A museum is a fitting venue to celebrate things that last.
At the Museum of Arts and Design on Saturday, Lanvin hosted a screening of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film “Persona,” along with the film’s lead, Liv Ullmann, and her friend and past collaborator Cate Blanchett. The screening was followed by a reception at Marea.
Addressing the rows of attendees — which included Marina Abramović, Hari Nef, Jordan Roth and newly anointed Lanvin artistic director Peter Copping, among others — Blanchett acknowledged the film’s continued impact on cinema.
“So much has been said about this film. It’s been analyzed and re-analyzed,” she said, then recounting when she first met Ullmann her first year at Cannes before collaborating on a production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
“Liv has this incredible, radical openness that speaks to this profound and deep, indefatigably curious life that is lived with engagement and complexity,” Blanchett said. “You see it so often in your performances, Liv.”
The film’s continued influence is the exception and not the rule. “It’s very unusual,” Ullmann said, nodding to the nearly six decades since its release. Ullmann, who self described as being “terribly shy,” said the spotlight wasn’t on her tonight.
“It’s Lanvin we are celebrating. Ingmar [Bergman] would say, ‘What’s Liv doing now? She’s doing a fashion thing?’ But he would have thought it was fun. Fashion is also an art that I don’t know very much, but they celebrate directors, writers, and that’s part of it.”
Indeed, Siddhartha Shukla, Lanvin’s deputy chief executive officer, said the brand’s film-oriented projects are meant to celebrate oeuvres that still find relevance. Earlier this year, the brand screened “Sophie’s Choice,” and hosted an event with Charles Finch during the Cannes Film Festival.
“Film is an art form that has historically always found an incredibly important relationship with fashion,” Shukla said. “The projects are less about a general obsession with newness, and more about how great works of film have shown their timelessness.”
That ethos also extends to his plans for Lanvin in 2025, which start with Copping’s debut collection in Paris in January.
“We’re thinking very much about what it means to continue the legacy of a woman like Jeanne Lanvin,” he said. “She designed a theater, she did interiors, and she was one of the first couturiers to develop a fragrance. All the work we’re doing is an attempt to frame that for a new generation.”
