For her pre-fall collection, Emilia Wickstead returned to two of her most beloved references: classic cinema and Italy. “It’s been a while since I’ve taken a journey to Italy with one of my collections, so it felt like the right time to return,” she said. Yet while Wickstead’s Italophile instincts have typically been associated with a certain brand of sunkissed, la dolce vita glamour—consider her collaborations with glitzy jet-set hotels Le Sirenuse in Positano or Passalacqua in Lake Como—this time, she decided to dive deeper into one of her favorite films, Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 melancholic neorealist masterpiece Journey to Italy.
More specifically, Wickstead was inspired by its characters’ wardrobes—and not just Ingrid Bergman’s sumptuous coats and silk scarves and boat-neck black dresses, either. (Although you will find a supremely elegant 2024-worthy update on the latter in look 44, here cut from a luxuriously hefty black lace.) Instead, she was equally drawn to the classically masculine tailoring worn by George Sanders, even lifting a blown-up version of a gingham check he wears for an especially lovely pair of dresses, one with a button-down collar and another with a crisp scoop neck.
There were plenty of splashes of all-out glamour in the mix, too, most notably a gold-foiled lace gown that paid homage to the film’s setting of Naples and its gilded Baroque churches. A series of pink-on-pink and blue-on-blue floral prints, meanwhile, were inspired by Italian tapestries and the luscious fabrics you might find wallpapering the homes of southern Italian nobility. Elsewhere, a set of caped evening gowns were playfully styled with the swags of fabric thrown over the shoulder or even worn with the cape alone and a matching skirt for a touch of something more risqué.
The most exciting part for Wickstead? The way the collection afforded her the feeling of having stepped into the director’s chair herself, working closely with the equally cinematically-minded photographer Pavel Kharatia on the images to pay homage to a film she so admires. “We had the models do these very elegant, curled poses that were inspired by Ingrid in the film,” she says, with a wide smile. “But then we also had to toughen it up a bit to make it feel right for our modern-day woman.”
