Valentino (Q1777)
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Italian clothing company founded in 1960 by Valentino Garavani
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Valentino |
Italian clothing company founded in 1960 by Valentino Garavani |
Statements
1 January 1960
2024
creative director
collaborator
client
Reviewing one of Alessandro Michele’s collections on mannequins at a showroom appointment can feel somewhat underwhelming—the experience lacks not only the prismatic whimsy of his shows, but also his acrobatic talent as a raconteur. There’s a silver lining though: You get the chance to closely examine (and marvel at) the savoir faire behind each of the 62 women’s looks and 28 men’s. Their dense craftsmanship actually makes for a narration in itself.As always with Michele, each look seemed to have its own voice, unfolding through cascades of appliqués, embroideries, passementeries, bows, ruches, and lace trimmings on meticulously made and millefeuille-styled confections, all of which radiate the palpable delight he takes in the Valentino archives. It’s kind of striking how his work at Gucci subtly hinted at Garavani’s influence, though there he lacked the resources to achieve the level of refinement possible within a couture house. Now he’s clearly reveling in this chance. Even though this was ready-to-wear, the execution was exceptional—apparently every lavish embroidery was handcrafted by artisans using embroidery hoops.The co-ed collection showcased a few recurring themes. Daywear drew inspiration from the 1960s, evident in the trapeze silhouettes of short shift dresses; neat skirt suits with elongated shirt-jackets in a black-and-white optical print namedOpti-cool, a sort of hallucinogenic houndstooth; and prim silk shirtdresses featuring a cherry motif dubbedCherry-fic. A leopard-printed trench coat channeled abeau mondeflair evocative of Valentino’s jet set chic, yet it was offset by Michele’s quintessential quirk, layered over an ensemble printed with tiny pugs, a motif calledPetit Charlesas a tribute to the house founder’s beloved canine companions.In the 1970s, Valentino’s take on boho leaned more blasé than insouciant. Michele revisited its sense of romance, infusing it with some of his own tendencies. A standout series of paisley-printed dresses featured theVoyage Imaginairemotif, making the case for a masterclass in juxtaposition: short, loose caftans with bibs were intricately embroidered with crystals, and tiny glass pearls and mirrors were variously layered over long ruched skirts cinched with belts emblazoned with butterflies or bows. On a similar note, chiffon wrap skirts were paired with boxy matelassé jackets trimmed in passamenterie.
For evening, tulle gowns were ethereal and exquisite, embroidered with cloud-like lightness and finesse — if Apple Martin, who recently made a sensation in a custom Valentino gown at Le Bal des Débutantes in Paris, had the chance to turn back the clock and debut again, she would have no shortage of enchanting options.L’homme Valentino was offered an equally sumptuous wardrobe, rooted in sartorial tailoring with imaginative incursions into decorative funk. Tapestry-jacquard capes trimmed with tassels, romantic 19th-century hussar officer jackets with finely embroidered cuffs reminiscent of a Tolstoy novel, and red velvet four-pockets field jackets with ruched collars were styled with denim bermuda shorts or straightforward, classic trousers. For a pretty clear sense of the collection’s wealth of ornamentations, browse through the close-ups in the accessories feed. They highlight how Michele’s time at Valentino is only heightening his love of lush embellishments—he remains true to his own style no matter where he lands. Isn’t that the essence of true authorship after all?
12 December 2024
Well, that was sensational! After a two-year gap, Alessandro Michele was back on the runway today in Paris, the new man at Valentino. In his absence, fashion has fallen into a quiet luxury funk that we’ve all gotten so used to we didn’t realize quite how good his maximal, more-is-better vibes could make us feel. The mood was ecstatic as people left the show. This crowd is prone to hyperbole, but an overheard remark, “the king is back,” had a ring of truth to it.A consummate showman, Michele set out to do Valentino his way. After years of the brand showing at the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild in the 8th arrondissement, we were out on the Périphérique, where the Dojo de Paris presides over the side of the highway. It was an eyebrow-raising location for Valentino, a maison whose bon vivant founder is as famous for his grand homes (and yacht) as he is for ruffles and the color red.Michele had transformed the arena’s cavernous basement with love seats, chairs, and ottomans (along with some armoires and giant birdcages) shrouded in dust covers atop cracked-mirror flooring. We were perhaps in one of those stately houses, excavating its hidden treasures or raising ghosts—Michele loves a metaphor, both visual and literal. Ambient music echoed through the space as it filled with the designer’s friends including Elton John, Harry Styles, Florence Welch, Colman Domingo, and Maneskin’s Damiano David.Into this atmosphere, Michele sent out 85 looks—modest by the standards of thesurprise resort collectionhe dropped online in June—as eccentric and extraordinary as anything he did for Gucci, but with a lightness, femininity, and exquisiteness of detail that can only be Valentino. In a meeting before the show, Michele said he was in the house’s archives before the end of his first day at the company. “It’s so alive; it’s a place with a lot of history,” he observed. “You can really find inside everything: the ’80s, ’70s, ’60s. For a guy like me who adores analyzing all this stuff, it’s a privilege.”He said he started by looking at pieces that impressed him aesthetically—“the very beautiful and light ruffles, the doll look that came from the ’60s and ’70s, and an ’80s power suit with a kind of sensuality that’s [actually] very démodé now.” If anybody can make the démodé modern, Michele can; after all, he did it once before, reshaping fashion and turning around Gucci’s fortunes with his inclusive gender-fluid vision for the brand.
29 September 2024
Alessandro Michele is bringing his prolific, almost prodigious creativity to Valentino. Just two months after being appointed creative director, today he’s releasing his first resort collection for the Roman maison, called Avant les Débuts. The 171 ready-to-wear looks, plus 93 images of (rather delightful) shoes, bags, and various accessories, were revealed through an impromptu zoom call with a select group of editors. Speaking from his apartment, surrounded by a display of personal mementos, a relaxed and talkative Michele explained how he fell under the spell of “Valentino’s magical, potent place,” and how a deep dive into the “marvelous treasures of its archive” has been the starting point of his journey. “I’ve been seduced by that place,” he said.” I’m in love with it.”Michele’s first thought was to put resort directly in stores with no fanfare at all. But in the last few days he changed plans. “I started working at Valentino as if we were an orchestra; everyone was playing his instrument with so much love and dedication that I thought it’d be right to be thankful and grateful to the people who have worked so tirelessly to make it happen. My job is to tune the instruments, and it’s all about sharing, so to keep the collection somehow hidden from view wouldn’t have felt right. This is a beginning born out of love—it wants to be brought to light and be seen and shared.”When Michele started at Gucci, he had just a couple of weeks to put together the pivotal men’s collection that changed the fashion discourse around gender. Although this collection doesn’t have the same disruptive character, he wasn’t given too much time here either: “Probably I’ll be remembered as the one who has the distinction of doing things quickly,” he joked. His intention was to bring about “a real wardrobe,” made with precision and complexity, connected with a certain elegance that belongs to the image of Valentino Garavani. “I’m deep in conversation with the clothes he created, and with his life, and I’ve often had the impression of having him seated next to me,” he said.There’s much of Alessandro Michele himself in the vast collection. “What you see is me meeting him, and it is my hands and my eyes that inhabit the atelier now,” he said. Michele has found a certain affinity with Garavani’s penchant for an almost obsessively soigné look, put together to the nines, meticulously ornate.
He said they share a gusto for the complexity of composition, an attitude he explored at Gucci, that here he elevated through refinement and composure. Though the collection wasn’t available to be seen in person, it seems apparent that Michele’s flair for the extravagant gesture was contained within a perimeter of sophistication and luxe, without losing its charming quirk. “Valentino was never a minimalist, rather a maximalist, even in the ’70s when he was at his most streamlined,” he pointed out. “There was always a very Roman sense of opulence and excess to his work, distilled through an obsession for beauty.”
17 June 2024
The Valentino fall women’s ready to wear ought to be viewed on a continuum with what Pierpaolo Piccioli was saying about dismantling toxic masculinity in his menswear collection, by softening tailored suits with traditional couture techniques. For women, his push for gender parity integrated tailoring into Valentino’s classically delicate world in a collection entirely in black “in order to resignify all of the codes” from Valentino in the 1980s, “the ruffles, the bows, all the elements of femininity of Valentino, giving them a new power.”This conversation, held in a preview in Paris, went into the specifics, well exemplified by a short tailored long-sleeved dress with 3-d roses sculpting the cuffs. “It’s clean and powerful, but not minimal like the 1990s. We must embrace new times,” he said. “Our job today is to embrace an equality of all the elements.” A famous 1977 photoshoot by Deborah Turbeville of a group of models in romantic Valentino haute couture lace ballgowns was pinned to his inspiration board. The image, captured in Rome, is a lodestar of the brand’s identity, but Piccioli was adamant that his collection be anti-nostalgic. He sees that tendency particularly acutely as an Italian, living in a country with a far-Right premier elected on the wave of backward-looking populist sentiment, in which the pushback against women’s rights is featuring heavily.Culturally, he says, “it’s bad not even to realize you are going back, because that means nothing is happening. You see it not just in fashion, but in songs, music, everything, and I think this is very bad. It’s stupid for designers to say their work is not political. When you manage a brand like Valentino, I feel all the elements can become different for today: I think you can show the possibility to be powerful and feminine. It’s time to melt it together.”His black on black manifesto for progress was explored in 63 ways, starting with a new Valentino day-suit tailored as a tunic-jacket and shorts, through sober-seeming matte black dress silhouettes, tough-chic utilitarian jackets, right up to dealing with naked dressing in romantic Valentino lace evening looks. One drawback to designing entirely in black is that the detail of cut and fabric doesn’t necessarily show up well in runway photos. In real life, however, the subtleties are breathtaking, a gorgeous smorgasbord of choices created from the Valentino vocabulary.
Things which have the initial impact of an impeccably austere silhouette will prove to plunge to an exposed back. There’s businesslike Valentino—an amazing man-tailored overcoat; a jumpsuit in the form of trompe l’oeil pleated pants and a molded padded-shoulder t-shirt. As in all the work that comes from the house of Valentino, the skills have to be seen to be believed—a vaporous tulle skirt, casually paired with a blouson, the delicacy of vertically-ruffled organza blouses, the classy swing of the volume in a fit-and- extreme-flare dress, in which the gores are inset in an amazing scallop pattern in a drop waist.In his spring 2023 summer collection—which began in pristine white—Pierpaolo Piccioli expressed his creative outrage against prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s retrograde remark on women needing to dress conservatively in order to avoid rape. His collection in black followed through, expanding on multiple options for women to show their bodies however they will, from hip-slashed skirts to a full engagement, if desired, in full-frontal red carpet exposure in transparent Valentino lace.
4 March 2024
Each season before the Valentino couture show, Pierpaolo Piccioli hosts a preview that is actually a mini défilé; he talks through the collection’s standouts, taking pride in the artistry of his Roman atelier. Seeing up close the sublime details that give every piece a hint of the preternatural is a privilege; at these levels of execution, couture is fashion’s most noble expression. Not all of this week’s collections are created equal—Valentino’s is certainly haute.Piccioli is syncing up couture to the times, while keeping its ritualistic mystique intact. Today’s collection was steeped in the modern lexicon of fashion, but staged in the gilded salons in Place Vendôme, the Maison’s Paris address since 1998, it replicated the intimate atmosphere of défilés past. While proximity amplified the emotional temperature and the sensorial delight of getting close to each passage, “you don’t have to feel the weight of the technique and of the handmade, because ultimately couture is about the illusion of effortlessness,” Piccioli said. “The technique must disappear so as not to lose the magic—a magician remains a magician only until he reveals his secrets.”The collection didn’t have preposterous narratives or abstruse subtexts, instead it read as an extensive experimentation (Piccioli called it “an instinctive expression of the urge for creation”) on shapes, volumes, silhouettes, and cuts. Revised wardrobe fundamentals such as blazers, masculine coats, hoodies, and parkas were translated into “couture objects” via idiosyncratic, almost paradoxical pairings with traditional couture templates, that Piccioli called “traces of couture past.”A bouillonée minidress in emerald green silk faille was worn under a structured, oversized blazer in mustard techno gabardine, while a poufy ballgown in turquoise taffeta was paired with a boxy hoodie in khaki green gabardine, trimmed with stand-up feathers. Elsewhere, the allure of an impeccably easy mohair coat in a soft shade of rust stood in contrast to the haute pink of a slender bustier dress made of almost impalpable silk chiffon, cut in such a way that it could be wrapped around the body in a single sensuous gesture.Piccioli believes that couture is the ultimate privileged space of authorship for a designer, a place where the obsessive quest for perfection and drive for experimentation can be given free rein. Yet being a Roman sensorialist, his approach is far from the sharp, hard edges of modernism or conceptualism.
Rather it’s infused with the humanity and charm that permeates the ambience of his atelier; his virtuoso talent for chromatic assonances channels a sort of vibrational energy that seems to elicit a response that isn’t just visual, but rather emotional. Ultimately, Piccioli’s fine sentiment for couture appeals to the senses—there’s no narrative more powerful than that.
24 January 2024
In designing a collection for men, Pierpaolo Piccioli believes he has a role to play in dismantling toxic masculinity. “There has to be a reflection on the idea of masculinity. In the last year, in Italy, there has been a lot of violence against women,” he said in a preview. “I think it’s time now to join the fight with women, for real respect and equality. I think it’s time to rethink even the symbols of masculinity—because if you don't do that right from inside, men will never change.”Where his last few Valentino menswear collections were aimed at a younger, more casual audience, this one stepped up to reimagine the suit: the heart of the matter; the uniform of patriarchal and corporal norms. “I want to give men a new grace and gentleness,” he said.His solution came from applying the secret haute couture weapon that’s at the heart of the house of Valentino. “Made-to-measure tailoring is a sort of men-only club. It’s far away from women’s couture. I wanted to meld the two together,” he said.So, although his collection, chiefly of suits, jackets and coats, appeared to be fit the regular block, the techniques and fabrics—such as chiffon linings and rounded shapes—came from haute couture practices. “The suits are really soft as cardigans,” Piccioli observed. “It’s a long way from the classic president’s double-breasted power suit.”He broke down the idea even further by showing turtlenecks under shirts and ties, adding double lapels on jackets and coats. The three-piece suit was dissected in a trompe l’oeil manner, so that the waistcoat became a kind of vestigial scarf. The ‘roundedness’ associated with women’s haute couture volumes was applied to the structure of a black single-pocket T-shirt, so the casual assumed a kind of formality (Piccioli said he had his own eye on wearing this one.)More work went into smartening unstructured pajama suits, upgrading choreography jackets and shifting the grammar of cargo pants by moving their pockets to the front of the trouser. From a distance, Piccioli’s collection, dark-hued and long-coated, fit very much into the look of menswear this season. The substance and the feeling was subtly different though, geared, as Piccioli put it, to see “men as human.”
20 January 2024
Pierpaolo Piccioli went in a sharply edited haute direction for pre-fall. His approach to wardrobing “is filtered through a very Valentino eye,” he said at a showroom appointment. This translated into a tight, curated selection of handsome everyday pieces, eachbravura-crafted with grace and realism, embellished exquisitely with what he called “indulgent embroideries.”After a spring show where the ready-to-wear had the stellar craft quality of a couture collection, pre-fall was kept at similarly luxurious levels, just toned down a notch to make it not so much a radical statement, but a more covetable and credible repertoire. “Making the ordinary become extraordinary,” was how Piccioli framed his MO. To that end, a few couture techniques seen in the spring show were reprised and adapted, the most striking being the high-relief cut-out intarsia the maison’s atelier came up with, that here graced the back of a sharp-cut, fitted gray wool coat. The decoration wasn’t just a visual magnet, rather “a sort of built-in structure that defines the garment,” pointed out Piccioli.The Valentino signifiers—bows, roses, feathers, lace, scalloped hems—were given a counterintuitive treatment that skimmed the unconventional without straying from the label’s fundamentals. Sharp, masculine tailoring in dry wools and tweeds, mainly in classic shades of slate gray, made the case for flawless, atelier-level cutting techniques, yet bent to the feminine through flattering hourglass shapes and smatterings of lavish crystal embellishments on lapels and cuffs. On the same ordinary/extraordinary note, a pair of XL “tourist bermudas” were studded with a cascade of sequins, and worn with a crisp poplin shirt; a trench coat was printed with a chichilla trompe l’oeil motif, or with the bold archival civet cat pattern, and a belted citycoat was punctuated by quivering feathers, while appliqué rosettes whirled on a straight-cut ‘60s duster in rich black leather.The overall luxurious feel of the collection was apparent, which sits well with Valentino’s raison d’être. Yet Piccioli’s idea of luxury is rather more subtle. While acknowledging that Valentino is about a certain effusive, indulgent flair for the extravagant, “it has always been about grace and a gentle way of respecting the feminine, never loud,” he said. He believes that today the value of luxury is connected to “the humanity that goes into making a superlative piece.
