Held en plein amongst the goings of a post-quarantine Italy, Salvatore Ferragamo unveiled its latest on the S/S 2021 runway in Milan yesterday. The late-Baroque, former-cemetery-current-catwalk, Rotonda della Besana turned all other colonnade porticos pale in comparison as Paul Andrew garbed models in the sartorial trappings and proportional seduction of 1960.

It was a Vertigo redux, had Hitchcock dressed Anok Yai, Jonas Glöer, Samer Rahma, Mariacarla Boscono and Maggie Cheng, all stars to Andrew’s own cinematic iteration shot by Luca Guadagnino stalking the streets of an August-Milan – quiet in the grips of coronavirus. Tapping those long-endured cinema mysteries made for a 30-look, co-ed showing of saturated hues, soft tailoring, F-wedges and intense artisanship, subliminally echoing a past cohort of Kim Novacks, Tippi Hedrens and Rod Taylors.

And it was a coup for color. Andrew’s palate, heavy in Hitchcockian rhetoric: Hedren Green, Lobster Mousse, Bodega Bay Sky (a wink toward the classics), was tailored into honeycombed knits, twilled overalls, and plaid seersuckers that, in any other season, would surely be hued in clean, rational gray, moody burgundy. Hand-embroidered feathers flocked from strait-legged pants paired consciously to a white tank – a cinematic minimalism if there ever was. Elsewhere wildflowers grew the length of a canvas trench, emblematic of the Tuscan blooms amidst quarantine, and a ‘floating’ string skirt, spliced across the thigh, made for an editorialized take on modesty. The occasional bare midriff and leggy amble that wafts in and out of the collection adds levity to the outsized structure so often dovetailed with the power of Ferragamo clothing.  It’s a whispered elegance, couth and cool – made for theaters.

“Lockdown has been dark, surreal, and mysterious, like a Hitchcock movie,” Andrew told Vogue’s Tiziana Cardini. “But strangely, like in a Hitchcock movie, the ending is always somehow beautiful. I’m trying to celebrate the beauty that is going to come out of it.” Optimism has never been so striking.