aquatic creatures that live and survive without any delusion.
Carlo Mazzoni
Louis Vuitton Resort 2024 Collection
Jewelry Louis Vuitton Fine Jewelry Collection
Photography Alice Rosati
Styling Niki Pauls
Hair Anastasiia Tymoshchuk
Makeup Hind Soussan
Casting Dominyka Angelyte @d.a.consulting
Production Candice Carcaillon @Error404
Production, photography assistants Alan Marty and Ludovico Colato
Styling assistant Remy Yombo
Production assistant Anastasiia Honcharova
Talent Awang @IMGModels
Thanks to Studio La Reserve Des Arts – Lucie Bonafonte, and Calum Buchan @IMGModels
Alice Rosati Louis Vuitton Resort 2024 Collection, future archeology and womanity
Alice Rosati is a visual artist, photographer and director based in Paris. Rosati received her first camera for Christmas at the age of four, a cute little ninja turtle exemplar. Her polyhedric artistic research proposes to us a dialectical vision of the absurdity of reality. It wasn’t until 2008 that Rosati made a living out of photography. Storyteller, she developed her aesthetic around the sensuality of bodies and lights. In 2020, Alice Rosati released her first book I am a mermaid, featuring a non-gendered mermaid character. Alice Rosati shot for Lampoon the Louis Vuitton Resort 2024 collection presented in Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore, Italy. A collection that explores womanity, the nature of women, through marine monsters that born out the lake. In a dystopian dream of future archeology.
Louis Vuitton Resort 2024 Collection – Photography Alice Rosati and styling Niki Pauls