It’s about beautiful hands capable of creating something exquisite, even out of the humblest material.” Valentino’s expressive ethos doesn’t really sync up with some quiet luxury notion. “Quiet luxury has something of the conservative,” reasoned Piccioli. “As a designer, you have the duty to give people ways of representing themselves free of clichés. Fashion conveys a strong message, and if you have a voice, it’s your responsibility to use it to bring about change.”
11 December 2023
Following Valentino’s highly talked-about couture show in July, especially Kaia Gerber’s opening look of a simple white shirt unbuttoned down tothereand deceptively simple jeans that were in fact made from all-over sequin embroidered silk, the look is now trending. For resort, Pierpaolo Piccioli has expanded on the look. The new offering includes more accessible, yet no less glamorous, jeans with sequin embellishments at the hem.Elsewhere, Piccioli follows the Valentino formula that’s worked well for past collections. Button-ups are layered under light knits, while midi skirts come in bold embroidered prints. The iconic Pink PP shade makes its way onto feather-trimmed sheer button-ups. At the same time, the tomboy-ish mini shorts and ties from thespring 2024 menswearcollection are revamped and styled with thigh-high boots and a feather-trimmed cape that accentuates movement.Valentino sits at number eight on Lyst’s top hottest brands for the third quarter. This collection’s simple hoodies featuring a metallic “V” logo brooch at the heart and suede gum-soled sneakers are proof that Piccioli’s appeal for a “versatile wardrobe” that emphasizes “urban elegance” continues to be a winning vision.
17 October 2023
Pierpaolo Piccioli showed a dazzling, pristine collection of Valentino ideas for summer at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. FKA Twigs and her dancers were performing athletically in the center, and the models walked—not uncoincidentally—against a backdrop that included classical nude sculptures of women.“We have to keep women’s freedom to express themselves, to express their bodies in a very free way,” Piccioli said in a preview. He is appalled by the political pushback on women’s rights he sees happening under Giorgia Meloni’s conservative-right administration in Italy. “The worst thing is the government has said to girls is ‘be careful what you wear.’ I think that feminism is the freedom of women to be who they are. Even to expose the body, and say no.”His collection was faithful to his word—in fact full of a generous variety for different styles, sensibilities, moods, and cultures. There were great-looking trouser suits and jackets paired with matching long tailored skirts; flowing silk T-shirt dresses with a twist at the hip, over-shirts, shorts, jeans. But the riveting headline idea he showed was a quite ravishing innovation: dresses made from a cut-out embroidery technique that created a kind of caged effect, made up of linked flower, bird, vine leaves, or pineapples.“I wanted to use embroidery not as decoration, but as structure that becomes a fabric in itself,” Piccioli said. “I think this is the most exposed collection I’ve done; it shows skin, but in a different way.” The idea was based on low-relief architectural moldings familiar in Italian renaissance interiors, with a special nod to the Sala Bianca, the storied palatial Florentine venue where Valentino first shot to fame with his all-white collection in 1968.Piccioli wasn’t doing it for the sake of nostalgia, or trying to revive an archival Valentino idea. Nevertheless, the pure craft of it was fully in the spirit of the house. “Prettiness and elegance is what Mr. Valentino’s work is associated with. I think you can keep that, but also work on things which expose the body in a different, modern way that isn’t about being sexy for someone else.”
2 October 2023
Simplicity’ and ‘Paradoxes’ were the two conceptual drivers framing Pierpaolo Piccioli’s haute couture collection, held on the grand grounds of the Château de Chantilly. “Simplicity is complexity resolved,” he said at the press conference, quoting artist Constantin Brancusi, whose sculptures are the modernist epitome of absolute purity. Piccioli called the show “Un Château.” “It’s somehow paradoxical to show in an historical site that I believe is a metaphor for status and power, a symbolism that has to be questioned and re-contextualized,” he said.Staging the couture défiléen plein air,out of the Château’s regal interiors, was Piccioli’s way of visually performing the metaphor of freeing the constrictions of a walled, elitist life, opening up the seclusion of privilege—Liberté,Egalité, Fraternité. Models walked around one of the castle’s vastparterres à la Francaise; the catwalk sneaked around a circularbassin d’eau,leaving in the background the elegant silhouette of the 17th century manor. A perfect sunset; a light breeze; the lyric, transporting voice of Anohni on the soundtrack—it seemed that the stars were aligned to infuse the spirit of the place with some magic.One of the paradoxes of couture is that it’s a craft wrongly synonymous with redundant complexity. Piccioli, whose hyper-skilled atelier can bring to life even the most maddeningly elaborate artifacts, believes on the contrary that the essence of couture is profoundly simple. He made the case for this by showing a collection devoid of pyrotechnics, superfluous gimmicks and crowd-pleasing distractions. It was simplicity at its most masterful, a celebration of imaginative, extravagant clarity. “It’s all about concealing the effort that achieving simplicity requires,” he said.Draping, one of the most challenging haute couture constructions, infused the gesture-defining vertical, pure, essential silhouettes with vitality, modernity, and with the impact of the sophisticatedcapriceso inherent to Valentino’s aesthetic. Column dresses and tunics were treated to deceptively simple bias-cutting and soft-draping techniques, making them lean sensuously on the body; hooded capes became “mantles of modern Madonnas,” bodices with skin-baring cut-outs extended into twisted knots framing the face. What Piccioli wanted to achieve, he explained, was an effect of almost no gravity.
A handsome white dress in featherlight, velvety cashmere (he called it “just a rectangular T-shirt”) with an asymmetrical trailing hem at the back was made on the bias with just one cut. A white tunic in heavenly soft velvet was draped in a way as “to freeze the spontaneous motion of the dress in a sort of still image.”Inventive paradoxes abounded throughout the collection, one of the most striking being the opening look on Kaia Gerber. A pair of slouchy jeans reprised from classic vintage Levi’s were actually made of silk gazar, entirely embroidered with tiny pearlescent beads dyed in 80 hues of indigo to reproduce an actual denim texture. Worn with an immaculate oversized masculine white shirt, gold flat slippers and dangling rhinestone chandelier earrings, they were a handsome example of what Piccioli called “a simply paradoxical trompe-l’oeil.” The same approach was echoed in a billowy trapeze-shaped gown, whose circular feathered ruffles were made from 500 feet of white organza. To make the feathers even more featherlight and preternaturally weightless, they were burned one by one to achieve the right quiveringcadence. An apparently impossible mission, but not for the formidable Valentino atelier. “We know, we’re crazy,” said Piccioli. He was only half-joking.
5 July 2023
Valentino Garavani presented his first men’s collection in Milan in 1985; today, Pierpaolo Piccioli returned to the city, opening Milan Men’s Fashion Week with his “The Narratives” men’s show, staged on a regular school day in the garden of La Statale, Milan’s public university housed in a beautiful Renaissance building. Students watching the show from the courtyard’sloggiawere also treated to a live performance by rap and indie musician d4vd.Piccioli’s choice of location was part of his quest for a creative practice whose message is meaningful and accessible to younger audiences, breaking the elitism of fashion circuits and sparking discussions to ignite change. Reflecting on how masculine identity is represented and defined through the codes of fashion was what today’s collection was about.“The signifiers of power and success have so far defined the idea of masculinity,” he said at a post-show press conference. “But I believe that true power and strength are about the freedom to show your own fragility and sensitivity.”It was for this reason, he said, that he was drawn to Hanya Yanagihara’sA Little Life, so much so that pink-hued copies of the book were sent out as invitations to the show. “The intimacy and humanity of the four male characters, their open vulnerability and resilience was touching and inspiring for me,” he offered. Quotes from Yanagihara’s pages were printed across a black tailored suit and at the front of a pair of denim trousers.The show pivoted on Piccioli’s easing of classic masculine tropes, subtly subverted through a gentle approach. He worked on sartorial codes, softening the proportions of boxy blazers, replacing trousers with short shorts and skirts, embroidering flowers on lapels or printing blown-up blooms on breezy light jackets and straight-cut shirts. Piccioli’s artistic flair for a pictorial palette—mint green, raspberry, turquoise and hot pink alternating with black and white—emphasized a sense of individual vitality and an attitude of romantic freedom. “I am against any aesthetic diktat,” he said.Piccioli believes that his duty as a designer is to not only give life to beautiful creations, but “to say something meaningful on a deeper level.” That’s why staging the show at La Statale University, which is a powerful activator of education and knowledge, was important to his ethos.
To that end, Valentino will sponsor student scholarships through a substantial donation to the university; on the sustainable front, runway materials will also be repurposed and recycled in partnership with Milan’s Spazio META, a company offering recovery services of used materials. An oak tree will also be planted in Milan’s public gardens of Porta Venezia, going full circle on the good practices Piccioli and Valentino are committed to pursuing.
16 June 2023
While brands travel the globe staging flamboyant shows for their cruise and pre-fall collections, Valentino’s latest offering, dubbed Urban Riviera, was presented via a lookbook with accompanying press notes. Was it a statement against the turn to the extravagant that fashion shows have taken this year? Pierpaolo Piccioli wasn’t available for interviews, so the move is up for interpretation.Scrolling through the images Maison Valentino provided, the impression was that of a wardrobe where luxe was given a twist of cool, in keeping with Piccioli’s current direction. Via email, he confirmed that “the idea of a wardrobe as a vocabulary of various and diverse semantic layers has always fascinated me. Every one of us is a collector, creating a vision through selection and personal taste.”Separates of the deceptively nonchalant variety were styled in the counterintuitive way the designer has embraced, looking at the boundary-breaking codes of the new generation to open up Valentino’s repertoire of haute self-representation “to many aesthetic worlds.”While the recent Paris show read as an exercise in demystifying the formality of the black tie, the approach here seemed utterly pragmatic. Pieces had a polished ease about them, with no conceptual detours. Stylish mismatches abounded: A brocade full-circle skirt was worn with a masculine striped shirt and a simple V-neck jumper; a leg-baring, skimpy bodysuit in gray wool looked sexy under a chic navy peacoat. On a similar note, a richly embroidered full skirt (one of the collection’s main themes) took a turn for the antithetical combined with a fitted striped marinière, while a mermaid trailing skirt embellished with sequined florals was given the nonchalant treatment paired with a dove gray jersey sweatshirt.Broad-shouldered masculine pantsuits introduced the monochrome palette that punctuated the evening offer. Dense pops of bright green, Valentino red, and the new Pink PP hue added vitality to sleek long dresses with side bow-knotted cut-outs, as well as to fluid jumpsuits with wide palazzo pants. Glamorous yet tinged with cool, they exuded the charisma of haute dolce vita ingrained in the house’s codes. There’s nothing quiet about Piccioli’s idea of luxury. It would’ve been interesting to have him articulate on the subject du jour.
26 April 2023
When Pierpaolo Piccioli came home from work at the Valentino office in Rome recently, he was astonished to see that his 15-year-old daughter had raided his wardrobe for a night out with her friends. “She’d taken one of my black suits, white shirt, and black tie and was on her way out the front door. It was amazing to me, because she’d never seen me wearing a suit to the office. I keep some I wear with a bow tie to things like the Met Ball and other events, but never on a daily basis.”He realized his cool kid had no idea about ascribing socially-conditioned ideas to the conventions of formal dressing. “It was just, she liked it, and it was a new thing to her. In the end, I think that’s the way to approach fashion, as a personal choice of freedom.” And he was off, with ideas aplenty, inspired to design his ‘Black Tie’ collection. (A side-reference: Harper Seven Beckham, aged 13, also surprised her parents by wanting to wear a tailored trouser suit to her mom’s show in Paris.)Piccioli has been all-out to dress and impress today’s youth at Valentino for a good few seasons. The neo-punk tribe of people he sent stomping around the rooms of the Hotel Salomon Rothschild had face-jewelry, tattoos, and heavy boots, the better to demonstrate the individuality he wanted to spotlight amongst his reinterpretations and deconstructions of traditional formal attire.Variety amongst the discipline of uniform tailored dress codes has emerged as a theme across the season. Piccioli added many twists on the theme, the consistency being in the proportions: lots of leg, miniscule pelmet-length dresses, skirts, shorts, and jumpsuits, mostly in black and white, amongst splashes of strong Valentino red.Of course, it was Yves Saint Laurent who first broke the boundaries between women’s and menswear with his evening ‘Smoking’ suits in the 1960s. At the time, Valentino Garavani was focusing much more on creating a language of femininity which attracted conventional aristocrats, Hollywood actresses, and socialites. “I always think about what Valentino was about—it was about the idea of lifestyle, the perfect life, success,” Piccioli said. “I think, now what I’m doing is more switched to the idea of the lifestyle of community, our community, communities that are about the sort of gang of kids who are saying, look, we can wear the same sort of clothes, but giving them their personality with that.
”But if Piccioli’s modernizing of the Valentino remit is disruptive in one sense, in another, the wealth of techniques, skills, fabrics and trimmings he uses is thoroughly true to the house. Underneath the white-collar, black-tie concept peeked delicate frill-front blouses, ostrich feathers, sequined minis, 3-d roses, and a dress made entirely of a lattice-work of red bowties, amongst a collection that was also strong on classy, voluminous coats. Still, it was one long, unembellished silk shirt-dress, draped to one side at the hip that summed up the new Valentino spirit better than anything. It captured a mysterious blend of flou and cool, in a standout red.
6 March 2023
Pierpaolo Piccioli’s project with haute couture for the past few years has been to stretch the metier to say something that makes social points beyond the clothes. This season, he took couture literally to the club. His venue, at night, was a famous Paris joint under the Pont Alexandre. A bridge too far for some who had been working at the shows, perhaps, but the crowd scene outside proved that there are thousands today who clamour to photograph and feel part of the scene around Valentino and what haute couture, and fashion in general, has to say.His point about standing for inclusivity—his passion—is definitely intended to be heard by the wider world of young people. In a preview, he explained how he thinks the principles of one-off dressing can be relevant to them. “Of course, I love it that haute couture is about the magic of impossible challenges,” he began. “Of course it’s about craft, and we talk about that all the time, but I also love it when couture feels effortless. It’s all about the feeling of having something for yourself. It’s kind of democratic in a way, in the idea of showing this freedom of being whoever you want to be.”On his inspiration board were photos of clubs in the 1980s, ranging from Studio 54 to London’s New Romantic Blitz Club, the Club For Heroes one-nighter and the Taboo, hosted by the outrageous performance artist Leigh Bowery. What all these scenes, underground or jet-set, had in common was that they were hotbeds for generating fashion and havens for what used to be called ‘gender-bending.’“The difference was that then, it was behind closed doors. Now it’s something we have for life. It’s today’s way of freedom,” he argued. “So I love the idea of a club, but it’s a club for today. Thinking of inclusivity as welcoming people for who they are, and who they want to be. So it’s invitation to be free to be what you want ro be, mixed with the codes of Mr. Valentino in the ’80s.”Still, haute couture formalities were observed in a way—Valentino’s creatures of the night weren’t presented as a wild crowd of dancers, but as models walking on a runway, haute couture standards of solemnity preserved. What emerged from the darkness were pops of color (Valentino’s vastly popular Pink PP, claiming the night in ballgowns, coats, lycra tights), dark Parisian sexy black transparent lingerie dresses, and many varieties of strategic body-exposure.
