Every Piece From the ’70s Fantasy That Is the Marisa Berenson x Zara Collection

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I will never forget the first time I saw Marisa Berenson. It was the early ’90s and I was visiting my great aunt in Massachusetts. Her stately Victorian home had a TV in the parlor, but no cable — she preferred the radio. The TV was there solely for the purpose of watching movie musicals, which my aunt loved. She had 10 of them — on Betamax — including Cabaret starring Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Joel Grey, and, of course, Miss. Marisa Berenson.

Marisa Berenson (Marisa Berenson x Zara)

My aunt forbade me from watching Cabaret because she said it was too grown up for a first grader, but this, of course, only made me want to watch it more. So one morning, while she and my mother were out picking blueberries and my father was hiking in the woods, I crept into the living room and slipped it into the VCR. I was mesmerized from the first moment and I remember thinking that Marisa Berenson was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

My father came home from his walk about halfway through the film and if he knew my aunt didn’t want me watching it, he didn’t let on. He just sat behind me with a coffee and watched right along.

When my mother and aunt got home, he was the one they yelled at, not me. My aunt turned off the TV, but my mother said the damage had already been done so they might as well let me finish it. Which I did.

I then watched it again. And again. And again.

I didn’t encounter Berenson again until my 20s when I saw Barry Lyndon for the first time after a stylist I was working for said it was his favorite movie. In it, Berenson plays the naive and love-blind Lady Honoria Lyndon and the scene where she asks her new husband (played by Ryan O’Neal) to stop smoking still gives me chills. And the clothes! Stunning doesn’t even begin to describe them.

Of course, Berenson was just as stunning off-screen as well. Maybe even more-so. The granddaughter of Elsa Schiaparelli, Berenson began modeling at the behest of the legendary Diana Vreeland — appearing nude in Vogue in 1969, much to the upset of her terminally chic grandmother who, despite a life of eccentricity, self-expression, and grandeur, wanted her beautiful young granddaughter to find “a boy from a very good family,” and settle down.

Berenson had other plans, though. She became a movie star and the face of ’70s glamour and that’s exactly what she’s brought to her first ever lifestyle collaboration with Zara. The collaboration features a huge assortment of clothes and home wares worthy of an Italian Villa or a night at Studio 54. It’s honestly so fabulous and fun that if you don’t buy at least something I can almost guarantee you will regret it.