The red carpet at Ca' Sagredo starts at a water gate, so every arrival came by boat. The La Dolce Vita Awards closed out the 83rd Venice Film Festival inside a palazzo that has been watching the Grand Canal for centuries, and the evening belonged to the women who walked it.
Alisa Roever took the award. Former model, New York nutritionist, founder of Angels Helpers, the charity that buys arts education, mentorship and instruments for children whose families cannot. She started it after finding that serious music training for her own son was priced out of reach, and she has been repeating the same sentence ever since, that talent is universal and opportunity is not. In a room of luxury houses it landed harder than any of them.
Nadine Ahmad opened the presentations with one thousand bottles and nothing else. Musk Thé, the debut from her house Young Voyage, is limited to exactly that number and will not be reprinted. It stays close to the skin in a category that mostly shouts. The restraint is earned. Ahmad spent two years defending the Young Voyage name against Hermès, and won without giving up a letter.
Lidia Weber wore the night's jewellery and presented it. Director of Special Projects at Oliver Weber Collection, she carried the new Dolce Vita Collection through the frescoed salons. The Austrian house, founded in Tirol in 1994 by two former Swarovski managers, still works only in hand set Swarovski crystal. The Venice pieces take their colour from the lagoon, from Carnival, from the light on the water, so for one night the jewellery and the ceilings were quoting the same source.