In 89 looks, Piccioli put forward individualism in tiny pelmet skirts or cutaway bodysuits implanted with giant bows worn with floor-trailing capes, a dress with cutout polkadot portholes, and white shirts and ties styled with micro-minis (one with a dramatic red sequin trench). Inter-gender inclusivity means that men’s suiting has taken up its own space in haute couture—they came in vibrant emerald green, yellow, electric blue; some with coats bristling with metallic beaded embroidery.Beauty, he seemed to be saying, can be chosen, styled, and invented any which way with clothes. Strangely enough, it was the homages to Valentino Garavani’s classic draped ’80s couture gorgeousness that drew the eye most—giant ruffles in lavender or white frothing up around the face and over one shoulder, big fat bows placed on hips. Only when it passed did you see how Piccioli had subverted the canon so that the white flounce garlanding the front of a stately white finale dress had left half of the torso naked. Will Valentino bare breasts soon be worn in clubs and on red carpets? Even today, that seems a risky proposition. We’ll see who’s ready to push it with Piccioli.
26 January 2023
It wasn’t lost on anyone attending Paris fashion week this season that shows are growing into pop culture events ever closer to the world of entertainment, with flocks of multi-hyphenate celebrities (and their vast entourages) taking over the front rows, and unleashing frenzy outside the venues and on social media. Even A-list influencers, a term that today gives off a slight scent of the passé, receded into the shadows of less prominent seat assignments. Is fashion (as in clothing) fading into a sort of corollary to the buzz generated by these theatrics, with designers and creative directors adding the role of impresario to their CVs? Are garments turning into the sidelined Cinderellas of fashion month?The Valentino show was definitely one of the season’s blockbusters, where the scene was so hyped as to obfuscate at times the perception of the clothes’ obvious beauty. So a conversation with Pierpaolo Piccioli about resort was timely, as the collection was conceived as a precursor to the spring 2023 outing. Stripped of the stagecraft of the show, it was representative of Piccioli’s line of thought, both conceptual and visual.“Fashion shows are there to solidify the narration around your values and your identity,” Piccioli contended during a Zoom call from his studio in Rome. “Resort is the moment when fashion speaks its own language. There’s no storytelling here, just work on construction, cut, silhouettes, color. It’s justmoda, fashion, in its purest self. Of course, for me, clothes are always about how real people inhabit them.” For Piccioli, there’s nomodawithout humanity.He named the collection Surfaces, emphasizing the visuals of an all-over, head-to-toe silhouette where textures and shapes were turned into a sort of minimal continuum. While Piccioli has been toying around with minimalism for quite some time as a way to highlight the individuality of the wearer—“you reduce the excess on the garment to spotlight the attention on the face,” he said—it’s actually a concept rooted in Valentino Garavani’s 1960s aesthetics, when lines were pure, volumes were close to the body, and decoration was kept to a minimum. Fluidity was an element of sensuality that didn’t detract from the purity of design.Resort was in conversation with those style fundamentals. At the spring show Piccioli indulged in fluidity and movement enhanced by an abundance of sequined shine, but here he kept the silhouette neat, slim, and very short.
Trim contours and head-to-toe maximalist surfaces were in evidence, for example, in a black macramé lace slip dress paired with matching thigh-high legging/boots, or in a mini shift dress encrusted with white lace, which somehow stretched into matching stocking/boots edged with leather. Piccioli said that he wanted the lace—a quintessential Valentino accent—to be not just a pretty decoration, but blown-up and maximized rather unapologetically into a total, pervasive surface.
18 October 2022
And just like that, boom! Everything changed. Last March, Pierpaolo Piccioli sent out a Valentino collection that included a 48-look homage to the power of fuchsia, and the audience at his show today had clearly got the memo and dressed accordingly. Just about everywhere you looked, that color reigned supreme on clients and celebs alike, though none looked as major in it (and I will brook no argument on this) as Erykah Badu, who worked it from the tip of her towering stovepipe hat to the trailing hem of her feathered coat. (Even more major: The way Ms. Badu adorably bobbed up and down in her seat, phone in hand, primed to film Piccioli’s appearance on the runway at the end of his show the minute he popped out from backstage.)So there was every eye in the room training itself on Piccioli’s opening salvo for next spring, and what did we get? No more Think Pink, that’s for sure. Instead, a caped dress in the palest of beiges that was graphically emblazoned with the house’s V logo. The marque was over absolutely everything, including the gloved bodysuit worn under the dress (silky knit body-suiting, designed to counteract the diaphanous nature of his fabrics and make women feel more comfortable about wearing such gauzy materials, was a constant refrain here). It was even painted across the model’s face, an incredible effect courtesy of the deft hand (and ceaseless imagination) of Pat McGrath.That was just the start. Piccoli focused his look on mostly beautifully cut flowing, undulating dresses, short or long, some scissored away at the waist (inspired by the slashed canvases of artist Lucio Fontana) and soft suiting that was androgynous with or without the feathery trims, in myriad shades of ivory, beige and brown, his celebration of the beauty of every skin tone. During the course of the show, he started to introduce bright saturated colors as a contrast—electric blue, acid green, emerald green—which looked at their most dazzling when deployed for the dream-it-and-we-can-make-it technical marvel of his pleated sequin pieces, such as a shrug it on coat, or a sweeping floor-length backless evening dress. (How often does one see pleated sequins, particularly when the folds run on the bias? Like, never. Difficult to do doesn’t even begin to describe it.)
2 October 2022
Pierpaolo Piccioli is at ease in the world of couture. He approaches the metier with consummate confidence, and the record of his memorable shows grows longer by the season. Today he just threaded another pearl in his repertoire, staging the fall Valentino collection on Rome’s Spanish Steps, an almost sacred place so dense in strata of history, meaning, and symbolism that it has become a sort of meta-entity.“This is a deeply personal collection, because it’s all about the history of Valentino,” Piccioli said at a pre-show press conference, held at the label’s headquarters in Piazza Mignanelli. Valentino Garavani founded his eponymous maison de couture in 1959, together with his partner Giancarlo Giammetti. The first atelier was located in Via Gregoriana, a narrow cobblestone street winding down from the church of Trinità dei Monti, which sits at the top of the Spanish Steps. Piccioli wanted this fashion show to start right where the originalsartoria di Alta Modawas located, with models bravely walking down the 136 slippery travertine stairs to reach Palazzo Mignanelli. He described it as “the closing of a circle.”In a sort of counterintuitive turn of phrase, he called the collection The Beginning. He explained that after 23 years working for the maison, he felt the need to “understand how much of myself there is in today’s Valentino, and how much of Valentino there is in my identity.” He was adamant in refusing that this was a celebratory moment, or any sort of homage. Rather, he called it, “an ideal conversation with the house’s lexicon, which I wanted to do in a more conscious way. And I know that talking about beginnings sounds oxymoronic,” he mused. “But that’s the way I feel, because every beginning brings about the idea of a promise, and of the future.” This is also a concept inherent to the couture practice, “because couture is a continuous beginning, as you have always to start anew, without predetermined patterns or maps. The same design can be interpreted in completely different ways six months or six years after it has been created. What makes the difference are the people who wear it, the human approach—and that’s the story I like to tell.”Beyond his obvious creative skills, Piccioli’s idea of a new humanism is what has made his practice distinctive. “I believe that it’s my responsibility as a fashion designer to bear witness to the times we’re living in,” he said.
“I think that beauty has the power to break through, touch people and their conscience. Taking a radical posture through a strong narration and through images of a world that’s changing has an impact, and gives visibility to values that have to be protected. I believe fashion can be political.”
8 July 2022
Keeping a consistent narrative is crucial for a brand’s credibility today; Gen Z customers, the demographic coveted by every luxury house, are drawn to designers whose work is creative and value-driven in equal measure. That dynamic isn’t lost on Pierpaolo Piccioli, who has rebooted Valentino for a new audience, amping up the brand’s cultural ethos to resonate with the zeitgeist. Pivoting on the label’s extraordinary couture heritage, Piccioli’s focus is to translate the codes of Italian savoir faire into an aesthetic that, while staying true to its high-style fundamentals, speaks to the attitudes of fashion’s younger consumers.This ongoing exercise somehow peaked, both visually and conceptually, in Piccioli’s spring collection last October, paraded in the streets of Paris with fashion students filling many of the seats. Models sported individual looks styled to suit their personality, further highlighting the intent to relate to the world of today. Picking up where that show left off, the words ‘real’ and ‘reality’ came up quite often in a conversation with the designer about pre-fall.Piccioli believes that the aesthetic codes of the maison can be given a different meaning by shifting the way they’re interpreted by the wearer. To that end, for pre-fall he worked on pieces quintessentially Valentino (so much so that some templates came directly from couture collections), but “shuffled the attitude,” as he said, and tweaked the styling to create a sort of dissonance and vitality.Shot in the streets of London on young models, the lookbook images were conceived as a “portrait of a generation that wears clothes not necessarily different from those of 10, 20 years ago, but which are adapted to today’s lifestyle and our real social context,” said Piccioli. Case in point was the little black dress, a staple for cocktail receptions in a bourgeois milieu that Piccioli believes can be twisted into a sort of clubbing uniform. On the same note, an immaculate short white cape with matching pleated shirt that would’ve looked apropos on Marisa Berenson in the ‘70s if paired with high heels and a silk blouse, was given a cooler spin styled with a cropped marinière and chunky loafers. A sumptuous purple robe coat, lavishly embroidered with the Valentino atelier’s handcrafted couture techniques was turned into a citycoat and worn over a pair of distressed denim pants.
The challenge Piccioli faces is to immerse into today’s complex reality a label whose imagery is rarefied and rooted in a world of privilege, twisting the references and techniques of couture to suit a modern way of dressing that favors personality instead of status. “I want to breathe life into Valentino,” he reiterated. “I want its idea of perfect beauty to be somehow stained, so to speak, by the reality of today’s life, and to make it alive and relevant for a community of people with no reverence towards fashion, but who inhabit fashion with sentiment and an attitude of personal creativity.”
5 May 2022
Pierpaolo Piccioli adopted an extreme color strategy for Valentino fall ready-to-wear. Every look on his runway was pink—a specifically vivid tone of retina-vibrating fuchsia, set included. Or it was black.He said he’d chosen what he called “monotone” to remove distractions and concentrate the viewers’ eyes on distinguishing the differences between silhouette and detail. That theory played out in a huge collection of 81 looks, bulked out by the fact that he was showing menswear alongside women.Pink, though? Piccioli claimed he’d selected it—rather than Valentino red, or any other color, to “subvert” its cultural meanings, its associations with girlishness, or punk, or its original one which limited its use to men (presumably to kings, cardinals, and popes in the renaissance). Anyway, those weren’t thoughts which bothered the intellect too much as the visual saturation—a bath in hot, hot pink—continued.The pink went on for 40 silhouettes, meted out from head to toe (shod in either extremely high platform shoes, or chunky sneakers), in everything from tiny bubble dresses to long, narrow tabards, to crinolined bells; from sweeping opera coats to tailored suits and overcoats. It then returned eight more times for a grand finale of ostrich feathers, stately capes, and embroidery.Strangely enough, the cooling-off period provided by the sudden switch to black, mid-collection, showed off the elegance and sensitivity of Valentino’s repertoire to more powerful advantage. What Piccioli does by pairing lace tops or twisted tulle with pants feels modern, and cutting a black silhouette is very much part of the sober feeling that is sweeping fashion for fall.
7 March 2022
You could see the emotion in the eyes of some of Valentino’s models as they glided through the maison’s Place Vendôme salons to a specially recorded soundtrack by Anohni. “She was told she’d never walk couture,” Pierpaolo Piccioli said of one of them during a preview the day before. “In couture you never see these bodies. Never.” It is in large part thanks to Piccioli that haute couture is finding relevance in an age set on breaking the constructs of the past. On his mission to make this elitist corner of fashion matter to the generations dubbed “woke,” he has decided to “keep the codes, but change the values”: to give the broad spectrum of humanity the chance to mirror themselves in haute couture, in place of the waify, white, classical beauty ideal of its past.Today, in front of a distanced audience of just 65, he broke with the skinny stigma of that heritage in a collection titled the Anatomy of Couture. “When you do couture, you have the house model. And you apply the body of the house model to 50 or 60 models on the runway. I wanted to break these rules and embrace the idea of different proportions of body, different sizes, different ages. But it was impossible to do this with just one house model. So, I broke the rules and got 10 house models in with differently proportioned bodies,” he explained. The idea of haute couture was always to adapt silhouettes to the client’s body. But those silhouettes are typically dreamt up, fitted and realized on a tall, slim and young physique.This season, Piccioli changed that model, in more than one way. And in the process, he said, “We got to create new silhouettes.” A partly fuller-figured cast than what you normally see on a couture catwalk—what would maybe amount to the difference between a size 0 and a size 10–did change Piccioli’s silhouette. His signature monastic Roman lines and Hellenistic drapery morphed into shapes that registered more dynamic, more mid-century, more glamorous. Through a Hollywood lens, you might call them sexy. But it wasn’t as if his new cast looked shockingly different in size to the runway norm, which was perhaps testament to his method—and skill. “In runway shows, sometimes there are 50 skinny models and one bigger-sized. I feel like you don’t really relate to that. You don’t believe that. You just tick the box,” Piccioli said.
26 January 2022
Parisian cafés hold a particular charm for Pierpaolo Piccioli these days. The Valentino show he staged last month had models walking out of the Carré du Temple to stroll in the surrounding streets, where people were sitting in cafés enjoying theen plein airexperience. For resort, which reads as a sort of prequel to the spring collection, the lookbook was shot in the Marais, a livelyarrondissementpopulated by a hip and diverse crowd, in a café called Le Progrès. Its name resonates with Piccioli’s ongoing practice at the label, which he’s trying to steer forward without detracting from its history. “I want to bring life and a sense of reality into Valentino,” he said over Zoom from his studio in Rome. “Bringing it out of the atelier while retaining the savoir faire of the atelier.”Piccioli has been at the maison long enough to know its codes by heart; he has lived through its glamourous heyday, when Valentino Garavani received guests at his Château de Wideville, whose grounds were as perfectly manicured as the high-maintenance crowd that walked them. It was a world as fabulous as it was secluded and inaccessible. “I don’t want to forget the castle, but you have to be rooted in the present,” he said. “I want to bring the castle to the street, so to speak, and bring the street to the castle.”He calls this process re-signification; he feels that his duty as a fashion designer today is to be the vector of a vision of beauty in tune with the times we’re living in. “Beauty today means diversity and inclusivity; I want to encourage people to embrace it,” he said. Piccioli’s message is calibrated to appeal to younger generations, for which such values are a given; at Le Progrès, the cast included singer and TikTok-er Dixie D’Amelio; model and editor of the online platform the Youth Collective Project Amanda Prugnaud; filmmaker Christian Coppola; and actress Tina Kunakey.Bringingla couture dans les ruesmight sound like a marketing formula, were it not for Piccioli’s authentic belief and determined efforts to make it happen. “The idea isn’t only metaphorical,” he said. “I wanted to do it both from a fashion perspective and from a physical standpoint.” After a year and a half of pandemic isolation, the point was to avoid going back to showing in atmospheric palazzos as if nothing happened. “You can’t just talk, you have to do. You have to dare to be more radical.”
