Monica Bellucci stepped onto the red carpet at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and felt the earth’s plates shift beneath her feet. She tipped her chin towards the sun and basked in its rays as the skies split in two, raising her hands into a crown formation as if to call on decades of deities past. At that moment, she was Elizabeth Taylor and Brigitte Bardot , Grace Kelly and Sophia Loren .
A goddess offering herself to the cameras and absorbing each flash into her own siren force. If that sounds at all hyperbolic, I would recommend looking at this photograph of Bellucci for more than a nano-second and considering the cosmic events that might have taken place to produce such a potent fashion image. It was not, but could have been, a Dolce & Gabbana advert – Bellucci was a model for the house before she pivoted to cinema – its architecture hanging on an abundance of Mediterranean more-ness.
Glittering jewels, full lips, a lace-scalloped bra revealing itself beneath a curve-skimming dress. Tits, tan and Tinseltown. That there is for some reason a topless woman lounging on a sundeck in a series of wider frames only adds to the mystique of this portrait and the inimitable hauteur that Bellucci embodies within it.
In other shots, two assistants can be seen draping a Cartier necklace around the actor’s clavicles. This was, after all, the same year that Cartier made Bellucci the first actress to be formally associated with the house. The body language says as much: “I am you.