From his latest collaboration with Spanish luxury house Loewe, to his latest film which features everyone’s favorite girl Zendaya, the Italian-Algerian filmmaker and fashionista has always proven that cinema and fashion go hand in hand.
Throughout the years, I’ve loved writing about Luca Guadagnino. I even did it in my native language, for l’HuffPost Italia when I first watched A Bigger Splash in 2016 in Venice. Then, I got to write a comprehensive guide to his stylish brand of cinema for the now defunct monthly luxury publication of The National in Abu Dhabi. At that time, I had just watched The Staggering Girl, Guadagnino’s collaboration with Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli, starring the wondrous Julianne Moore. I kicked off the article by writing that “not since Alfred Hitchcock has a filmmaker channelled such an impeccable sense of aesthetics as a means of telling stories on the big screen.” I stand by my words from May of 2019.
Now, the fashionable filmmaker will be awarded a special prize to the career, the Premio SIAE Andrea Purgatori for a career dedicated to making auteur cinema, during the upcoming Venice Film Festival. The award is extra special as it is the first year it will be named after the beloved Italian journalist Purgatori, who left this world prematurely this year — leaving a gap in the hearts and consciousness of all of us who followed his words and listened to his unconventional wisdom. Guadagnino will receive the award on Sept. 2nd at 4.45 p.m., inside the Sala Perla and as part of the Giornate degli Autori, a beautiful sidebar of the cinematic festival which Purgatori presided over until his death.
It is a coming home of sorts for Guadagnino, whose films have always enjoyed their premiere on the Lido and most recently, where he was awarded the Silver Lion for Best Director for Bones and All, his 2022 romance/horro title starring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell.
Most recently, Guadagnino has been spotted wearing Loewe designs by Jonathan Anderson, the LVMH-owned maison’s creative director, on and off the red carpet (see above). They suit him, pardon the pun, very very well and managed to give a run for their money to the outfits worn by his young star Chalamet, whom Guadagnino discovered back in his 2018 film Call Me By Your Name. The film was famously penned by fellow filmmaker James Ivory — who also co-produced — and based his Academy Award winning screenplay on the 2007 novel of the same title by André Aciman.
Here is a bit I wrote in The National in 2019, about Guadagnino’s love affair with fashion, which culminated in a collaboration with Loewe, in the risqué short film above:
“One only needs to watch the film that first put him on the cinematic map, I Am Love starring Tilda Swinton, to realise that Guadagnino has a special relationship with beauty. The austere grey-toned architecture that is typical of Milan and its surroundings, the clothing worn by the film's bourgeois heroine, designed by Raf Simons for Jil Sander, and the men's chiselled Italian good looks, all conspire to tell a compelling tale of missed passions and an unfulfilled life.
In the films that followed, features like A Bigger Splash (where Guadagnino also called on Simons, then at Dior, to outfit his favourite leading lady Swinton), Call Me by Your Name and Suspiria, fashion also plays a starring role. It is a delicate balance between style and substance – and no one does it quite as well as Luca Guadagnino.
Famously, Suspiria costume designer Giulia Piersanti had to recreate a mixture of 1970s-inspired patchwork, prints and outfits straight out of the West German period magazine Sibylle – think "a socialist version of Vogue" – for the 2018 retelling of Dario Argento's supernatural vintage horror flick. The result was visually stunning, a sort of Rosemary's Baby meets the films of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, all dyed in maroon Rajneesh cult-inspired hues. There were even dresses made of hair extensions.”
While we will have to wait just a bit longer for his latest Challengers, starring Zendaya and co-produced by Amazon Prime Video and MGM, to reach a screen near us, now that the film has been pulled as the Venice opener because of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strikes, we can at least enjoy a view of Guadagnino on the Lido, receiving an award that is both timely and well deserved.
As a cute aside, even Chalamet has Guadagnino’s photo on his own Instagram profile. And we know how we all feel about the cute Timothée and his fashion choices!!