27 October 2021
Pierpaolo Piccioli belongs to the small but growing band of designers who’ve realized that the ivory tower, old-school rigmaroles of luxury fashion shows are becoming a thing of the past. “I think that we have to step forward, not step back, and that’s why I didn’t want to go back to Paris and show in a palace, or any of the places we showed before,” he said.So, to mark the return of Valentino’s ready-to-wear to Paris, he took over the old marketplace at the Carreau du Temple, and a row of neighboring cafés and restaurants opposite, to put on a joyful all-gendered show reunion symbolically blurring the distinctions between insiders and outsiders.“It has been such such a tough moment. That’s why I decided to get Valentino into a new dimension: life,” he said, amidst a backstage scene packed with young people who were getting ready to walk along the street for everyone to see, before filing back into the market space where the regular invited audience were seated at café tables.Piccioli, much loved in the industry for his warmth and down-to-earth lack of snobbery, felt the rupture of the past two years meant it has finally come time to put words and fine intentions into action. “I’ve been talking for a long time about making a shift, embracing a new generation, a new world,” he said. “And also to beleadinga change. You know, Mr. Valentino took part in engaging with youth in the ’60s. That was a revolutionary time. So I think this is my way of doing that today: keeping the codes and the couture values, and talking about a beauty which is about humanity and a shared wardrobe.”With refreshing candor, he said he didn’t really want to speak about clothes, inspirations, and narratives. “Fashion is about clothes—but it’s also about people wearing clothes. If I had to add words to talk about the storytelling, maybe my mission was not accomplished. Because I want to talk more about our community of people, sharing values—rather than a group of individuals that share the surfaces of a lifestyle. It’s more about celebrating diversity in a joyous way. “He pitched the production towards embracing Gen Zers with a proposition of a beautiful, casualized couture wardrobe designed to float between genders: lightweight taffeta tailoring in vivid colors, plethoras of dresses from minuscule and cutaway to sweeping, embroidered caftans.
The mini-maxi proportion play—like billowy volumes teamed with micro-shorts—provided a translated house glamour that captured everything the TikTok generation might relate to.
2 October 2021
Valentino’s creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli set his sublime couture collection in the Gaggiandre, or ship building yard, of Venice. He was drawn to the place’s haunting beauty which he likened to a De Chirico painting with its arches and robust columns. In Renaissance times this place represented the hub of the city’s trading machine, a sophisticated production line that was said to churn out a boat a day. The tall brick tower that still dominates the site is the place where the ships’ masts were installed as a finishing touch before they sailed out into the laguna on their missions of fortune. This being Venice and the Renaissance, of course the place—now part of the Arsenale where the city’s art and architecture Biennales are showcased—is as beautiful as it was once productive, having been built (between 1568 and 1573) by Jacopo Sansovino, one of Venice’s most revered architects of the period.Piccioli set his snaking runway under Sansovino’s soaring arches where the ships were once sheltered to be repaired, so that it appeared to float over the water. Guests were bidden to wear white. Luckily everyone did as they were told, and the effect, as the golden light of early evening streaked the water, the stone, tile, and brick, was undeniably poetic. To add to the spine-tingling moment, the collection was serenaded by the British singer Cosima, whose plangent voice gave a powerful twist toCalling Youfrom the 1987 movieBagdad Cafe, that opened the show.It was soon clear why Piccioli had asked us all to dress in white. I am old enough to remember Yves Saint Laurent’s stately couture presentations in the 1980s, and Christian Lacroix’s frisky ones, and the frisson of excitement, astonishment, and applause that greeted their audacious color mixes, often inspired, respectively, by the women in the markets of Marrakech, or the coruscating suits of the toreadors. Piccioli brings that same level of gasping wonder to fashion’s color wheel, setting flamingo pink, chartreuse, violet, cocoa, and mallard green ball gowns one after another, for instance. Or he might throw a raspberry double-face balmacaan over darker pink pants and an orchid pink crepe shirt, or a lilac cashmere cape over violet pants, frog green sequin t-shirt, and pea green gloves, and then ground the look with eggplant shoes with the heft of Dr. Martens.
These last two ensembles, by the way, are part of the menswear offerings in the collection, in case you were wondering, and very persuasive they were too.
15 July 2021
Pierpaolo Piccioli is busy keeping Valentino’s re-signification going, the line of thought about identity, humanity, and radicalism around which he’s been tailoring his practice since last year. “Today, more than ever, aesthetics are determined by identity,” he said during a Zoom conversation we had about his new pre-fall collection. “To make Valentino’s codes and values pertinent for today, I want to keep a firm hold on its identity while shifting its signifiers, giving them a new attribution.”What does that mean, exactly? “It means giving a more human dimension to Valentino’s lexicon, less obviously glamorous,” Piccioli said. “Not because I condemn red carpet glamour, but because today, there’s the need of a new warmth, of more humanity. So you have to open up those codes, giving them new life and the freedom to speak through more personal, individual interpretations.”And what is more individual, personal, and human than a portrait? For pre-fall Piccioli lensed the look book himself, with a cast of Italian beauties not all of whom are models, but rather friends and young women “with something to say,” he explained. The collection was intended as a series of individual pieces underlining the unique, non-clichéd humanity of each woman and her non-stereotyped representation of femininity. “The way I approached the shoot was a metaphor of what I’m doing at Valentino,” explained Piccioli. “Models for me are individuals,persone. This is a moment in time where humanity is paramount. The whole cultural discourse about inclusivity, accepting and enhancing diversities, and the freedom of expressing oneself—it’s just about putting humanity front and center as a non-negotiable social, political, and personal value.”Shot in an empty yet decadent Roman palazzo, withchiaroscurolight giving each image a painterly, metaphysical aura, the collection paid a telling homage to Valentino’s culture of couture, even if it consisted mostly of daywear. Dégradé embroideries in macro sequins, wool knots, and beads; handmade taffeta and lace intarsia; bouillonné rosettes and thread-made appliqués; embellishments made through a complex carving techniques—these and other couture flourishes were lavished on clean-cut coats and capes in double cashmere, everyday pieces of luxurious ease.
Red roses, an homage to the famous Valentino flamingo dress, were stitched on a sweatshirt in vermilion cady, while a simple shirt in crisp pale blue poplin was inlaid with individually cut florals selected from different types of see-through lace.
5 May 2021
For Pierpaolo Piccioli, the meaning of creativity in this moment rhymes with punk gestures and romantic acts of purpose and strength. His fall collection was staged in the empty spaces of historic Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, closed to the public since the beginning of the pandemic. “The fact that we decided to have it reopened, albeit just temporarily, it was a sort of a punk act,” he said at a press conference held in the darkness of the auditorium. “What we missed in the pandemic was above all the sense of sharing and of communality that culture gives us—not so much pasta and pizza.”Valentino’s shows are visually intense experiences, layered with emotions and extravagance. The pandemic seems to have clarified and delineated Piccioli’s mindset. His approach feels direct, personal, and authentic, less filtered through the arcane references that mood board narratives often hazily convey. He calls this process “radical.”For fall, the collection was concise and sharp. Hems were drastically shortened with an almost tangible gesture of slashing. “It’s an act of fashion,” he explained. “ I was looking for a space open to new possibilities, like the slashes Fontana inflicted on the canvas to find new dimensions behind it.”Rendered in single-minded, stark black and white, with occasional pops of muted gold, it felt like the point of convergence between the racé couture genius of Valentino, which Piccioli has mastered so flawlessly and the new proposition of an abbreviated, terse silhouette pertinent for today. A daywear assortment of beautifully cut short wool capes (the couture outerwear templatepar excellence) was the collection’s pivot, worn with bare legs and elegant stilettos “for sensuality,” as Piccioli underlined.Couture-inflected, high-brow versions of no-gender punk signifiers tied the women’s and men’s lines together. Nets were a recurring theme—enlarged in a diamond pattern on a cashmere sweater worn as minidress; elongated in a cut-out cashmere duster over a crisp white shirt and black short; and rendered in the second-skin high-collared turtlenecks worn throughout the collection and made withbudellini, an atelier technique. “I wanted theéspritcouture to be clearly felt in the collection,” said Piccioli, “but without any hint of nostalgia or redundancy.” His need for elegant synthesis didn’t come across as a soulless, simplified reduction of codes. Piccioli’s sensibility is way too empathetic for that; he values humanity above all else.
He was probably born romantic : “It’s the radical act of having the strength to be who you are; that’s what I mean by romanticism today. It’s a subjective, almost anarchic gesture, assertive of one’s own identity—exactly like punk.”
1 March 2021
Nearly a year in, only now are we beginning to see the true measure of fashion’s creative responses to the pandemic. At Valentino, locked down in Rome with his atelier, Pierpaolo Piccioli has had a proper span of time to apply his brain-power, and the hands of his workforce, to what you might call a new vision of casual couture. “My idea is to witness the moment,” he said, just before the filmed runway show aired today. He called the collection Temporal—in the sense both of what it means to be living here, now, and of the quality of designing clothes, made by hand, which will long outlive trends.“It’s more about pieces that will give an effortlessness,” Piccioli said. “The narrative of the collection is the collection itself. No stories. Nothing figurative. I wanted to work on surfaces, not in a decorative sense, but workmanship which becomes the surface itself.” It would be crass to reduce it to percentages, but the ratio of Valentino daywear (often overlooked in old-normal practice) to eveningwear (large, voluminous, extravagant) had effectively been flipped this time. Along came garments that (also crassly) might ordinarily be classified as hoodies, sweaters, shirts, board shorts, and camisoles, acting as foils for amazing lattice-worked coats and sculptural capes. It had the aura of a new kind of minimalism, not-quite ’90s, but slightly: “I think elegance is not about ‘good taste’” said Piccioli. “It’s a bit daring.”And along came... men. At Valentino, “it’s for the very first time,” Piccioli shrugged. “But couture is for people. I don’t care about gendered (fashion). It’s an inspiration which is fluid, no-boundaries: a trench coat is for men and women.” And what a trench coat: structured so that the volume of the sleeves somehow continued seamlessly into a generous, chic storm-flap in the back of the coat. Only haute couture experts can pull off that sort of thing. Or have the capability to do what they do with capes, crafting their planes (the moulded shoulders, the flying panels) with the same expertise as architects or aerospace engineers. Or, in another department, piecing them together from tiny squares of fabric with the rigor of mathematicians.This is the place where an haute couture house alliance between a designer-director and the people who slice fabric, draw paper patterns, and wield pins and irons can start to challenge stock fashion vocabulary.
Piccioli nailed that with his explanation of a white cashmere cape: “I don’t want to call it that. It’s not a caftan, or a poncho. It’s a shape.” A shape that could be timeless; that was shown twice (covering either gender), and worn over turtlenecks and pants.It used to be that every haute couture look was conceived as a sacred kind of unit. Gone are those days. Now Piccioli is more motivated to make a white poplin shirt, which he showed with a long oyster-colored skirt that appeared narrow in the front, yet flared to a train in back in one of the show’s most arresting moments. “It’s a shirt, a fantastic shirt. Of course you can wear it like this, or any other way. And the skirt is timeless.”Piccioli is right: We’re thankfully long past the time when audiences might work themselves into a pearl-clutching froth at the sight of male models wandering an haute couture runway. Far more to the point is keeping the practice of haute couture relevant to the moment we’re living in. As many of haute couture’s old-world conventions drop away, what remains to be valued is the coalition of high craft and social insight. Piccioli spent a long time reflecting on that in the last months. “To me, the essence of couture,” he said. “is the ritual, the process, the care, the humanity. That’s what makes couture timeless, special.”
26 January 2021
Milan Fashion Week closed with a bang today, with Pierpaolo Piccioli presenting his Valentino collection for the first time here in Milan. In a declaration of support for the Italian fashion system and making the most out of the difficult circumstances the pandemic has forced upon us, he opted for an act of bravery—and bravura. He decided to decamp from the ornate Parisian fabulousness of the Salomon de Rothschild salons for the powerful industrial rawness of Fonderie Macchi, a metallurgical foundry active in Milan from 1936. “In this moment, sticking to an old mindset for me just wasn’t an option,” he said at the post-show press conference.Choosing a venue at odds with Valentino’s typical optics, so deep-rooted in couture, signaled the bold stance Piccioli was taking in the re-definition of the house’s stylistic codes—a process he called re-signification. “I focused on working more on Valentino’s identity than on its aesthetics,” he reflected. The wording could sound slightly highfalutin and self-congratulatory. But, as always with Piccioli, his approach was as instinctual as it was sophisticated; he’ll go down as one of fashion’s romantic visionaries, able to orchestrate moments of true creative enjoyment, both emotional and visually elevated.Romanticism was actually much on his mind while working on the collection. He called it radical. But what does it mean being a radical romantic today? “For me, it rhymes with individuality, with the freedom to express our very own identity and diversity,” he answered. Being romantic means also not following the rules, embracing idealism, being rebellious—fighting for a better world. Believing that things can change: “Fashion for me is a way to talk about the values that matter today,” he said. “The true acceptance of diversity. Tolerance and kindness. This is the world I want to tell through my work as a designer.”If aesthetics can actually suggest something about one’s life, then today’s street casting was a celebration of the many diverse-looking people Piccioli wants to include in his narration. Each look was individual, thoroughly chosen according to the personality of the character, young men and women coming from different backgrounds and walks of life. Yet from a fashion standpoint, the collection looked more cohesive than usual: streamlined and with fewer of the decorative flourishes and certain hyperbolic gestures of couture.
28 September 2020
Milan Fashion Week closed with a bang today, with Pierpaolo Piccioli presenting his Valentino collection for the first time here in Milan. In a declaration of support for the Italian fashion system and making the most out of the difficult circumstances the pandemic has forced upon us, he opted for an act of bravery—and bravura. He decided to decamp from the ornate Parisian fabulousness of the Salomon de Rothschild salons for the powerful industrial rawness of Fonderie Macchi, a metallurgical foundry active in Milan from 1936. “In this moment, sticking to an old mindset for me just wasn’t an option,” he said at the post-show press conference.Choosing a venue at odds with Valentino’s typical optics, so deep-rooted in couture, signaled the bold stance Piccioli was taking in the re-definition of the house’s stylistic codes—a process he called re-signification. “I focused on working more on Valentino’s identity than on its aesthetics,” he reflected. The wording could sound slightly highfalutin and self-congratulatory. But, as always with Piccioli, his approach was as instinctual as it was sophisticated; he’ll go down as one of fashion’s romantic visionaries, able to orchestrate moments of true creative enjoyment, both emotional and visually elevated.Romanticism was actually much on his mind while working on the collection. He called it radical. But what does it mean being a radical romantic today? “For me, it rhymes with individuality, with the freedom to express our very own identity and diversity,” he answered. Being romantic means also not following the rules, embracing idealism, being rebellious—fighting for a better world. Believing that things can change: “Fashion for me is a way to talk about the values that matter today,” he said. “The true acceptance of diversity. Tolerance and kindness. This is the world I want to tell through my work as a designer.”If aesthetics can actually suggest something about one’s life, then today’s street casting was a celebration of the many diverse-looking people Piccioli wants to include in his narration. Each look was individual, thoroughly chosen according to the personality of the character, young men and women coming from different backgrounds and walks of life. Yet from a fashion standpoint, the collection looked more cohesive than usual: streamlined and with fewer of the decorative flourishes and certain hyperbolic gestures of couture.
27 September 2020
At the finale of this strangely long, drawn out fall haute couture season, it was Pierpaolo Piccioli’s turn to show the Valentino collection in Rome. Entitled “The Performance: of Grace and Light, a dialogue between Pierpaolo Piccioli and Nick Knight,” it played as a hybrid digital/ physical event staged in a darkened void on the famed Cinecitta movie lot.In a Zoom press conference, Piccioli explained he’d conceptualized the 16-look collection as “an extreme response” to the tough circumstances of lockdown; a determination to overcome the technical problems of socially-distanced working in the Valentino atelier and the impossibility of creating prints and lavish embroideries. “I didn’t want to feel the limitations. Couture is made for emotions, dreams,” he said. “It was super-emotional for us all to be here together to win this challenge. A moment I will never forget.”A local audience was in attendance. Were you spectating via laptop, the distanced sensation was one of being sucked into a liminal space suspended somewhere between a digitalized romantic fantasy, and an installation of models wearing surreally-proportioned white dresses, relayed on video. First came a pre-recorded screening of an artily glitchy video by Knight, in which projections of flowers and feathers played over meters-long dresses worn by women who appeared to hover in an aerial circus scenario. Cut to real time: curtains drew back to reveal the models, standing perched on ladders in a static tableau, their dresses—now revealed to be all-white—cascading to the floor, videoed live.The process began with sketches on paper, relayed to Knight in London. Piccioli wanted to uphold the inimitable techniques of the house (which can be seen in the lookbook which was also supplied). In lockdown, however, the normal heads-together working practice was impossible—each couture piece is normally intensely labored over by six experts to a table—so construction was moved to mannequins, where the craftspeople could work two at a time, safely separated as they sewed the vast meterage and volumes of taffeta, tulle, chiffon, and organdie.The notion of taking the show to Cinecitta, Rome’s “factory of dreams,” led him to add the concept of “the magic of early cinema,” evoking the silent movie imagery of with silver sequins and waterfalls of glittering fringe.
