Ferrari is stepping into Rome’s ballet season through a new collaboration with the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma for 2025/26. The partnership’s first major focus is I Feel the Earth Move, Benjamin Millepied’s choreography returning to the stage in a production featuring original costumes designed by Ferrari Creative Director Rocco Iannone.
The premiere is set for Tuesday, March 17 at 8:00 pm at Teatro Costanzi, with performances scheduled through Sunday, March 22.
Fashion House Enters The Theatre Through Movement
Rather than treating the stage as a branding backdrop, the project is built around ballet’s most unforgiving requirement: everything must work in motion. Ferrari’s contribution is not a capsule collection or a styling exercise. Iannone’s costumes are conceived to operate inside the choreography, where line, tension, and breath are visible, and where materials have to respond instantly to the body.
Millepied first presented I Feel the Earth Move in 2017 at American Ballet Theatre in New York. In Rome, the piece becomes the meeting point between choreographic authorship and Ferrari’s ongoing design research, with Iannone translating the brand’s emphasis on precision and dynamism into garments engineered for performance.
Costumes Designed as An Extension of The Body
Iannone’s approach starts from a clear premise: costume should behave like a second anatomy. Across the ballet’s three-part structure, First Movement, Second Movement (Pas de Deux), and Third Movement, the wardrobe is built from technical, high-performance materials selected to support muscular work and sustain the choreography’s shifts between control and release.
The construction aims for a silhouette that reads as both sculpted and alive. Instead of relying on ornament, the garments use surface and cut to register energy: how a shoulder opens, how a torso twists, how a leg line extends and returns.
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For the female dancers, the foundation is formed by draped bodysuits in jersey, cashmere, and stretch nylon tulle with a soft, silky feel. Color moves through “purebred,” amaranth, and nude tones, chosen to register as temperature and vibration under stage light. These bases are wrapped in lycra and stretch jersey, alternating matte and glossy finishes to sharpen contrast and emphasize the choreography’s internal oppositions.
A Direct Thread to Ferrari’s FW26 Codes
The Opera House project also continues the expressive territory of Ferrari’s FW26 collection. The shared ideas are explicit: the body treated as architecture in motion, the tension between discipline and freedom, and the use of material surfaces that catch and return light.
On a runway, those codes read as attitude and silhouette. In ballet, they become functional. Discipline is visible in the held line; freedom appears in the moment the body breaks through structure without losing clarity. Fabric becomes structure, skin, and dynamic instrument, supporting the dancers while amplifying the visual rhythm of the piece.
Behind the scenes moments:
Iannone frames the collaboration as a meeting of Italian design and performance, describing his costumes as a tool to make movement visible, vibration, muscular tension, and the push-pull between softness and strength. “Collaborating with the Rome Opera House means creating a dialogue between two centers of excellence in Italian art and design. For I Feel the Earth Move, I envisioned the costumes as an extension of the body, able to reflect vibration and muscular tension in a balance of fluidity and strength. It is a meeting between Millepied’s artistic signature and Ferrari’s material and chromatic research.” Rocco Iannone, Creative Director of Ferrari.
For Eleonora Abbagnato, Director of the Ballet Company, the project updates ballet’s visual power without breaking from its discipline, adding a contemporary edge to Millepied’s signature. “This project represents a meeting that enhances rigor, passion, and aesthetics, projecting the tradition of ballet towards new expressive horizons. Seeing Millepied’s choreographic art dressed in Rocco Iannone’s creative vision adds an extraordinary modern dimension to the visual power of dance.”
General Manager Francesco Giambrone points to the collaboration as part of the Opera House’s broader commitment to experimentation, where craft and research open new space for contemporary culture. “We are particularly proud of this collaboration with Ferrari, which brings together two Italian excellences in the name of creativity, research, and craftsmanship. The encounter between the languages of fashion and dance gives rise to an original dialogue, enriching our artistic offering and strengthening the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma’s vocation as a place of experimentation, beauty, and contemporary culture.” Francesco Giambrone, General Manager of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma.
The performance features étoile Alessandra Amato, principal dancers Simone Agrò and Claudio Cocino, together with soloists Giorgia Calenda, Marta Marigliani, Giacomo Castellana, Mattia Tortora, and the Corps de Ballet of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma. I Feel the Earth Move premieres Tuesday, March 17 at 8:00 pm at Teatro Costanzi, with additional performances running through Sunday, March 22.
