Movie stars have been making a habit of it. After Catherine Deneuve raised around 900,000 Euros with Christie’s last January, Claudia Cardinale is now joining the ranks of icons opting to auction the most popular pieces of their wardrobe.
One hundred and thirty items including day and night dresses, suits and coats, some of which worn on set by the Italian actress, will be sold at Sotheby’s online auction “Claudia Cardinale – L’étoffe d’une diva” running from June 28 to July 9. For a brief two days from July 2 to 5, they will also be publicly showcased at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris.
Star of undisputable chiefworks such as Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, Federico Fellini’s 8½or Blake Ewards’s The Pink Panther, Cardinale moved her first steps in the fashion world right through these successful movies, where she wore marvelous costumes in countless glamour moments. She looked royal in a romantic white dress by Piero Tosi when dancing with Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon in Visconti’s piece, and oozed elegance in Fellini’s black & white movie with looks by Piero Gherardi, winner of an Oscar for Best Costume Design.
However, it was a rising Yves Saint Laurent to turn her into a timeless diva in Edwards’s work, dressing her in chic and sophisticated outfits tailored on her character, Princess Dala.
The auctioned items feature a long dress with black sequins and a flowery neckline that by Nina Ricci that the actress wore at the 1965 Oscars at Steve McQueen’s side, valued 6,000 to 8,000 Euros. The same designer also created Cardinale’s cocktail dress with black petals for the final scene of Antonio Pietrangeli’s The Magnificent Cuckold(1964), whose value reaches 3,500 Euros.
The list also includes a pajama suit in ivory shantung embroidered with beads by Irene Galitzine’s that the actress wore in The Pink Panther, assessed at 3,500 to 5,000 Euros, alongside a swimsuit by Cole of California from Mark Robson’s movie Lost Commandwith Alain Delon, and a long dress in fuchsia organza with floral embroidered patterns from Cardinale’s first Cannes Film Festival in 1961.
The auction also features works by Emilio Schuberth, Roberto Capucci, Rocco Barocco and Renato Balestra to
celebrate Italian fashion from the late 1950s through to the early 1980s, a period when Paris no longer had the monopoly on couturiers and their Italian counterparts were coming to the fore
as Sotheby’s experts pointed out.