He commissioned unreleased recordings from FKA twigs, her extraordinary voice soaring poignantly as the models swung from trapezes and floated through Knight’s digital performance.Fashion communication on multi-platform formats has taken surreal twists and turns as designers have tried to conquer the dreadful problems of the pandemic. In Piccioli’s case, the surrealism was right there, embodied in the theatrical form of the clothes. In practice, the house will work with clients to reproportion them according to their own dreams—that’s what a couture house always does, anyway. Still, it’s no disrespect to Piccioli and all his incredible teams to say that there is nothing that digital wizardry can possibly ever do to compete with the visceral wonder of seeing a Valentino haute couture collection walk through a room on his models. For now, the comeback of that precious experience is the dream we’re all left with.
21 July 2020
The lockdown has apparently unlocked the Renaissance man inside Pierpaolo Piccioli. He’s adding photography to his résumé of creative skills, which the confinement, spent in his hometown of Nettuno, Italy, seems to have amplified. “I never stopped working,” he said during a Zoom call. “I profoundly love what I do; this is my passion, something fundamental for me—it isn’t just work.” The resort collection is the byproduct of the time spent alone drawing and painting, while remaining connected with his team. Going full circle in the creative process, he decided to lens the collection himself, enlisting his longtime friend, the model Mariacarla Boscono. “I wanted to convey spontaneity and truth, even imperfection—but it’s the feel of human imperfection you long for right now,” he explained. “The collection was born out of flat drawings—paper and pencil, no styling, no mood board, just researching on paper shapes that linger in your head. A pure fashion process, as it should be done.”The human quality of creativity is paramount to Piccioli’s practice. He has imbued the rarefied world of couture with emotional values—exposing and revealing its craft and handmade processes, and shining a light on his team of seamstresses and artisans as essential players behind his fabulous creations. This center still firmly holds. “I wanted [to communicate] something even more personal, very close to myself. Conveying a sense of intimacy, a sentiment of individual connection, of emotion. I decided to photograph the collection myself because it seemed more coherent in this moment to send out a message with no filters, no manipulation, no other interpretation or mediation. I didn’t want the usual glamour of a fashion shoot,” he continued. “What I was interested in focusing on was what I’ve missed most in this confinement— the simple feeling of human connection, of shared love and friendship. This is what I wanted to bring about in my images.”Not surprisingly,simplicityis the collection’s key word. “It’s a radical simplicity though,” reflected Piccioli. “I wanted to be even more radical, in that the simplicity I’ve tried to achieve in shapes, volumes, and construction comes at the end of a process of resolved complexities. It’s a study and a project on cut, proportions, balance. Reducing and subtracting to reach the core, something essential and pure—but not more banal. Simple, not simplified.
” There’s an ease and a fluidity of movement, a feel for freedom and effortlessness exuding from the lean silhouettes of caftans, elongated shift dresses, capes, and separates. Defined by strong, solid colors inspired by Rothko’s chromatically powerful palette, pure shapes were infused with a vibrant, joyful flair. A few prints inspired by 18th-century tapestries were rendered as inconspicuous abstract strokes of color, as if they were just traces of memories, or shadows of the decorative motifs’ former selves.
6 July 2020
Have you noticed how many Paris Fashion Week shows have opened with head-to-toe black? It’s almost as if the city’s designers anticipated the dour state of things and the dark moods we’d all be in as the coronavirus crisis escalates. As the Valentino show took place, word spread that the Louvre Museum had not opened to the public today. The clothes on the runway presented a striking contrast with the last-season Valentino outfits in the front row, which were neon bright and covered in jungle prints. Asked afterward if he was feeling newly serious, Pierpaolo Piccioli said, “No, but fashion must be relevant.”As it turns out, Piccioli had a different kind of relevance on his mind. Over the last several seasons, he’s worked harder than most at bringing a new sense of inclusivity to his shows—remember the famous photo of Naomi Campbell and other black models at his spring 2019 haute couture show? Today he pushed his project further along. There were trans models in his cast and curvier-than-usual types too. He also had male models in the lineup. Backstage Piccioli said, “What I wanted to do was a portrait of a moment with no categories. Fashion has to record and embrace big changes in the world. We have to encourage tolerance and equality.”One way he went about illustrating his message was to strip away the color and quite a bit of the embellishment that we’ve become accustomed to at his Valentino—his thinking being that a uniform allows the individuality of the person wearing it to shine through. The show opened with a black mid-length belted cashmere coat, sturdy flatform boots (the show’s one shoe), and the house’s new Atelier bag. It wasn’t until look 26 that we saw a dress in full color, though eventually Piccioli did work his way around to many pieces in Valentino’s house red, as well as herringbones, leopard spots, and evening sequins for both women and men. He said that the other way he tried to get his point across about a world without boxes was by putting guys in girls’ clothes and vice versa. The coat that opened his men’s show last month was worn by a female model here.If Piccioli’s contrarian approach didn’t quite succeed in painting the portrait of individuality that he wanted—eclecticism is better suited to the cause—his sartorial instinct to reduce and the clothes it inspired nonetheless jibed with the season’s neo-minimalist look.
And there were certainly understated beauties here: among them a pair of brass-button peacoats, one short, one long; for evening a sleeveless black gown with a train; and the red sequin column worn by Piccioli’s current muse, Adut Akech.
1 March 2020
A very different facet of Pierpaolo Piccioli’s design imagination transpired at his Valentino spring haute couture collection. It was structured, linear, fishtailed, modular, yet still drenched in color and pattern by turns. The man who has triggered a million voluminous copies decided it was time to step off a path that has now turned into a fashion industry highway.“When you talk about couture, you talk about dreams, but dreams are the expression of something which is subconscious,” he said. “It’s about the freedom of expressing yourself.”Piccioli is as frank about cutting the crap about fashion as he is about cutting. “I hate it when people talk about ‘storytelling.’ I am not a storyteller. I don’t have the feeling that Cristóbal Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Charles James, Mainbocher, whatever—I don’t feel they had stories of the season.” Trusting himself to free-association meant exploring form and emotion in ways that emphasized choice, variety, and the ingenious devices that only the Valentino craftspeople are able to realize.There were more trousers, more columns than before; an interest in constructing layers in ways which only the wearer will know about. Some of the mid-sections that looked like low-slung cummerbunds or basques were actually attached; other pieces, like a scrolled peplum, were tied on with a sash. Opera gloves could sprout frills which merged into the deep 3-D ruffles on a neckline. Bubbles, bows, and plenty of Valentino red recurred. There was gorgeous color—purple, eau de nil, and scarlet, parma violet, pink, mint—but then again, equally stunning black dresses too.It gets list-y to call out all the effects. Better to stand back and see it as collection in which Piccioli challenged himself to stop the operatic volumes and begin his search for a new silhouette.
22 January 2020
The incandescent presence of FKA Twigs is visible only in the top left-hand corner of some of these photographs. Truth be told—it was difficult to concentrate on Pierpaolo Piccioli’s menswear show going by as she was singing in her uncategorizable delicate yet operatic way. Cloaked in iridescent Valentino haute couture with her face half-obscured by a crystal fencing mask, Twigs’s mesmerizing performance was a lot of competition to put up against the Valentino boy models who were walking past.Maybe that’s what Piccioli meant to happen, as the celebrated feminist male designer he’s known to be. “Life needs emotions,” he said before the show. “Men are changing much more quickly in the last two decades because of women. And because of how work has changed.”Read that as one man’s call to the next generation to celebrate its sensitivities. The societal changes which Piccioli intuits, or wishes to see realized, were projected onto his approach to tailoring: an exploration of the relationship between suits and haute couture.Guys these days should have no hang-ups about wearing coats and jackets stamped with photo prints or embroideries of flowers, Piccioli believes. Luxury for men and women is being dissolved into a median category. Valentino boys have segued seamlessly into carrying small cross-body bags. Some might be utility pouches, but others are indistinguishable from the mini-bags on chains that have been gendered as female for generations.As a father watching children and their friends growing into their teens and twenties, Piccioli feels the awesomeness of time turning in a positive direction. “I think we are learning from them,” he says.
15 January 2020
With one of the fashion world’s most sumptuous archives at his disposal, Pierpaolo Piccioli could easily get caught up in mannerist nostalgia or postmodern appropriation. But that attitude wouldn’t jibe with who he is. “There’s a big difference between reverence and respect,” Piccioli said from the vast Valentino studio in Rome’s historic Palazzo Mignanelli, where the pre-fall lookbook was shot. “Being reverent means keeping a certain distance from what the past represents,” he mused. “But the past must be reckoned with, because it’s part of your present, of who you are. You have to make it yours—it mustn’t be denied. The past must become a strength.”Being at the helm of a historic house in a time when old values, social mind-sets, and visual codes are being questioned and challenged could have proved critical for Piccioli. But his clever, supple, and high-spirited approach has propelled Valentino’s haute couture into a stratosphere of extreme fabulousness, one that balances emotional delicacy and extravagance, poetry and excess. What makes his practice sensational—beyond the breathtaking technique of the house’s ateliers—is the feeling of humanity and openness of spirit that permeates it. These are inherent traits of Piccioli’s; they’re what keep his idea of a modern couture joyful and inclusive—even if it’s the most exclusive, privileged practice in fashion.This high-minded, progressive approach has become a mind-set at Valentino, an all-encompassing attitude. “I want to maintain couture’s values even in the pre-fall collection,” said Piccioli. “I like the idea of breaking its rules and translating them into a modern, spontaneous wardrobe, making something historical become contemporary.” To that end, he picked from the archives a set of rather diverse references: a beautiful print of Delft blue vases from a sophisticated 1968 couture collection and an image from the ’70s shot by Chris von Wangenheim of curly-haired, free-spirited models in hot pants—the ’80s attitude of Valentino’s collections of that time. “But I wanted to put all these images on a diachronic level, stripping them of too overt historical references, giving everything a contemporary feel,” he said.To bring high glamour to a daywear collection, Piccioli gave classic wardrobe staples—the chic cape, the masculine tailored blazer, the slender city coat, the primchemisier, the flirty floral dress—the impeccably luxurious Valentino treatment, only tinged with a youthful, upbeat feel.
Lace intarsias, imaginative embroideries and prints, precious fabrics, and fine details exuded the savoir faire and feminine sophistication the maison is known for, yet also conveyed a spirit of optimism, lightness, and verve. Pieces were mixed and matched with soigné nonchalance and a dash of extravagance. Geometric foulard motifs from the ’70s were reworked on silk twill minidresses and hot pants worn with masculine blazers easy as shirts; the famous Delft print was rendered in fine embroidery on the back of a navy wool cape or intarsia-ed on a macramé dress—and even blown up on a slender high-waist print dress. Bouffant organza or taffeta minidresses had a whiff of couture gestures of old, as did the coquettish little bows decorating the shoulders of a tangerine jacket, worn with matching hot pants and a lace blouse.Being a great colorist, Piccioli indulged an expressive chromatic palette. Ginger contrasted with burgundy and hot pink; flashes of apricot highlighted delicate shades of blush and mauve; and Delft blue was balanced by white. Offset by a canvas of black and navy, such vibrancy kept the collection in an uplifting, cheerful mode. “I want Valentino to be lively and joyous,” enthused Piccioli. “For me, beauty means life, emotion, something that vibrates and is full of energy—not something removed that you look at from afar, as if on a pedestal.”
9 December 2019
Pierpaolo Piccioli dedicated the whole opening section of the Valentino Spring show to white, sending out 12 looks of pristine variety. “I wanted to work on something universal, to get back to the essence of shape and volume,” he said. “So I worked on the idea of the white shirt, but treating it with a couture sensibility.”These were hardly workaday basics—the idea ran from the wrap-over dress at the opening though meditations on huge, airy bishop sleeves; ruffles; mini shifts; shorts; transparency; and feathers. It felt like a long gulp of fresh air and optimism centered on something known. It hit a similar kind of note to that which Jonathan Anderson had sounded at Loewe with his laundered linens.Something of the aesthetics of the Renaissance came through here and there. Even though Piccioli said there was no deliberate religious or historic referencing, the starched bibs, shirt collars, billowing sleeves, and ruffs at times configured as visions of nuns or medieval page boys. Maybe that just happens when you’re an Italian working in Rome.So much white can’t help but draw comparisons with Valentino Garavani’s 1968 All White collection, which was epoch making for the house. But Piccioli is the creator of the second epoch of success that has come around for Valentino—the fashion and his sensitivity to what women of all ages want to wear just keeps flowing effortlessly.In technical terms, Piccioli’s aim for Spring was casualizing the voluminous couture silhouettes he’s established over the past few, staggeringly well-received seasons. He pointed out how he’d removed all the stiffness by translating dresses into light, floppy georgettes, which gave a lovely fluidity to them in delicious one-shot colors: green, absinthe, peach, and plum.His reaching for a more direct form of expression also brought him to jungle prints via the naive vision of 19th-century artist Henri Rousseau—easy to imagine these worn on beaches or boats on some long Mediterranean summer idyll. Italians do summer like no one else in fashion—the inventory of ideas stretched all the way from white to the new feeling for black, with glinting highlights of mauve and pink sequins and flashes of neon taffeta in between.The collection was joyful, touched on a myriad of occasions, and lifted hearts. It has practically become a seasonal ritual that Piccioli gets a standing ovation at the end of his shows; it happened again, and the women who surrounded him to cheer genuinely meant it.
29 September 2019
The front row power trio of Gwyneth Paltrow, Naomi Campbell, and Céline Dion (and the paparazzi angling desperately for their shots) said it all: Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli is the couture designer who matters most in 2019. His Spring show, with its irrepressible color and diverse casting—he asked the rhetorical question, What if Cecil Beaton’s famous photograph of Charles James dresses could be with black women?—set a new template for collections with a conscience.It’s no longer adequate to seduce with elegance and craftsmanship, though there is plenty of both at Valentino. Even in the rarefied echelon of couture, women are responding to and buying from brands they believe in, and Piccioli’s message of inclusivity is resonating in a world in which our leaders seem keen to promote isolationism, otherism, and fear.The designer’s new offering was very much a continuation of its predecessor. “The only way to make couture alive today is to embrace different women’s identities and cultures,” Piccioli said in a studio preview. Making good on that mission statement, Lauren Hutton, Cecilia Chancellor, Georgina Grenville, and Hannelore Knuts, who range in age from mid-70s to early 40s, joined the lineup. “It’s about the idea of individualism,” Piccioli continued.His mood board reflected that notion with its mix of Avedon portraits, Guy Bourdin advertising shots, canvases by the Italian Renaissance mannerist Rosso Fiorentino, and paintings of Diana Vreeland. “The eye has to travel,” he said, referring to the documentary about the famous editor. And travel Piccioli did, adding what he called folk elements, like ornamental hats and komondor wool fringe, to his exquisite garments.The major takeaway: sensational, glorious, buoyant color, often in surprising combinations, including the citron green and prune of a trapeze top and culottes; the ochre, lilac, and fluoro yellow of a bustier, trousers, and belt; and the aquamarine and brick found on a feathered coat and draped crepe dress. There was handwork to make the jaw drop, such as on a long dress with floral appliqués so painstaking to render they required 990 woman hours, or a sleeveless gown made of rose gauze squares attached together one by one over the course of 2,010 hours. “It’s not engineered by computer,” Piccioli said, “you can feel the humanity in it.
