"This Way In".(celebrities and fashion)

Byline: --ANDR�% LEON TALLEY

The summer dance dress is that all-important entrance-maker for gilt-edged invitation-only events, from debut cotillions to presentations at court. Samantha Boardman Rosen picked out her new Giambattista Valli madder-rose ball dress with a bodice scattered with plastic rose petals to wear to the Costume Institute's annual red-carpet gala last month (this year's theme: "Superheroes") after yours truly had called it in from Paris. Valli, who dresses Queen Rania of Jordan and Victoria Beckham, now has a new devoted fan in Rosen, who wanted to know where she could find more of his clothes. All she has to do is look at the brilliant lineup of red dresses he created for fall/winter, cut in the grand tradition of French high-style eveningwear, but with a twist of modernity. Those plastic petals on the bustier gave his bombast-skirt silhouette a youthful zest and wit without being a fashion joke.

The designer, who wears a single strand of beautiful Tahitian pearls, rang me from his holiday villa in Marrakech. When I asked if he could also send Rosen a pair of shoes the exact shade of the dress, we got to talking about the ultra-vivid colors in his collection. "It started with 'Little Red Riding Hood,' " said Valli, on holiday with his best friend and muse, Astrid Munoz. "The idea of the passionate red of the fairy tale had to be pushed. I was also inspired by one of my favorite films, Ingmar Bergman' s Cries and Whispers. That exotic Swedish landscape and the passion evoked in the climactic emotional breakdown of the sisters . . . my show started out with a pale palette and ended with the lush lipstick colors of the big dresses."

To make the process totally his own, on a business trip in Chicago last winter, Valli photographed an arrangement of carnations and had the pictures blown up into silk screens to print on silk for his collection. One of Emanuel Ungaro' s top atelier assistants, Valli had a bumpy start when he became creative director for that house, but he has always intrigued me with his unexpected originality and sophistication, not to mention dresses as beautiful inside as they are outside. Samantha's choice of her intensely hued dress recalled the great entrances of Bianca Jagger, who wore Zandra Rhodes' s extraordinary--and huge--dress of weightless, hand-painted tulle to Loulou de La Falaise Klossowski' s summer 1977 wedding in the Bois de Boulogne, which I attended with Karl Lagerfeld. "A touch of outrageousness is considered to be a moral obligation," as Kennedy Fraser so aptly wrote of Bianca in her definitive book The Fashionable Mind.

Modern English

Another great style icon, Amanda Harlech, who travels the globe beside her boss, Karl, for Chanel, would put on a red Dior riding coat and a voluminous riding skirt designed by the late Gianfranco Ferre to exercise her horses when she lived at the Mount in Wales. What drama! On Good Friday this year, Amanda and Karl were shopping in Tom Ford' s emporium, where Karl purchased a set of silk pajamas she found as a gift. It ...