Backstage, Antonio Berardi said that a vision of Lady Macbeth scheming, screaming, and schlepping her way through the Highlands of Scotland was his starting thought for this collection. William Shakespeare first came up with the character, his most compellingly poisonous catalyst for tragedy, three years after the death of Queen Elizabeth I. Contemplating the dress of this period and the rustling synthetic technical gear you’d wear to hike the high road today were aids to reading Berardi’s text in dress.
Twin lines of metal-tipped drawstring ran through ruffled skirts and at the hip of some jackets in farthingale arcs. There was an Elizabethan elongation to some of the bodice shapes—some were cast in knit, while others were gridded with constellations of crystal or prettily colored pins and beads (vaguely North African) magnificent enough for Bess (Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber to Queen Elizabeth I) to paint her portrait in. The wired-stiff, oversize stitched collars on a camel jacket and coat were raffish but versatile. The softly ruffled peplum on the coat was detachable via a golden popper, which offered dressed up or more casual options.
Drawstrings were used in suiting to afford a glimpse as well as cinch: This was a covered-up collection with narrowly targeted flashes of fleshy revelation. Panels of textured embroidered chiffon, grayish from afar, were worked into silks on jackets and dresses to provide topography for the watching eye. Apparent-jackets were, in fact, stitched into their billowing-trained skirts or jauntily wide-cut pants. At the end, Berardi’s own narrative wound its course as inevitably as Lady Macbeth’s: Soft pink silk gowns strafed with black lace provided with-a-twist evening poetry. Cleaved not to his mold, this was an unusually wide-ranging collection that touched new ground for this designer: His shirt-hemmed, quilted elongated liner jacket was a far subtler and more compelling riff on British country dress than most floating around London this season.
