Dua Lipa didn’t wear a gown to open New York Fashion Week, and that omission is the whole story. Alongside Lisa and Anne Hathaway, she stepped out for Bulgari at Little West 12th Street as the Italian house folded its Serpenti Infinito collection into the first proper night of NYFW Spring/Summer 2027, the kind of opening-gambit event that sets the tone for the fortnight ahead.
It’s the sort of story that shouldn’t move the needle in the UK the way it has this week, three celebrities, one jewellery brand, a party on the High Line. But the search interest says otherwise, and the reason is less about who turned up than about what they chose not to wear. When a pop star skips the obvious dress at a jewellery house’s biggest night, that’s a styling decision worth reading properly.
Bulgari’s Serpenti Infinito and the snake that never ends
The Serpenti Infinito collection takes its name literally: pieces that convert between necklace, bracelet and hairpiece without ever quite settling into one fixed form, a design logic Bulgari has built its own product storytelling around. It’s the ouroboros made wearable, the snake eating its own tail rendered in rose gold and stone, a shape that has quietly become one of fashion’s favourite symbols for a culture obsessed with reinvention rather than novelty.
That symbolism spilled off the jewellery cases and onto the street. To mark the collection, Berlin duo Plastique Fantastique installed auruBOROS, Urban Memory and Collective Dream on the High Line, a public artwork that turns the same infinite-loop logic into something you can walk through rather than just admire in a display cabinet. Dua Lipa arrived wearing the Serpenti Helix High Jewelry necklace and a Serpenti rose-gold bracelet, styled by Lorenzo Posocco in tailored trousers rather than the red-carpet gown the occasion technically called for, a choice W Magazine and WWD both flagged in their coverage of the night as deliberate, not casual.
That’s the actual craft story here, and it’s one the party recaps mostly skip: the trousers weren’t a downgrade from eveningwear, they were the point. Keep the silhouette architectural and graphic, stylists reason, and a transformable high-jewellery piece gets to do all the talking instead of competing with drapery, embellishment or colour.
Three women, three silhouettes, one argument about power
Put the three looks side by side and they read less like a red carpet and more like a masterclass in proportion. Anne Hathaway wore the Serpenti Falling Drops High Jewelry necklace with a full gown, letting fabric and jewellery share the frame in the most traditional register. Lisa took the middle ground in an embellished gown, jewellery and dress trading sparkle rather than one dominating. Dua Lipa went furthest, stripping the outfit down to separates so the Serpenti Helix necklace had nothing to argue with.
Three ambassadors at one activation is also, whether Bulgari frames it this way or not, a statement about how the house wants to be read. Single-ambassador campaigns, Cartier’s long-running association with the Panthère being the clearest example, build one face into shorthand for a whole collection. Bulgari’s High Line night did the opposite: three very different women, three different relationships to the same snake motif, arguing that Serpenti isn’t a face, it’s a philosophy anyone can wear their own way.
That plurality tracks with where fashion’s cultural centre of gravity has drifted this year, away from a single “it girl” model and towards ambassadors who each bring their own audience with them. Lisa arrives with K-pop’s most fashion-literate fanbase; Hathaway arrives on the back of a genuine press rehabilitation years in the making; Dua Lipa arrives as pop’s most reliably fashion-forward headliner. Bulgari didn’t pick a muse. It picked a coalition.
How to dress around one statement piece (and see auruBOROS free)
The transferable lesson from Little West 12th Street isn’t really about Bulgari at all, it’s about how much formality should be sacrificed the moment one piece of jewellery becomes the outfit’s actual subject. The higher the formality of the event, the more a gown can share the spotlight; the more architectural the piece, the harder separates have to work to stay out of its way. A gown reads as generous, an embellished dress reads as collaborative, tailored separates read as deliberately empty space around the one thing worth looking at.
For anyone in the UK heading to New York during NYFW Spring/Summer 2027, which runs from 9 to 16 September, auruBOROS, Urban Memory and Collective Dream is free and open to the public on the High Line through 20 September, no party invitation required. It’s the rare fashion-week activation that outlives its own launch night. Whether Bulgari’s snake motif still feels this inescapable by the time the High Line installation comes down is, at this point, anyone’s guess.
Photo: Patrick Cristiano, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, modified: subject cutout on an editorial collage background; montage licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
