Italian model Vittoria Ceretti turned a global sports broadcast into a very modern kind of red carpet moment when she stepped into the Olympic spotlight as Italy’s flag bearer. Best known to pop culture fans as Leonardo DiCaprio’s longtime girlfriend, she suddenly became the face of the host nation, carrying the tricolore in front of a packed stadium and millions watching at home.
Her appearance at the Milan Cortina Winter Games opening ceremony did more than add a bit of celebrity sparkle. It linked Italy’s fashion capital, its Olympic ambitions, and its deep bench of supermodels into one carefully staged image, with Ceretti walking in the footsteps of another Italian icon, Carla Bruni, two decades after Bruni did the same job.
The model who became Italy’s opening image
Vittoria Ceretti has been a runway regular for years, but the Olympics offered a different kind of catwalk, one where national pride mattered as much as couture. Earlier this year, the Italian model, who has been dating Leonardo for nearly three years, was tapped to carry Italy’s flag and then hand it off during the athletes’ parade, turning her into a symbolic bridge between the fashion world and the country’s Olympic team. Images shared from the stadium showed Vittoria Ceretti front and center, framed by the Italian tricolore and the glow of the arena lights.
Her relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio inevitably followed her into the stadium, even if the job itself had nothing to do with Hollywood. The pairing of an Italian fashion star and one of cinema’s most recognizable faces meant that, before the first medal was awarded, Italy had already won a share of the celebrity conversation. The fact that Ceretti has been described as a longtime girlfriend of Leonardo gave gossip watchers a hook, but for Italian viewers, the bigger story was that a homegrown model was trusted with one of the most visible roles of the night, a sign of how closely the country’s style industry is woven into its national identity.
Walking in Carla Bruni’s footsteps at Milan Cortina
The choice of Ceretti also carried a deliberate echo of Olympic history. Two decades ago, Carla Bruni, another Italian model who crossed over into global fame, helped represent the host nation at a Winter Games ceremony. Now, at the Milan Olympics Ceremony, Ceretti was cast as the new standard-bearer, literally and figuratively, walking in Bruni’s footsteps 20 years later. Coverage of the event highlighted how the Italian model looked almost angelic as she carried the flag into the stadium, with the Milan Olympics Ceremony staging her as a kind of living link between past and present.
That continuity matters in a city that treats fashion as both business and heritage. By inviting Ceretti to follow Carla Bruni’s path, organizers signaled that the Milan Cortina Games would lean into Italy’s reputation for glamour as much as its alpine terrain. The visual of a statuesque Italian model leading the way, then passing the flag to athletes, fit neatly with the country’s self-image: stylish but serious, elegant yet rooted in tradition. For Ceretti, it was a rare moment where a model’s walk was less about selling a collection and more about embodying a nation on one of sport’s biggest stages.
A “dinky” show with a very glamorous centerpiece
Not everyone was impressed with the rest of the opening ceremony, which some critics dismissed as a string of underwhelming dance numbers. One review bluntly described the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony as “dinky,” arguing that the production leaned on safe choreography and familiar staging instead of delivering the kind of jaw-dropping spectacle viewers have come to expect. Yet even that skeptical take conceded that it is “molto bene to be Leo’s girlfriend,” noting that at Friday night’s Winter Olym event, the camera kept finding Ceretti as she glided through the stadium. The same account that called the show a letdown still admitted that everybody looked gorgeous, with Ceretti at the center of that carefully curated beauty.
That contrast, a modestly received ceremony wrapped around a highly photogenic flag moment, says a lot about how the modern Olympics works. Even when the choreography falls flat, a single image can dominate the cultural memory of the night, and in Milan, that image was Vittoria Ceretti in white, flag in hand, with the world’s cameras trained on her. The criticism that the show was “dinky” only sharpened the focus on the parts that did land, and Ceretti’s appearance became the unofficial highlight reel clip, shared across social feeds and replayed in celebrity segments. In a host city that lives on fashion week buzz, it was fitting that the most talked about part of the Winter Olym opening was not a pyrotechnic stunt, but a model turning a national flag into the ultimate accessory.
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