” Just as stunning yet almost simple by comparison were the draped taffeta dresses in emerald green and electric orange worn by Lineisy Montero and Saskia de Brauw.Summarizing any more would defeat Piccioli’s point about individuality. Put simply: The cumulative effect of all this beauty was irresistible. The audience was on its feet even before the designer walked out for his bow with his atelier staff. When Valentino himself began kissing his congratulations to each and every one of them, many of the typically impassive editors could be seen wiping away tears.
3 July 2019
“Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” the Pink Floyd track from theWish You Were Herealbum, surged, volume up, as Pierpaolo Piccioli ran out to take his bow after his Spring 2020 Valentino menswear show. Completely apt—Piccioli really is fashion’s crazy diamond, an authentic modern-day hippie who follows his own instincts, whether they’re deemed fashionable or not, and has thereby charmed and swept everyone along on his trips to wherever.This time, it was to a place in his own head—via the psychedelic porthole opened by ’70s prog rock: “A fantastic journey into yourself, where you can find fantastic landscapes, and you don’t have boundaries,” he said. “When I was a kid, I was there, far from everything, and I want to keep that feeling when creating a collection, because then you don’t limit your imagination.”There was a time when suburban boys in bedrooms everywhere would put their prog-rock albums on their record players and stare for hours at the album art, reading the meaning. That was Piccioli, for sure. One of the major delights at this grown-up successful stage of his life is that he can now not just meet his teenage heroes, but collaborate with them. This time he found Roger Dean, album cover artist of the ’70s, and asked him to make a comeback version of his airbrushed acid–sci-fi–impossible landscapes for this collection.Well, that art—on souvenir print shirts—formed the main plank of what’s certain to be a hit collection. The riffing colors of the Dean print—on a djellaba-like shirt, a purple tree, sky blue; and on a long cagoule, a desert orange, weird outcrops, and purple haze—inspired a series of other jungly prints and fantasy embroideries. One jacket had a huge red dragon wrapped around it. “DRAGON AT DAWN” was embroidered onto the back of a hoodie.The great thing about Piccioli’s collection is that you didn’t feel him reaching for “inspiration,” projecting himself onto another generation, or noodling on about the good old days of alternative rock as middle-aged men are wont, given half a chance. The fact is that he’s a down-to-earth modern guy who simply enjoys life and uses his talent to give men—of whatever age—access to an easy Italian lifestyle aesthetic.
There was nothing in the collection one couldn’t imagine him wearing himself, either at Valentino HQ in Rome (the techno-cotton pieces in tobacco, khaki, blue) or in his family life-affirming summer Instagram posts, where he’ll be seen relaxing at the seaside in necklaces and caftans, and making them look cool.Escapism in fashion can sometimes lead to dubious and dark places. Not so, with Piccioli, whose positivism is inclusive—the diverse casting he’s brought to his women’s shows carried through to men—and comes from lived experience. So, yes: shine on, Piccioli.
20 June 2019
Pierpaolo Piccioli had his Resort collection photographed in Rome’s Orto Botanico, a green oasis in the center of the city with giant bamboo stands and towering palm trees. He liked the garden’s exuberance, but also its urbanity. “I didn’t want escape,” he said at today’s New York presentation.Getaway clothes have often formed the basis of Resort collections because they arrive in stores so close to the winter holidays. Piccioli was more interested in aligning elegance and the everyday. “Pre-collections have to be about a wardrobe,” he elaborated. The opening look paints a compelling picture of his vision: a sweeping cape, silk shirtdress, suede boots, and wide-brimmed hat without a single superfluous embellishment or stitch, and all in complementary shades of purple. Piccioli has mastered the art of doing more with less.A blouse in dark red taffeta and a long skirt in plum taffeta, both couture-ish in their proportions, were just as good at marrying the real with an alluring sense of grandeur. It was that juxtaposition that animated the collection’s most novel looks, like a black evening suit with a cape-like jacket embroidered in sequins and ostrich plumes and bermuda shorts in place of trousers, or a streamlined, long black shirtdress whose multicolor stripes were formed by tiny embroideries of crystals and feathers.Piccioli is lucky to have at his fingertips decades worth of pictures of archival Valentino Garavani looks. One famous 1968 photo of Lauren Hutton inspired a naively and lively printed day dress, and another of Veruschka circa the late ’70s was the template for an apricot satin pajama set voluptuously trimmed in feather tassels. Piccioli kept the aesthetic firmly in the now with sturdy flat sandals boasting strass gryphons and snakes. Smart, chic footwear for the Orto Botanico and beyond.
22 May 2019
The massively influentialValentino coutureshow Pierpaolo Piccioli staged in January, with its diverse cast, has been reverberating throughout the wide world of fashion ever since—visibly shifting the needle of the industry toward volume and glamour, and cementing the normalization of inclusive casting. Piccioli is a magnetic, down-to-earth guy who cares about celebrating the skilled people who work for him, a man on an intuitive mission to place fashion on a positive plane. “I feel that people are looking for emotion and dreams—but not distant dreams,” he said today before his ready-to-wear show was about to take to the runway. “I want to create a community for Valentino. I mean something different from ‘lifestyle,’ which is about owning objects. It’s about people who share values.”In prepping this show, he’d reached out laterally in two directions to connect with cocreators from beyond the exclusive realms of the Roman house. One was the continuation of the creative brainstorming with Jun Takahashi of Undercover that the pair started withValentino’s menswear. This time they morphed together a print of a 19th-century neoclassical sculpture of kissing lovers with a pop-punkish image of roses. The prints proliferated over coats and dresses, settling most beautifully as a cut-out pink bloom appliquéd on white lace in the breast of a slim cream midi dress.Piccioli had also been hit by the resonances of the direct actionMovement for the Emancipation of Poetry, which anonymously pastes lyrical lines on walls in cities around the world. The idea of publicly accessible poetry about love and tendernessled him to commissionthe Scottish poet and artist Robert Montgomery and the three young writers (Greta Bellamacina, Mustafa The Poet, and Yrsa Daley-Ward) to contribute to a slim volume,Valentino on Love,which was left on seats for the audience to pick up. An illuminated billboard with lines by Montgomery stood at the end of the runway, reading, “The people you love become ghosts inside of you and like this you keep them alive.” Piccioli showed how he’d picked lines from the anthology to be printed or embroidered inside coats, on mid-layers of tulle dresses, inside bags and boots—so that only the wearer would know they are there.In between all these gestures consciously intended to include a much younger customer—there was a series of leggy tunics and short coats—came the timeless, drop-dead-simple side of Valentino.
The beauty of the cut and balance of a red A-line silk dress with an integral scarf flung diagonally across it, or a deep purple floor-length gown with fluted panels visible only in movement—these are the fashion poetics that Piccioli and his team make near impossible to translate into words but whose appeal will speak beyond seasons and down generations.
3 March 2019
“For me, it’s about more than clothes,” said Pierpaolo Piccioli backstage at his magisterial Valentino show, which effectively brought Paris’s haute couture season to a close. Céline Dion stood by to congratulate him, still fighting the tears that had convulsed her during the presentation. “You have given women back their beauty,” said Dion, bursting into tears again.Designers including Raf Simons, Clare Waight Keller, Giambattista Valli, Christian Louboutin, and Valentino Garavani himself were on hand to support Piccioli, and if the preshow atmosphere was ripe with anticipation, Piccioli did not disappoint. The collection was indeed transportingly beautiful, a triumph of audacious color, flawless workmanship, and bravura statements for night leavened with glamorous and insouciant real-life propositions for day.And then there was the show casting. In the midst of fittings two days earlier, Piccioli had diversity on his mind. “What if Cecil Beaton’s [1948] photograph of those Charles James dresses could be with black women?” he asked, pointing out that iconic picture of a bevy of mid-century swans on his inspiration board. Piccioli had surrounded the image with others taken from the pages ofEbonyandJetmagazines from that period through the 1970s, which included such icons as Eartha Kitt and Beverly Johnson. They were joined by stately medieval depictions of black Madonnas, painterly representations of black beauty like the women in Kerry James Marshall’s impactful contemporary work, and the cover girls of Franca Sozzani’s July 2008 Black Issue of ItalianVogue. Piccioli’s casting shamed the tokenism of even recent memory and included Sozzani’s cover girls, Liya Kebede and Naomi Campbell, alongside newcomers such as Ugbad Abdi, making her runway debut, her face framed in volutes of chestnut brown horsehair crin. The diversity in the show made Piccioli’s idiosyncratic colors sing even louder.“You don’t invent color,” said Piccioli, “but you can invent new harmonies for color.” This season, those unexpected mixes included a sugared almond pink cashmere coat faced in coral, worn with a chocolate crepe blouse and emerald gabardine pants, or a lilac serape thrown over orange pants and an oyster crepe blouson fringed with floor length budellini—the padded rouleau fringe beloved of Valentino himself—in pale mauve.
Even the solid colors were remarkable and included voluminous ball gowns in Matisse blue organza, peridot green sequins, turquoise lace, and tangerine silk faille.
23 January 2019
It was a tale of two bros, really. Pierpaolo Piccioli met Jun Takahashi of Undercover when Valentino put on its show inTokyoat the end of last year. Takahashi and Piccioli decided to collaborate on prints that would appear in both of their menswear collections, one after the other. “It’s a social experiment!“ Piccioli said backstage as the Valentino boys were lining up.Takahashi has done the artwork—themed on Edgar Allan Poe—with time traveler slogans, spaceships, skulls, and a joint VU logo for the Valentino-Undercover-branded bits. But the double-faced shapes and the thinking are still very Pierpaolo. He said he’d been looking at the fluidity of Italian tailoring in the 1980s—there was a Herb Ritts photo of a louchely relaxed Valentino suit on the mood board—but the learning he took from that was thinking how to integrate sportswear into it. “To me, Valentino is a couture house, but to be relevant today, it has to be more inclusive and open to new opportunities. That’s my idea, always.”So up came another idea: a collaboration with Birkenstock. “It is a shoe that has universality, like denim. It has no gender, no status,“ he said. But Birks in winter? “Ha! They’re seasonless too,” he laughed, pointing at the models’ feet. “Just wear them with socks.”Piccioli is adamant that men are not going to give up streetwear, or at least the comfort that goes with it, anytime soon. “I’m not going to renounce sneakers and put back on shoes every day!“ he said. “So the thing is to find a new way to integrate sportswear. To have a coat with the ease of a hoodie.” Still, there’s a distinct Italian-accented glamour about what Piccioli showed. Not any of the tighter-‘70s looks that are beginning to emerge, but something more like a layered trapeze volume, moving away from the body. Very Italian.
16 January 2019
When it came to presenting a Valentino collection in Tokyo for the first time—Pre-Fall 2019 for both men and women (another first)—Pierpaolo Piccioli wanted to break away from the house’s historical world of lacquered beauty and to put on a show in a concrete warehouse next to a river where ships once off-loaded their cargo. It was a statement of the way he has adapted the codes of the house to the modern world with intelligent focus and grace.In this raw space, the refinement of the clothes stood out with added drama as the pianist Angèle David-Guillou performed her haunting composition “Desert Stilts” on a gleaming black Steinway to the accompaniment of lively strings.“I love the culture of Japan,” declared Piccioli at a morning preview of the festive evening presentation. “It’s so modern with a sense of tradition which is romantic, not nostalgic—it’s part of the present.” In a moment where cultural sensitivities in the fashion world are on high alert, Piccioli explored the subtleties of his host country with his characteristic soulful elegance, particularly the concept of ma—the space or interval between objects, or the telling pause in a conversation—and of wabi-sabi, which finds beauty in imperfection. “I’ve always been fascinated by this idea,” Piccioli explained, “Western culture is about symmetry, perfection, static beauty, while wabi-sabi is more close to the idea of harmony, of inner grace. Time goes by and it adds, it doesn’t take away. It’s really interesting for this moment—in the past, beauty was perfection, but I really feel beauty is about diversity, that this idea of wabi-sabi is very modern in this moment.”Piccioli is also drawn to the Japanese art of kintsugi, of repairing the cracks of broken porcelain with a molten gold effect that adds new layers of beauty, “so the most broken pieces become the most precious—the opposite to Western culture. Time adds something to beauty.” And what designer could fail to be moved by a culture that, as Piccioli explained, celebrates “the symbolic act of dressing up. People in the street dress like a ceremony, like a ritual”?On the designer’s mood boards and in his exquisitely produced collection inspiration books were such East-West juxtapositions as a kintsugi vase and a Piero della Francesca fresco in an Italian church, or Leonardo da Vinci’sLady With an Erminewith an exquisite ancient red lacquered Japanese figure.
(Renaissance art also appeared in the purses produced in collaboration with Undercover’s Jun Takahashi, which will only be sold in Valentino’s Tokyo flagship store, but more widely available runway collaborations included puffer jackets designed for Moncler and the playfully surreal self-portraiture of the 21-year-old artist Izumi Miyazaki that appeared on loose dresses and parkas.)
27 November 2018
There’s no way of speaking about this without sounding silly and girlish, but sorry, it has to be said: Valentino tonight was just utterly, lusciously all-round gorgeous. “I was thinking of paradises, about artists’ colonies of the past,” said designer Pierpaolo Piccioli. “There were reasons why artistic people went off to places like that—so they could live their identities,” he said. “Today, everyone is talking about escapism. But I don’t believe in that—l think everyone should just live their identities in the city, or wherever they are.”Kristen McMenamy—her white-haired, elegant, individualist self—grandly led the parade in a voluminous black cotton off-the-shoulder dress. There followed lots of looks in black—each one effectively a different character sketch: an amazing slim black cotton lace dress with an asymmetric cape thrown over one shoulder; a tuxedo with a fine tulle ruffle spilling from the front; an incredible peasant dress with a bubble skirt and balloon sleeves. Then Piccioli went wild with color: Valentino red dresses, with fine fan-pleating going on; a jersey dress with a caped top, half which somehow ran around the back and joined its skirt; something delicious in fondant pink taffeta with balloon sleeves.The variety—all this inclusive fabulousness of shape—was breathtaking. Then followed the print: wildly joyful patterns in colors inspired by Matisse and Gauguin—printed silk velvet pajamas, a purple and green curlicued hand-painted print. Somewhere near the end came a sequined and feathered emerald and lavender column that shimmered like a dream.In a season when there’s been so much talk about the appreciation of couture dressmaking and craft skills, Piccioli just took it to the ultimate. It was as accomplished, as complexly cut—and as simple as that.
30 September 2018
In the final show of the haute couture week, Pierpaolo Piccioli for the house of Valentino unwittingly offered a rather different answer to that question that had loomed over the catwalks: What would Meghan Markle wear? Possibly nothing, unless the house of Windsor gets super chic (of a fearless, head-spinning variety) super fast. Banish the drabulousness, begone the greige! Piccioli, instead, offered a parade of such extravagantly saturated hues, swaggering proportions, and how-does-one-even-do-that craftsmanship that in closing it brought the audience to its feet and a tear to the eye of Mr. Valentino (seated, as always, front row, along with Luca Guadagnino, Alba Rohrwacher, Alexandre Desplat, and the singer Mika).But let’s begin with the backstory. “With ready-to-wear, your vision of beauty relates to the times you are living in,” said Piccioli. “Couture involves a deeper and more intimate perspective, to go further into your own vision of beauty.” And this season his vision involves a mash-up of Greek mythology, 17th- and 18th-century painting, the films of Pasolini and the photographs of Deborah Turbeville, medieval armor, and Ziggy Stardust. Sounds mad yet looks magnificent, especially in capes appliquéd, embroidered, and even perhaps quilted with gods and goddesses. An evening dress composed of multiple brocades, rhinestones, sequins, pearls, and vivid textural embroideries is described by Piccioli as “Renaissance meets Versailles meets ’60s whatever” but the truth is far more fabulous: It’s not a set of references, but a dream of a dress, which is what couture should be, frankly.And there are many dreamy dresses in this collection: a trio in featherweight taffeta that wrap, balloon, and float around the body, tethered by discreet micro-pleating; a red strapless gown (signature Valentino) sculpted from a scuba jersey; an emerald and mauve column in crepe intarsia depicting an entwined Daphne and Apollo, cut like a long T-shirt and cinched at the waist by a drawstring.For day Piccioli paired extravagant capes with cropped full pants or neat Bermuda shorts and blouses with soft ties at the neck or exuberantly ruffled cuffs. There are long pleated skirts of radzimir and velvet, backless jumpsuits in lightweight double-face, and lamé jackets and tees. The colors—gold, strawberry, almond, pistachio, turquoise, tangerine, lemon—are luscious and dramatic, and the volumes equally so.
