Cinema, Culture, and Fashion Inspiration; A look at Fellini’s Satyricon

As a young film and visual media student at University, I spent most of my hours studying and watching films. I was mostly inspired by French new wave and Italian Neorealism, but one film in particular truly left its mark on my creativity, Fellini’s Satyricon ( 1969). Before this film, I had never seen or experienced anything that surreal, bizarre and visually so outrageous. The film is an odyssey through the decadent world of ancient Rome, and is an adaptation of the poem Satyricon, by 1st Century AD author Petronius. Fellini said that with this film he wanted to eliminate the border between dream and imagination. Film critics have said this was the director’s own vision of the late-‘60s counterculture ‘adrift in a world of pleasure, violence and rampant corruption at the time’.

I remember feeling shocked, at times event disgusted and yet I continued to curiously watch these grotesque characters unfold, and the fascination with all the beauty in the cinematic details including the colossal sets, the costumes, jewelry, make up, photographic framing of the scenes, etc. Half the time I didn’t understand wtf was happening but I knew this was more than just entertainment.

When the film was released in 1970 Alberto Moravia stated that Fellini was "a decadent who is magnetised by the most celebrated and most historic of all decadences." Not so long ago the film was restored by the film's director of photography Giuseppe Rotunno and Cineteca Nazionale, the work described by Fellini himself as "science fiction from the past" and widely regarded as his most visionary piece of cinema – so much so the fantasy drama, rejecting textbook confines and delving into parts of the unconscious.

This piece of cinematic history has influenced almost every Italian designer to date, including several of Dolce & Gabbana's collections, Valentino and most recently Moschino.

“Fellini is absolutely the person who inspired me most of all for this collection – says Jeremy Scott – his masterpieces, all those fantastic characters he created, I started from his imagination and I tried to grasp the essence and then translate it into the clothes”. Everywhere Fellini breathes: from the neon projected in the hall with his name to the embroidered skeletons on the jewel suits. On stage, bare-chested centurions and sculpted muscles synthesize the pop soul of the brand.

Bodies fill every cinematic orifice of Satyricon, young and muscular, old and pendulous, withered and gross, bulbous and bountiful. A rebellious artist trying to throw off Catholic moralism was also trying to connect urgently with this dance of repulsion and delight. Fellini had offered up some broad queer caricatures in La Dolce Vita, and Satyricon finds him caught in a posture, at once fascinating and perturbing, of trying to encompass pansexual lust as just another wing of the museum.