Dressing Up the Opera Stage: Sofia Coppola’s La traviata

Abstract

In 2016, Sofia Coppola directed an exemplary melodrama in the history of female representation at the opera: La traviata. Premiering at Rome’s Teatro dell’Opera and preceded by an exclusive preview for a select few, this sumptuously staged production was enhanced by haute couture gowns designed by Valentino Garavani (for Violetta) and the brand’s creative directors Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri. This version of Verdi’s opera exhibits a hallmark of Sofia Coppola’s artistic identity: hybridity and a cosmopolitan sensibility. The convergence of her sustained engagement with high fashion and her boldness in transcending cultural boundaries — manifested in artistic-productive fields unrelated or adjacent to cinema — draws upon the cosmopolitanism inherent to high fashion itself. Drawing on Angela Carroll’s (2009) notion of fashion brand communication and celebrity endorsement, one may interpret Coppola’s operatic venture as both a container and a showcase for the “Coppola brand.” Her temporary foray into opera exemplifies her strategic use of culturally plural signs. The Valentino-Coppola collaboration reconfigures the cultural space of opera in the spirit of Verdi’s Paris — the capital of the Belle Époque, of illicit comforts and pleasures —, where marginality becomes profoundly compelling and what has traditionally been deemed insignificant or unworthy — female pleasure, the ephemeral, the materialistic — is placed at the narrative center. Valentino Garavani’s garments literally “dress up” the stage — alongside sets by film production designer Nathan Crowley — thereby interrogating high fashion’s status as a site of Art, its traditional cultural and national borders, and even the distinction between everyday dress and theatrical costume. So pronounced was this fusion that the press dubbed the production “Valentino’s La traviata.” Coppola’s opera, transformed into a theater of haute couture, links the “culturally marginal” with pop contemporaneity and expands opera’s cultural space. In Coppola’s vision, Valentino’s costumes are, alongside Violetta, the true stars of the show. They traverse the material and symbolic terrain of the opera, echoing other costumes, other Violettas, and other eras — from Lila De Nobili’s designs for Visconti’s legendary 1955 La traviata to Anne Hathaway’s striking Valentino red gown on the 2011 Oscars red carpet.