A dress studded with LED lights to illuminate the night of the first Saturday of Carnival. For this year’s Carnival, Venetian costume designer and stylist Stefano Nicolao has designed, once again, the dress that Mary of the Year 2022 Alice Bars will wear on Saturday, February 4 during the Opening Parade “Original Dreamers” scheduled from 8 PM along the Grand Canal.
“The dress I created for the opening of Carnival 2023 was conceived as a luminous image, a shining star representing the new edition of the inaugural parade of Carnival after the pandemic”, explains Nicolao. “The desire to start again and come out of the shadows of a period that forced us to cancel or limit the carnival celebrations prompted me to create this white-silver “queen” with rhinestone embroidery, sequins, and a thousand lights. Almost 30 metres of inlaid fabrics were used and worked with more than 190 LED lights and the dress came out, as if from a spell, from the expert hands of the Atelier Nicolao staff”.
Alice Bars will thus open the way, and in this case the most beautiful waterway in the world, the Grand Canal, to begin the joyous festivities of this 2023 edition.
“Her presence on the enormous white platform full of colourful characters, acrobats, and dancers celebrating the very Mary of Carnival, will be manifested in a dress that recalls, with its transparencies and reverberations, glass, water, the white and golden marble of the Venetian palaces and the enchanting starry sky, bringing back to the performer’s body the reflections of an enchanted island: Venice”.
Atelier Nicolao, active since 1980 on the international film, theatre and opera scene, has a repertoire of over 15,000 film-theatre costumes made with fine fabrics and workmanship for important film and opera productions, completed by the relevant accessories.
“Over the years, the collection has become more and more valuable and varied, so much so that we can provide costumes for all events and types of activities, from historical re-enactments to gala events, from costume parties to elegant and ceremonial evenings, and even costumes for artists or event personnel”.
Stefano Nicolao was born in Venice on 25 March 1954. First an actor in 1972 then, since 1975, he has been the director of tailoring at the Teatro Stabile Friuli Venezia Giulia in Trieste. Furthermore, he worked as a costume designer, and in 1980 he set up the film-theatre costume tailoring company “Nicolao Atelier”, intending to commit himself to the philological study of materials while maintaining craftsmanship as a primary feature also for accessories. Stefano has been teaching Fashion Design – Historical Cut, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice since 2008.