These are clothes for when one is tired of merely blending in or in any way circumscribing one’s presence in the world. These clothes are not about being “skinny” or “sexy” or “avant-garde.” They are about being dressed beautifully and courageously, and that is so rare as to be utterly thrilling to behold.Look at the images from this show, and do not be distracted by Guido Palau’s fantastic teased coifs or his wonderful flower heads. Do not spend too long on Kaia and her pink feather fiesta, beautiful though it is. Consider, instead, a chiffon cape of emerald sequins paired with simple wool trousers in prune and ask yourself,Would I wear it?Would Meghan? And if not, why? Shouldn’t we all dream of, and realize, a world so unapologetically fabulous?
4 July 2018
Pierpaolo Piccioli and his date Frances McDormand honestly looked as if they had the most fun of anyone at the Met Gala, what with their vogueing dance routine in the museum, and their fridge-ransacking for alcohol back at the hotel—absolute Instagram classics. Without any pandering to the stuffy rules of Old World etiquette, Piccioli has managed to gather himself huge intergenerational popularity: a middle-aged dad who is cool, funny, and unpretentiously himself—an immensely humanizing personality who simultaneously upholds the timeless wonder of Valentino haute couture. In this week of menswear shows, he was talking more backstage about breaking down perceived Old Guard barriers. “It’s about how Valentino can become a relevant brand for today’s generation. I want to get out of this exclusivity and to be more inclusive,” he said. “I really want couture to be alive. You can’t keep it to the red carpet.”The meeting of a couture house and the street: What with Virgil Abloh appearing at Louis Vuitton, and Kim Jones at Christian Dior menswear, it’s the theme of the week. In Piccioli’s formula, he said he’d taken to “bootlegging” Valentino’s ’70s and ’80s scarf prints, and overlaying them on classic fabrics, including the camouflage print he himself has established as a menswear code. The couture payoff: ostrich feathers clipped to the backs of trainers, intarsia peacock wings sewn into the back of a gray sweatshirt and a camel trenchcoat, beaded animal embroideries on performance jackets, and feathered baseball caps and bucket hats.
20 June 2018
A year ago Pierpaolo Piccioli was in New York presenting a Valentino collection influenced by the street. Eighties hip-hop and Baz Luhrmann’sThe Get Downwere his jumping-off points. Well, he was back today and talking about the street again, only this time it was his native Rome circa the ’70s that piqued his interest. Maybe it was theCall Me By Your Nameeffect or the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” exhibition, with its collection of Vatican treasures, that had him thinking so intently of home.“Baroque, Pasolini, angels, pagans—in all these layers together lies the beauty of Roma,” Piccioli said. “There is a harmony of many things.” The collections are oceans apart: Where last year’s was bright and athleisure-y, this one is broodier and bourgeois. Broad strokes, though Piccioli’s intentions then and now are the same. In his pre-collections, he wants to make Valentino clothes for women to really live in. Of course, there were the precious dresses the house is famous for—some real beauties, too, like a black sequined column picked out with tangy yellow mimosa flowers, and an ivory tulle peasant gown with Art Deco beading. But best of all was a kicky little white shirtdress striped with metallic sequins, because it spoke to the overriding message about ease.Elsewhere he got his point across by serving up everyday eclecticism: a ’70s-cut blazer worn with a silk shirt, denim shorts, and fringed, stacked-heel loafers; a poncho jacket and flared jeans; a charcoal gray pantsuit paired with white trainers. What made these combinations compelling was his liberal and imaginative use of archival Valentino logos. He called them “bootlegged,” i.e., all mixed up, and even in a market oversaturated with branding, his treatment of them, more like prints than promotion, looked novel and fresh. Also imminently wearable: all manner of fluttery silk dresses in micro-floral prints.
22 May 2018
Something is going very right at Valentino. It would be hard to name another designer in the establishment echelons of fashion who is putting out a more inclusive, relatable, and unforced sense of modern elegance than Pierpaolo Piccioli. After his sensationalhaute couture collection in January, it was hard to believe that he could follow up so quickly with a different but equally nuanced ready-to-wear show. “Romanticism,” he called it. “It’s a strength today, if you’re able to be assertive but not aggressive.”How to put it? Where so many other designers have sought to meet these fraught times with throwbacks to ’80s-power-woman shoulder-padded templates, Piccioli has found a new cadence of expression. It includes flowing lines, flowers, layers, scalloped edges, and a vibrant, sophisticated color sense. For evening, there was a wealth of options to cover all occasions, according to the person a woman might be. It might mean flowing, completely covered-up gowns or ankle-length A-line tunics with slim trousers beneath. It embraced tailoring in a fresh way, producing combinations of jackets over dresses over pants. Piccioli handled both minimalism, in spare, dramatic shapes, and decorative embellishment in blown-up floral appliqués and jacquards.A measure of how Piccioli has developed Valentino’s range is how far he’s moved it on from the Renaissance virginal look which first put the house in a leadership position in the days when he was working with Maria Grazia Chiuri. In this second phase, there was only one reminder of the empire-line princess neckline that was the house signature a few years ago. Now the collection offers a smorgasbord for women regardless of age, shape, or cultural tastes. It recognized dignity and delighted in amazing color. Bravo, Piccioli. This was outstanding.
4 March 2018
If the skill of squaring circles can be pulled off anywhere in fashion, it ought to be in haute couture—it even sounds like an obscure cutting technique. But here are the apparent irreconcilables: How can a designer toss around operatic shapes, bows, and traditional fantasy, meanwhile convincing a modern woman there’s a way she can approach wearing it? Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Valentino couture solved the contradictions in his opening look: a gloriously puffy yellow-ochre faille coat, shrugged over what looked like Carhartt-brown trousers and a simple white tank—with a giant aquamarine ostrich feather saucer hat floating above. Yes: If you’re a damn cool casual woman, you can come to the couture ball after all.This Paris haute couture season has been wanting someone to let loose with feathers and wildly clashing colors and an unfettered sense of fantasia, albeit without going down any tiresomely stereotyped princess route. Piccioli was the man who nailed it, simply by introducing the idea that couture can also mean trousers (though possibly in dusty pink or turquoise moire silk), an oh-so-easy foil for the grandmotherly extravagance of a sweeping ’50s opera coat or a ’60s tunic cocktail top.The thing about Piccioli is that he’s also a walking contradiction: a down-to-earth dreamer. The fantasy excited in him as a boy by seeing glamorous magazine photographs of ’50s-through-‘80s haute couture is balanced by his equal respect for the people who dedicate their skills to making every piece materialize. “I hate it when they’re called ‘petite mains.’ They are not ‘hands,’ they’re people.” Without the specialists who work in the ateliers of Valentino in Rome no rules can either be bent or gloriously elaborated on. They were the people who made possible the image of the chaste Renaissance princesses with which Piccioli and (then) Maria Grazia Chiuri changed fashion in the late aughts. They’re the ones who can now also swivel in this new direction for the house at Piccioli’s bidding.He made a point of naming each look after its maker—thereby honoring the huge scope of the capabilities of Valentino, and widening the chances of many kinds of women (given a certain level of income) finding themselves among the variety. It’s not that the ingenue has completely been banished. Sparkly fairy-tale dresses are to be found under this roof, but there are now many more ways to be and feel brilliantly dressed.
One can own one’s identity by being drop-dead simple, or flamboyantly, colorfully impressive. Whatever, it was a longed-for breakthrough.
24 January 2018
Pierpaolo Piccioli’s vision of menswear is one of those state-of-play vantage points on where we’re at with male dress codes. Whereas what’s considered sartorially accepted used to be dictated by the dominant, wealthy, and middle-aged, now it’s the young who are actively influencing their fathers, uncles, and bosses’ generation. Literally, you can read that from the ground up, starting with the general permission to wear trainers with everything, especially if they’re in the on-trend, heavy “dad” shoe genre. Now, the barometer of change is rising into the trouser department. As Piccioli rhetorically put it before the show, “How can a tracksuit become normal?”When it’s slim and tailored, and almost indistinguishable from men’s skinny pants, is part of his answer. Then add a classy narrow overcoat, a puffer, or parka, and that’s a smoothed cross-generationally, trans-globally understandable template, set right there. “I don’t like fancy territory,” Piccioli said. “I like real.”Well, it depends on what you call fancy. Piccioli’s narrow silhouettes also comprised some pretty elaborate Italianate appliqué and embroideries of flowers, and abstracted tiger patterns on the backs of flawlessly tailored traditional overcoats. Some of them came studded, DIY-punk style. Piccioli had selected two archival haute couture photographs—womenswear, of course—as inspiration. Both from the late ’60s, they showed a print of a dragon and a tiger. The tiger pattern also came deeply embossed into the surface of one of the Valentino Moncler puffers, a collaboration with the kind of logo co-branding that currently sends collectors wild.While acknowledging Piccioli’s clever sprinklings of imagery, it would be overstating matters to call it a groundbreaking collection. Rather, it’s one where the designer said he reached back into Italian art history, Picasso’s work, and late-’70s and ’80s music—Adam Ant and The Cure’s Robert Smith included—with the purpose of transmitting the expressive and romantic side of masculinity. “The male wardrobe is a century of rules,” he reflected, “and I think in the past decades men have changed very fast. They don’t want to be stereotyped anymore.”
17 January 2018
With a men’s show scheduled for next Wednesday in Paris and an haute couture outing to present the Wednesday after that, Pierpaolo Piccioli was in New York today, showing off his prodigious Valentino Pre-Fall offering at the Institute of Fine Arts. It’s a grand old mansion dating to the days of Millionaires’ Row, but these pictures were shot in Valentino’s Roman atelier, “where everything is born.” Piccioli liked the metaphor. The collection was informed by the house’s past, he explained, but in quite a personal way, with random references: to Valentino Garavani’s 1968 tiger print (among other bold animal motifs), to black-and-white stripes from the ’80s, and to a wave-like logo print that dates to the mid-’70s. “This is a moment about identity and heritage, and how it can be alive today,” he said.Piccioli has lately created a logo of his own. The letters VLTN appeared all over accessories, including on a clever “paper shopping bag” made from leather. They were even intarsia’d in black on the back of a white mink and appeared in reverse (white-on-black) on a shiny puffer coat made in collaboration with Moncler. Not unlike the Resort collection he showed in New York last May, this one was keyed to the street, with an emphasis on tracksuits and track dresses, but the reliance on branding here was brasher. Piccioli has sidelined the romance of his earliest Valentino outings in favor of an attitude much more hedonistic. Pictures of Bianca Jagger, Jerry Hall, and Grace Jones in nightclub regalia populated his mood board, and there was certainly no shortage of party dresses, the good majority of them in black with sparkling extras, from crystal rosettes to polka dots in gold lamé. The workmanship at Valentino is peerless, and he’s handled the shift deftly, even if there will be some holdouts for a softer sensibility.Speaking of, should the #Blackout be over by the time the Oscars roll around in early March, the red tulle gown with heart-shaped ruffles on the skirt would be a sweetly smashing choice for Saoirse Ronan or some other young starlet.
10 January 2018
In the search for a creative way to overcome the Sturm und Drang of this strife-filled time, Pierpaolo Piccioli took Valentino on a space mission. In a manner of speaking, anyway. The Spring collection, he said, had been partly inspired by the perspective of the Apollo moon landing, in which the Earth was photographed from space and revealed in all its natural wonder. By the same token, by psychically hovering over the history of the house, Piccioli discovered something else to appreciate that he’d never gone to before. “I wanted to get back something of the glamour of the ’80s that Mr. Valentino did so well,” he said.Voilà: being grateful for that which we’re blessed with—a fresh starting point for Spring that mixed clear plastics with sequins, and athleticism with glam and roses. The collection veered away from the familiar visions of Renaissance princesses, but it still played young—curiously, almost into the territory of Helmut Lang’s ’90s NASA-influenced collections, with its pared-away, layered necklines; utility jackets; a jumpsuit; and lean jeans.Still, no matter. In its own way, Piccioli’s collection reads as yet another strand in the season’s enabling of the impulses of girls who just want to dress up and go out dancing. Rather than full-on disco flash, there were mini bubble dresses and ultra-shortened translations of Mr. Valentino’s ruffled couture dresses of the ’80s.Piccioli has his own handwriting and the wonders of Valentino’s inimitable powers in the embroidery at his disposal—the coming together of clear plastic sequins and flowers in a little T-shirt shift dress at the end was delightful. Strangely, though, this collection was somewhere on the spectrum of all the other designers who are doing disco and glam in ways that look forward by retrieving a past. It’s quite a crowd now: There’s Anthony Vaccarello abbreviating Saint Laurent’s glamour; Alessandro Michele at Gucci with his ’70s Elton John references; Julien Dossena at Paco Rabanne doing space age–meets–’80s disco. Valentino girls still have their purely romantic escape routes (the designer hasn’t abandoned the long, covered-up dresses the label is known for), but Piccioli ticked the boxes of a whole other set of seasonal trends here, too.
1 October 2017
When one’s atelier literally sits in the shadow of the Vatican, it isn’t so much a question of whether the church will inspire one’s designs, but when and to what effect. For Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino, the answers were now and with great success. It wasn’t the expected next move for this house. The Valentino Resort collection, shown last month in New York, was an all-out celebration of glamleisure—track suits with mink coats!—and that isn’t necessarily profane, but it’s damn secular. Not so for the haute couture, and this was the starting point for Piccioli: He wanted to draw a line between notions of the sacred and the ritualistic in the church and in the practice of haute couture. The parallels are convincing—all that initiation, craft, training, lore—and the aesthetic impulses not dissimilar. His starting references were the portraits of Zurbarán, those of cardinals and bishops, nuns and martyrs. There are hooded capes and silhouettes that resemble the robes of priests, and there are hammered metal bags with enamel mosaic details (a collaboration with Harumi Klossowska) in the shapes of animal heads meant to symbolize the seven deadly sins.One could quibble with these gestures: Most women do not want to dress like extras fromThe Handmaid’s Taleno matter how relevant it (sadly) may be, and most couture clients would have more than a passing familiarity with some deadly sins and not want to be reminded of the source of their fortune by their handbag. But one would be missing the point, and missing the mystery and beauty of the handwork and artistry behind Piccioli’s extraordinary designs. A simple pleated skirt is made of strips of emerald feathers. There are brocades of cotton lace and cashmere, chiffon plissé with velvet intarsia, combinations of fabrics and textures and embroideries that dazzle without recourse to sparkle (except in a luminous column of tiny bugle-beaded fringe suspended from a velvet bodice). There is a modesty to Piccioli’s eveningwear that belies the 1000+ hours of craftsmanship required to create a single garment. It is an act of devotion to make such a piece, and, frankly, a mysterious and blessed endeavor at this point in our history . . . ergo the correctness of Piccioli’s original analogy.It is easy to be distracted by the parade of exceptional evening offerings at Valentino—here a cranberry cloud of silk, there an appliquéd column hemmed in mink and embroidered with feathers.
