Romantic Fall

Italian high-fashion designers displayed their fall collections last week in Rome's magnificent Palazzo Barberini. Set in such baroque splendor, the clothes took an occasional second place to statuary but, by and large, emerged victorious--and lovely. The year's top Italian fashion news: the look, in general, is fanciful and "romantic."

Romance, in high-fashion terminology, means marabou feathers and encrusted chiffon, sumptuous embroidery and lacy swansdown, and involves moonlight only as an adjective for blue and roses only if they bloom on fabrics instead of bushes. Fur and crocheted collars are conspicuous, as are capes: Eleanora Garnett smocks them for daytime, Fontana cuts them in satin and velvet for evening, Faraoni makes sleeves of them for narrow dresses. Romantic, richly worked evening gowns slink to floor length, Gattinoni's narrow satin gowns come with heavily beaded apron fronts, and Top Designer Micol Fontana offers a blue velvet ball gown with gold embroidery spilling over the skirt. Fontana, whose colors include something called "adoration red," says of the new line: "It's a reaction against all this talk of war and bombs. In evening a woman should be allowed to wear something sweet and romantic. We need more sentimentality in life."

Italian sportswear, always ingenious, this year includes trimmings ranging from boa-like looped-wool fringe on suits (by Pierluigi Trico) and enormous pompons on after-ski capes (by Lily Liuba) to colored felt "scoubidou"-like tassels* on ski sweaters (by Lida di Trepuzzi). Centinaro, who calls her line "Penguin" (the pouch-backed shape), shows shiny black spaghetti-fringe collars and olive-green fur linings. Albertina's boutique features knit suits and coats made without cutting or seaming and guaranteed to be sagproof, and Roland--who must have seen The Wild One--spotlights a skintight, all-black leather ensemble.

Children's fashions, in which Italians are tops, turn rather romantic too. Zingone shows a boy's overcoat with a short tartan cape and a terribly clubby suit (they'd love it at Princeton) with suede torso, checked tweed cuffs and collar. Little-girl styles are more restrained, stick to lowered waistlines, gently flared skirts with deep box pleats.

Clever fashion accessories include Fontana's shoes, which can be worn on either foot with equal comfort and no lack of style, Perrone's three-tiered gloves--additional sections of which can be buttoned on as the day grows more formal. But perhaps the greatest contribution to the three-day showings was made not by any one designer or even by the luminous Barberini background but by six giant pythons who gave their lives for the snakiest raincoat in fashion history.

*The scoubidou is an obsessively popular French children's game involving the braiding of plastic strips.

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