For eleven days at the start of September, one small island off Venice becomes the best-dressed place in Europe, and almost none of it happens on the red carpet.
The 83rd Venice International Film Festival runs September 2 to 12 on the Lido, which makes it the oldest film festival in the world and, for less obvious reasons, the most useful one to watch if you care about how women dress.
The festival is on the Lido, and the Lido is a beach town
This is the part visitors never expect. The Mostra is not held in Venice proper. It is held on a long sandbar across the lagoon, a residential strip with bathing huts, bicycles and a handful of hotels, where people are also just having an ordinary early-September holiday.
So for eleven days the same street carries actors going to a premiere and residents going to buy bread, and the interesting dressing is not the gowns arriving by boat. It is everyone else — the women who live there, the ones who came for one screening, the ones who have done this every year for thirty years.
They have all solved the same problem, which is that the day is hot and the evening is not, and there is nowhere to go home to in between.
What eleven days of this teaches you
The solution, everywhere you look, is that the evening is the outfit and the day is an adjustment to it.
Nobody on the Lido changes clothes at seven. There is no time and no reason. What they do instead is wear something that was already correct for nine at night, and make it survive the afternoon — flat sandals swapped later, a shirt over the top and then taken off, hair up and then down.
It is the same logic as any Italian seaside evening, only compressed and put under lights. And it explains why the dressing there looks so unhurried: nothing is being assembled at the last minute, because there is only one outfit and it was decided in the morning.
The dress that does this
It is long, it is dark, and it has one idea in it.
That last part is what the Lido gets right and what photographs of the carpet get wrong. The women who look best are not wearing the most. They are wearing something plain with a single deliberate detail — a bow at the shoulder, a slit, a back that is cut lower than the front — and then nothing else competing with it.
The detail carries the evening. Everything else is quiet on purpose, which is also why the same dress works at a screening, at dinner afterward, and on the walk back along the water when the crowd thins out.
September 2, if you are anywhere near a screen
The festival opens on the second, with Maggie Gyllenhaal presiding over the main competition jury, and for the following week and a half the photographs coming out of the Lido are the best free styling reference of the year.
Watch the ones taken in daylight, off the carpet. That is where the transferable ideas are.
Our evening dresses are bought with that hour in mind rather than the gala one — long, dark, one detail, nothing that needs an entrance to make sense.
Sarasota has a great many warm evenings and very few genuine galas. The Lido is the better model for both.
She travels to Italy each season to hand-select the boutique's collection, choosing fabrics by hand before they reach the rail.
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