Ilaria Icardi’s jewellery line is deeply personal, inspired by trinkets collected on her travels and pieces her father made. Photo: The New York Times
In the Luca Guadagnino psychological thriller After The Hunt, its star, Julia Roberts, wears simple but elegant clothes.
The cream suits, wide-leg jeans, blazers and button-up shirts that her Yale University professor character wears show she is a woman of practicality and good taste.
Her chunky gold jewellery suggests that there may be something more to her than meets the eye.
That is where Ilaria Icardi came in. She is the Italian designer whose namesake jewellery line is worn by Roberts’ character in the film.
There is a ribbed bracelet made of 18-karat gold, a gold magnifying glass pendant on a long chain and a hefty enamel and diamond ring.
Fashion has always played a large role in Guadagnino’s work. Jonathan Anderson, the new Dior designer, did the costumes for his previous film Challengers. The director has the power to elevate and anoint a new designer.
“Luca, he’s a fantastic friend,” said Icardi, who was reached via Zoom while on vacation in Pantelleria, a volcanic Italian island beloved by the European fashion crowd and where Guadagnino filmed his 2015 film, A Bigger Splash.
“They said, ‘Your pieces are going to support the character.’ I sent them seven, maybe eight pieces, and they used almost all of them.”
The film opened the New York Film Festival recently, which coincided with Milan Fashion Week, where Icardi has her main job as design director for womenswear at Prada.
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Icardi, 53, was raised in Valenza, a town in northern Italy known for its production of fine jewellery.
Her father, Umberto, started his own line there in the late 1960s. She left for Milan to study fashion and spent the next decades living between Paris and London.
Her namesake jewellery line is worn by Julia Roberts’ character in the film (pictured in this still). Photo: Handout
She worked for Etro and developed the first women’s ready-to-wear line for Hugo Boss in the 1990s. By 2001, she was working with Tom Ford and Stefano Pilati at Yves Saint Laurent, where she remained for a decade.
In 2009, Icardi went to work as design director under Phoebe Philo at Celine, travelling between London and Paris.
“I wanted to escape and have an adventure,” she said with a shrug.
“We had a very close relationship,” she said of Philo, with whom she worked until 2013. “She’s obviously very demanding, and it was like a startup at the beginning. So it was intense.”
“When you work for a company, it’s not always necessary that you are connected with what you design,” she continued.
“But for the first time, I really loved the product that we were designing – it was minimal but not really minimal – the women we were designing for, everything we were trying to build.”
After her daughter, now 12, was born in London, she stayed there to work as design director for Victoria Beckham, whom she described: “A lovely person who gave me a lot of freedom and trust.”
Later she worked at Bottega Veneta.
Icardi associates the style of London with freedom.
“We dress for the occasion,” she said of living in Italy. “We dress! In Paris, they are very cultured, very chic, but there is more control.”
Since she is a woman whose career has been behind the scenes, her own design signatures are woven into the companies she works for.
“I always love a touch of classicism,” she said. “A double-breasted jacket, a T-shirt, denim. I like something that you throw on.”
After years in the fashion trenches, Ilaria Icardi made a foray into accessories. Photo: The New York Times“And I applied that to the jewellery line, to put something that is good taste maybe close to something bad taste,” she said. “I like the clash of the two.”
She started working on a jewellery line just before the onset of the pandemic in 2020.
“It was really homemade,” she said. “I was just going to jump into a little adventure.”
She worked with her gemologist brother, Lorenzo, on a small line that made reference to Icardi’s travels and pieces from her father’s archive.
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Her friends were fans, including Giulia Piersanti, who was the costume designer for After The Hunt.
“Julia Roberts’ character, Alma, has an effortless and almost uniform-like style.” Piersanti wrote in an email.
“There is a subtle masculine allure to her wardrobe choices – very few pieces, but each carefully chosen. I found that Ilaria’s jewellery would fit this intent while also elevating her looks.”
Icardi was wearing a handmade gold chain.
“From my papa,” she said, touching it. There is a little gold spaceman pendant she designed and a gold whistle pendant that works.
“I use it to call my daughter when she doesn’t listen to me,” she said, joking. “No, I like it as an object, and it also comes from this core of things I used to play with when I was little.”
Right now, Icardi thinks of her line as admirably small.
“I have, let’s say, 100 clients all around the world,” she said. “They can purchase something, and then they come back and ask me to maybe reset something. So there is a real connection and like a relationship. I really like that.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
