Burberry collaborated with Marina Abramović for her latest project

Rumours have been circulating for almost a year about Marina Abramovich's new art project, The Seven Deaths of Maria Callas, whose costumes will be created in collaboration with Burberry and its creative director, Riccardo Tisci. The collaboration between the two was already known from February 2019 and, during the year Tisci himself had shown four of the costumes worn by Abramovich, ahead of the world premiere of the project to be held tomorrow 1 September. 

In The Seven Deaths of Maria Callas, Abramovich will play the "death" of iconic Maria Callas characters through seven short films that will also co-star the actor Willem Dafoe. According to the photos of the dresses published by Tisci you can try to hypothesize which of the most famous works of Callas will be mentioned: the golden dress looks like a reference to Turandot, the black one may be Tosca, the Spanish bolero is Bizet's Carmen while the wedding dress Madama Butterfly. Symbolically, the work of video-art will also constitute a meditation on the death of the soprano through the characters she plays and the survival of her legend. Callas herself, after the death of her partner Aristotle Onassis in 1975, became a recluse in her apartment where she died of cardiac arrest at the age of 53.  The music of the project will be composed by Serbian Marko Nikodievich. 

This ambitious project is perhaps one of the most important steps in that path taken by Tisci with Burberry and aimed at giving the brand a more marked direction towards pure luxury fashion. This type of effort, also due to the lockdown, proved difficult for the brand, whose sales plummeted by 48% during the first quarter of 2020. Impediments to which the brand has proved quite responsive, with the launch of summer collections such as TB Summer Monogram, collaborating on the visual album of Beyoncé Black is King and launching new products such as the recent Pocket Bag.

The Seven Deaths of Maria Callas will debut tomorrow at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich and will be visible online at STAATSOPER. TV starting September 5.