Sylvia in the Fountain: Re-Creating The Look
While Marilyn’s subway dress costume is available in adult and children’s sizes starting at 24.98 (wig not included), masquerading as Sylvia in La Dolce Vita is a taller order—less about fashion and more about action, more about mood and spectacle. A look, a mode of being.
A copy-cat pose struck and captured by real, imagined, or just-playing paparrazi.
A gold-lamé bright-sunlight wade into a fountain, waving at anyone who will wave back until the police fish you out and give you a fine.
A luxury brand and a supermodel in an ad campaign.
Many a tourist and Roman alike have replicated the scene, including Delilah Jay, a then-64-year-old former British model, as shown in the above 2016 video. “The police were very kind, they helped me out of the fountain,” Jay told the Italian media. “I explained that I did what I did because I love Italy, I love Fellini and I want to live la dolce vita.”
Just weeks after three girls in bikinis did the same thing, minus the fur stole and kisses.
In June 2017, the Mayor issued a decree banning bathing and swimming in any of Rome’s forty Baroque fountains, also announcing a trial plan whereby tourists could not even stop at the fountain, but only pass by along a one-way route with guards on duty from 9 am until midnight. “Rome is, and always will be, welcoming,” said former mayor Virginia Raggi, “but that does not mean tolerating bad behavior and damage being done to our city.”
This served to make the scene, and Sylvia, even more legendary. With her celebration of sexual freedom and sensual pleasure, she was also celebrating a freedom to be in a public space that was threatened to be taken away.
Of course, it is much easier if you are Valentino, and you wish to recreate the scene with Claudia Schiffer for your 1995 Spring/Summer Campaign. Over the three days of shooting, shared Valentino’s publicist, “Rome got crazy during this campaign. We had a lot of people following us all around, paparazzi non-stop, newspapers and TV crews asking for credentials to follow the shooting.” Arthur Elgort photographed Schiffer in multiple re-imaginings of classic Syliva moments, including the shot with the white baby kitten, as seen at top.
Produced by The Bank advertising agency for Peroni Nastro Azzurro, this 2006 short film celebrates Italian cinema in loving recreations of iconic scenes from La Dolce Vita, including the opening helicopter sequence, Sylvia arriving at the airport and, of course, the dip in the fountain.
The references may very well have been lost on its audience, as evidenced by the comments on this YouTube video, including: "I remember the advert but cannot remember the film. Quite possibly the best advert I have ever seen."
And, “All of that was a beer commercial?!”
While this and other re-enactments featured here evoke a sense of playfulness—in addition to being stylistically sophisticated—they feel sweet, they feel tame. They are not Sylvia. They are not Anita. As Fellini has described Ekberg: “I had never seen anyone like her. The luminous colour of her skin, her clear ice-blue eyes, golden hair, exuberance, joie de vivre, made her into a grandiose creature, extra-terrestrial and at the same time moving and irresistible.”
The recreated fountain scenes feel more like social media pranks than something both over-the-top and real, featuring a virgin/whore/superwoman enjoying her sexuality, her corporeality, at a time when women were not as empowered as we are now. I don’t know if that’s how you tell something is the real deal—something so badly you wish you could be, live, wear, do. But never quite can.