“So awful,” Mariel Hemingway quipped last night at Casa Lever, describing modeling alongside her daughter, Langley Fox Hemingway, in Ferragamo’s new Fiamma bag campaign. “She’s an awful daughter. Just kidding!” The Hemingways were just one of the families selected to model in the project — which is only appropriate, given that the bag is named in memory of Fiamma Ferragamo, the daughter of founder Salvatore, who died in 1998.
Luckily, the generational divide between the two (“Is there one?” joked Mariel) was eminently bridge-able. Said Langley, who has modeled for Marc Jacobs, “It was great. It’s like working with your mother. It’s like making dinner with your mother, except it’s a picture.” Mariel, who was in a modest sheath dress, joked about her daughter’s punky attire: “This bag goes really well with my tattoos.” Does the pair have any Mother’s Day traditions? “She always gets me a card that makes me cry. Every year.”
Designer Jacqueline Beaurang, who posed alongside her daughters, Lola and Stella Schnabel, was not a Mother’s Day proponent. “I don’t care about it,” she said. “That’s an invention for Hallmark cards. Mother’s Day, I think it’s kind of a cliché thing. The most essential thing is it’s wonderful that we have a great relationship, that we can talk to each other. Then you move from being only a mother to being a friend.”
Also featured in the campaign and its accompanying short film were Sydney and Anika Poitier; Princesses Patricia and Melusine Ruspoli; Flora Zeta Cheong-Leen and Claudine Ying; Hanayo and Tenko Nakajima; Helena Bordon and Luciana and Marcella Tranchesi. As dinner got underway, Mariel Hemingway shared that she’s embarking on a family-centric project of her own, adapting her grandfather Ernest’s classic Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, into a film. “We just finished the script,” she said. “And we’ll be in pre-production sometime this year.”