Apricot pleated tunic with green sleeves and cross-gartered leggings. All around, some of Fortuny’s wealth of hand-blocked velvets.

Fortuny dresses have always been collected by women who are beauties and/or intellectuals: Eleanora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, The Marchesa Casati Stampa, Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Mrs Gloria Cooper Vanderbilt, Anjelica Huston, Monica Vitti, and now Julie Christie, who bought Fortuny’s pink and silver dress with pleated silk side and glass buttons at a recent auction at Christie’s. Here Julie Christie borrows Fortunys from another collector, Mrs Liselotte Hohs Manera, Austrian painter and ceramist, who is married to an Italian lawyer, and one that belong to Eleanora Duse from Vern Lambert’s collection. Castaldi took the photographs in Venice, where Mariano and Henriette Fortuny lived and worked in the Palazzo Pesaro, which is now the Fortuny Museum, and where Julie Christie has been making the film Don’t Look Now, directed by Nicholas Roeg. She’ll next be seen in Uncle Vanya, on Broadway, an extraordinary production to be directed by Mike Nichols with George C. Scott an Nicol Williamson.

Photographed by Castaldi.

Scanned from Vogue, July 1973.

Antique violet tunic and skirt pleated like a mushroom: inspired by a visit to Delphi, Mariano Fortuny and his wife, Henriette, created the fabric: Isadora Duncan was the first customer.

Eleanora Duse’s black velvet dress printed in silver with pleated silk side panels.

Fortuny’s velvet cloak over a pleated dress of terracotta by St Mark’s and the Doge’s Palace where it must hav swept many times before.