Tonight is the premiere of Gianni Amelio’s Battlefield in Venice, a World War I drama described as “an unrelentingly bleak viewing experience” about “the enormity of human suffering” during large-scale fighting. “There is a chance,” it says the Screen daily judgement“that the public may not want to expose themselves to this violent coughing…” – but it’s going to take more than a subplot about the Spanish flu to keep Emily Ratajkowski from a red carpet premiere, especially when she pulls off a Gucci look autumn 2004 in the boldest shade of green you can think of for the occasion.
Those aware of fashion history will know that Fall 2004 wasn’t just another Gucci collection, it was Tom Ford’s last for the Italian house. Set to the soundtrack of Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ and featuring showers of fragrant rose petals, the show relived the designer’s biggest hits from the ’90s and ’00s: the best-selling velvet blazer worn by Kate Moss at the fall 1995 runway; midriff-flossing Elsa Peretti-inspired dresses; the iridescent dress in which Nicole Kidman co-hosted the 2003 Met Gala. (The theme that year? Goddesses.) One by one, the platonic ideal of each of Ford’s Gucci signatures marched down the plush-lined runway, a sensual parade of fur finishes and jewel tones, plunging necklines and bamboo handles.
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And then there was EmRata’s dress. The look is one of two mermaid dresses from the collection shown in what Fashion described as ‘a fantastically evil shade of green’, modeled on the catwalk by Eugenia Volodina, twenty years before marketing teams adopted the term ‘snot summer’. Ford, the magazine declared, had “outdone himself” with the evening wear. As fashion critic Sarah Mower wrote in her emotional message from the front row: “There is no doubt who the Gucci woman is: the embodiment of sexual confidence, polished to a high shine.” Which, it has to be said, isn’t a bad way to describe Emily Ratajkowski.