Olympia Le-Tan Heads Up the Film Appreciation Society

Round about midnight at Florence’s Trattoria Cammillo, Olympia Le-Tan and a chic and rowdy clique from Paris and New York were deep into the grappa in preparation for more post-supper revels at the Krisko club. Vincent Darré, Elie Top, Andrew Richardson, André Saraiva, Annabelle Dexter Jones, Olivier Zahm and Natacha Ramsay, Sarah and Philip Andelman, Olympia’s sister Cleo, and papa Pierre Le-Tan, to name but a few, had all jetted in for the day to celebrate Le-Tan’s installation at Museo Bellini as Pitti W’s guest women’s designer this season. Spurring them on was a polka-dotted-dressed Jennifer Eymère of Jalouse, whose bag of choice these days is one of Le-Tan’s embroidered renditions of first edition book covers, say Nabokov’s Lolita, the one Natalie Portman wore to the premiere of Black Swan.
 
When Pitti called Le-Tan this spring to invite her to dream up a special collection and an event, she went back to her school days as a student of Italian literature and a lover of Cinecitta classics from the ’60s and ’70s, when Italian cinema was La Dolce Vita. Le-Tan asked Max Farago, whose images are full of wit and gentle romance, to quickly fly all over the world—well, New York and Paris—to photograph some of her best friends posing as icons from the films of Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni, Bertolucci, and Visconti.

To make a long story short, Olivier Zahm went for Pasolini, complete with twisted bedsheets and full-frontal; André Saraiva reprised Jean-Louis Trintignant’s role as Marcello Clerici in Paris preparing to assassinate his former college professor in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 film The Conformist, based on the book by Alberto Moravia, and Olympia matched Silvana Mangano curve for curve in a busty sweater and short shorts from Giuseppe de Santis’ Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice).
 
Florence’s Renaissance treasure-filled Bellini Museum, served as the backdrop for Le-Tan’s bag library of Italian masterpieces and petit film can clutches and shoulder bags from Dante’s Divine Comedy to La Strada. And now she’s really on the run—because this little Italian bacchanale was just a warm up for Le-Tan’s main Fall collection, which will make its debut quite soon in Paris.