But the real accomplishment of this collection is the daywear, with its leggy yet comforting proportions, its modular assemblages (turtleneck with shirt with tunic with dickey with trouser with cape), its delicious yet slightly off palette (marshmallow, strawberry, banana, prune, chocolate, mint). Day clothes have been, bizarrely, the focus of this Couture Week. (Bizarre because who are those clients who aren’t living in jeans?) But where other creators have looked to a breed of chic that dates from another time, with its roots in the postwar era, Piccioli argued for chic of a very different order—and not a religious one. It’s about being modest yet grand, colorful yet demure, comfortable yet never sloppy. A look to worship.
5 July 2017
It’s becoming clear that awareness of the peripheral influence of millennials is having an increasing influence on the center of luxury menswear houses and brands this season. Why? Are millennials everywhere an extraordinarily wealthy generation? Not in the West, anyway, where they’re more likely to be saddled with higher debt and lower wages than their parents ever were. But in the age of social media, when the likes of Gosha Rubchinskiy, Vetements, Supreme, and Palace have converted teens into fanatical collectors and traders in hot items, the main players are looking for a way into the action. AtValentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli is one of them.Backstage before his show, he was pointing out the VLTN lettering printed on streamer-like scarves attached to white shirts, and daubed in white paint on a classic brown overcoat. “It’s one of the logos of the house from the '80s. I didn’t like it, because I knew it,” he shrugged, “but I have a lot of young guys on our team, and they loved it. I like to listen to them—you have to listen, to learn. So I tried to re-set my eyes. And I started to see it in a different way.”Piccioli also said he’d been reading Jungian psychology and thinking about archetypes and human social consciousness—something just a little bit older than social media. It was hard to fathom the portent of that in a sweltering basement full of dressed-up teenagers, but as the show went out, it was clearer that Piccioli had been tweaking such ordinary standards as chinos (adding a pleat in back of the ankle) and adding handwork and embellishment to anoraks and tracksuits. The human touch he alluded to ranged glancingly through folk and tribal embroideries—beading, cross-stitch, and mirrored hand-work which might have been sourced from African, Central American, Eastern European, and Native American peoples.Still, if logos and one-world signaling should fail to get through, there is one aspect of this collection which certainly will. Piccioli is a brilliant accessory designer by his original calling, and there was not one pair of eyes in the room which wasn’t instantly riveted by what was on the feet. Each pair of sneakers was its own individual collage of multicolored knitted textile and appliqué. There were zig-zags, flashes of metallics, totemic symbols, piped, striped bindings. Each pair amazing. Clearly, being so complex and so special, they will be very, very expensive and also very hard to get.
In other words, packed with all the ingredients guaranteed to get an international fanboy base activated before the last model had left the room.
21 June 2017
The 2018 Resort season is a world tour in more ways than one—not just entailing travel to far-flung destination shows, but also including collections that trumpet local cultures: Ancient Greece for Chanel, Japan for Louis Vuitton. Chalk it up to our divisive times; designers seem captivated by notions of identity, celebrating them and pushing their boundaries. In today’s superb Valentino show, Pierpaolo Piccioli took up that most American of references: hip-hop.Cultural exploration has been the project at Valentino since the beginning of Piccioli and his former partner Maria Grazia Chiuri’s tenure at the house, but more often than not it found them investigating their Italian roots. Back in January, Piccioli held his first solo preseason show for the label at the Beekman hotel, citing Ellis Island and the idea of immigration as his starting points. Today, again, he was in New York, but with a more modern reference that resulted in a more vital lineup. He said he fell for Baz Luhrmann’s Netflix showThe Get Down. Connected to the street and erupting with color, it pushed the Valentino vocabulary forward, out of the realm of the inviolably precious and into the world of the everyday.To be sure, the tracksuit has gotten its fair share of attention from the high fashion world—we have reached peak athleisure. But cut in technical jersey, or, better, hammered silk in brilliant shades of emerald, ruby, and pink, Piccioli’s tracksuits looked fairly irresistible. Sewn from four narrow panels of that gorgeous hammered silk, his pants swished above be-feathered flip-flops or studded shower shoes. There were also pleated track skirts, short and long zip-front track dresses with contrast piping, and extrapolations on the sporty theme that found Piccioli layering the house’s signature sheer A-line midi dresses over color-blocked leotards. Fresh.Beyond the high-low hip-hop references, Piccioli touched on army fatigues and washed and faded denim, embroidering the former with pre-Columbian motifs and deconstructing the latter with split waistbands and sleeves. He reunited with Zandra Rhodes on a lipstick motif that decorated a tiny romper and an oversize bomber. And among the many embroidered evening stunners, a streamlined column in hot pink silk velvet radiated desirability. On Sunday night, as Piccioli prepped for today’s show, he spoke about diversity and “finding the harmony in difference.
” Fashion isn’t going to solve the world’s problems (and fashion still has its own problem with model diversity), but Piccioli’s instinct is right on. So was this collection.
23 May 2017
Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Valentino seems to be one of the few havens unaffected by the anxiety and the urge to protest, which is a constant theme running through fashion now. Perhaps that’s because this label, based in its idyllic Roman headquarters, has already been rebuilt on escapism. If you’re in need of a fantasy dress, Valentino, with its exquisite workmanship and aura of art-history-tinted romance, will be very near top of mind. So this season, there was no panic reaction going on in Rome, just a carrying on as usual.Piccioli said he’d merged Victoriana and the Memphis Group as starting points. On paper, they have nothing in common, but that barely mattered to the results. The Victoriana provided plenty in the line of the long, high-waisted, high-necked house signature dresses; the Memphis angle led to ice cream colors and a patchworked fur coat with jazzy patterns of hands and numerals.A fashion eye will jump to the newness, though. That came in the swingy, waistless, knee-length dresses, with volumes swirling as the girls walked. It was shown in several iterations, from a black-and-white squiggle print to plain satin. The ultimate version was smothered in raspberry and pink sequins, hands down the Valentino dress of the season.
5 March 2017
It’s an oft-repeated, slightly annoying fashion-world cliché to say that the purpose of haute couture is “to make women dream,” begging as it does the question of who dares presume to know or direct what women dream about? In practice, it often turns out to be synonymous with elaborate froufrou—only serving to define “a dream” as something that commercially divides the very rich from the rest of us. Pierpaolo Piccioli, flying solo in control of Valentino couture for the first time, spoke about dreaming in a different sense, as fittings were going on at the house. “Dreams make us human; they go down to who each of us are, in ourselves,” he said. That thought had led him back to Greek myths and legends, “because they were the beginning of naming human feelings.”Those impulses—thinking about dreamscapes and the pure, classical aesthetics of ancient Greek architecture—had a liberating effect on Piccioli’s collection. Where there had previously been precious Renaissance virgin princesses, now there were young goddesses wearing flowing pleated gowns, statuesque floor-length tabards, cloaks, and Greek sandals. It was a change in the silhouette, a shift toward purity and simplicity, and with the long chiffon scarves trailing out behind as the models walked, the dresses were astoundingly beautiful in motion.Will this new look of Piccioli’s be enough to reset women’s dreams about eveningwear? Highly likely: The shift toward this dignified long silhouette, covered up yet wholly unrestricted, is certain to have a magnetic attraction for grown-ups—and for anyone of any age who rejects the conventions of sexy dressing. Another idea, not so obvious from a distance, is that fluid, wide trousers were slipped under some of the looks. To that extent, anyway, the influence of Valentino and its easy-to-wear silhouette is bound to be a dream-fulfiller for many, when taken up by brands further down the market.All of that passes the tests of mass influence, relevance, and great timing, but it’s not the ultimate thing that distinguishes and elevates the practice of haute couture to the true dream level. That resides in the uses of technique, and the application of handcrafted skills. On those points, the Roman couture workers at the Valentino ateliers surpassed themselves.
Close up, the micro fan-pleating, intricately pieced together from segments of silk and jersey, the microscopically narrow lines of silver bugle beads cascading irregularly from shoulder to floor, the encrustations of three different designs of floral guipure cut-out lace—all this and very much more was just dreamy, in every case. Truth to tell, the show could have taken an edit, a few less of the duplicated silhouettes. But then again, Valentino has so many couture customers, with the Academy Awards and the Met Ball coming up, maybe it just means there’ll be less of a tussle between stylists.
25 January 2017
Pierpaolo Piccioli is a guy who gets on a plane to seek out his heroes and heroines. Not content with pinning printouts of inspirational pictures on a mood board in the usual fashion, he goes to the trouble (and the Valentino bankrolled expense) of going to the living source, and starting a conversation. For Spring, which was Piccioli’s first solo womenswear collection, he went to London to persuade Zandra Rhodes to collaborate on new prints (a smash hit). Previously, Valentino has commissioned ’70s photographic greats David Bailey and Sarah Moon. This time, he went to Liverpool to look up Jamie Reid, the graphic designer who worked with the Sex Pistols, who offered Piccioli usage of two pertinent-to-now slogans that ended up sewn to the backs of Valentino’s menswear coats and on baseball caps. One: “Beauty is a birthright, reclaim your heritage.” Two: “It seemed to be the end, until the next beginning.”One way and another, the condition of the world, and of masculinity itself, is inescapably under discussion in this cycle of shows. Piccioli said his route is to look for optimism, to measure change in the long perspective. “I loved punk as a state of mind—anarchy of the mind,” he said. “Men have definitely changed more than women in the last two decades. I started this collection by going back to the idea of the gentleman. To me, today it means to be a gentle man. Gentleness is an expression of freedom. Expressing your fragility is the new strength.”In practice, that step forward manifested in a collection strong on a huge variety of Valentino outerwear. It ran from ankle-grazing duster coats to capes, windowpane-checked car coats to duffles, mackintoshes, and multiple iterations of short, boxy jackets. The color palette took in pinks, mint, camel, and riffs on the tweedy English-trad spectrum—a multitude of expertly collaged shades, which were also reflected in the massively successful Valentino sneakers Piccioli has developed over time. There was a differently colored pair of sneakers allocated to each young model who walked this runway. Shoes are just shoes, yet somehow, that spectrum of choice seemed to allude to the generational individualism in which Piccioli finds hope.
18 January 2017
Pierpaolo Piccioli staged Valentino’s Pre-Fall show at the newly refurbished Beekman hotel this morning. The venue wasn’t happenstance. Piccioli is embarking on a journey as the sole creative director of Valentino, having worked side by side with Maria Grazia Chiuri at the brand for 17 years. In a preview, he called New York “the land of opportunity, a place where dreams come true,” and Valentino promoted the show on Instagram with evocative shots of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline. On the soundtrack, Nina Simone sang, “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life. . . and I’m feeling good,” for anyone who didn’t get the message.Fashion has witnessed countless comings and goings over the past years. If Piccioli and Chiuri’s parting of the ways was more bittersweet than most—theirs was such a success story—it came with a happy ending. Piccioli’s solo debut back in October was an unequivocal triumph, full of magical dresses inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’sThe Garden of Earthly Delightsand with a surprising new emphasis on daywear.He took up that more casual spirit for Pre-Fall, with a caveat: “It’s important to give daywear a touch of dreams.” Marching out on terrific, over-the-knee flat leather boots, the first dress was a short floral print, but with jet-black bugle beads stitched perpendicularly to the frock’s vertical seams. A glossy snakeskin shirtdress was hand-painted with pastel blooms, while a navy peacoat was laser cut and stitched with beads to create what looked like three-dimensional appliqués, exquisitely understated. As for dreamy, pajama sets were paired with patchwork mink coats and slip-on sneakers, a first on a Valentino runway.Those pj’s and minks and other layered looks, like baby dolls accented with ribbed-knit bra tops, hinted ever so slightly at the idea of immigrants arriving with all their possessions on their backs. But overall, the idea was subtly handled. Piccioli seemed more interested in variety than in conveying a single organizing theme. That was especially true with his eveningwear, which ranged from high-neck Victoriana to red carpet–ready red sequins.Piccioli has his first independent menswear and haute couture shows set for next week and the one following in Paris. Does he feel daunted? Quite the opposite, actually. “I just did what I felt,” he said. So far, that’s working just fine indeed.
11 January 2017
We can say it now: There was an anxiety hanging over what would happen to the house ofValentinoafter Maria Grazia Chiuri departed for Christian Dior, thus ending her long and amazingly successful design partnership withPierpaolo Piccioli. No one could be sure who did what, and whether the fairy tale would evaporate with the parting of the ways. Well, as of this sunny Parisian afternoon, that worry has ended. A new chapter written solely by Piccioli opened, and it read just beautifully.Piccioli is an avid researcher, a fan of the Renaissance, an expert in all forms of couture techniques, and even more importantly, is curious and open to the world beyond the Valentino headquarters in Rome. The first step he took was to liberate the ready-to-wear show from the darkness and anonymity of a tent in the Tuileries, and let the light stream in on the girls who walked around the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild—already a change for the better. They were wearing a collection he’d based on looking at a lot of medieval art, but particularly at Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych,The Garden of Earthly Delights—not that the clothes read as historicist at all. “I like to know my history, and then forget it,” Piccioli said at a preview.He’d also become fascinated by the work of Zandra Rhodes, the great British fashion designer of the ’70s and ’80s, known for her hand-drawn prints and floaty, haute hippy dresses, so he got on a plane to London to see her. “He was wonderful,” exclaimed the pink-haired designer, who was sitting in the front row today. “He and an assistant came to my studio for two days, I showed them everything in my archive, and he asked me what I could do to make prints from the Bosch painting. It’s just incredible to see what they did with them.”It was indeed: a magical series of handkerchief-hemmed, diaphanous dresses in pinks to reds came out, delicately printed or embroidered with patterns of birds and fantasy vegetation. The girls, their hair done in simple braids, had fresh faces and rosebud pink lips. On their feet were velvet sandals or wonderful dusty-pink suede slippers with a low block heel and ankle straps.Perhaps the romantic dresses were predictably of the house, though still stunning in all their variety. What was more striking was Piccioli’s daywear. He showed a mouthwatering brocade coat in plush pink, and coral and poison-green patterned boy-cut trousers, and paired them with white shirts in such a way that they also looked completely modern.
For other tastes, he cut single-color crepe dresses with an integral cape, the epitome of elegance in vibrant fuchsia.In short, he aced it, not only meeting expectations but surpassing them too. If Piccioli can keep on developing that rich-looking but practical daywear, then Valentino will likely be adding a whole new constituency of customers to the ones who come to the house looking for dream dresses.
2 October 2016
All’s well that ends well? Let’s sincerely hope so. On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, the Valentino haute couture Fall 2016 collection was Elizabethan themed, a conveniently fitting trope, considering that so many of the bard’s plays were set in a fantasy Renaissance Italy—Romeo and Juliet,The Merchant of Venice,The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and so on.The cast of characters treading the runway were princelings, princesses, and priests, all high white ruffs, doublets, bodices, puffed sleeves, and clerical robes—inspiration richly available to two designers,Pierpaolo PiccioliandMaria Grazia Chiuri, who live in Rome and are surrounded by the portraiture, architecture, and high Catholicism of the Renaissance. It’s a culture these two live and breathe every day, as do the all-important Roman men and women who work in the Valentino couture ateliers. All of them together—as a fashion house on fire—have created an influential and poetic fashion phenomenon over the past few years. It’s their joint capability which can magic up such wonders as the fragile latticework necklines; golden, pearl-embroidered brocades; and whooshing taffeta capes and skirts we saw tonight.There was a fin de siècle subplot to the proceedings, though. It hasn’t quite escalated into a full-blown drama yet, but the denouement is expected any minute, a move which will separate Chiuri from Piccioli, as she heads to Paris and another house. Will this be destabilizing to Valentino? If there was a strain or a distraction going on in the planning of this collection, it lay in the matter that no one had noticed thatAlexander McQueenandSarah Burtonhad both comprehensively trodden the boards of this Elizabethan-clerical look before now. Never mind, though. Valentino’s many couture customers surely won’t quibble. More center-stage is the issue of how the curtain will be brought down on this long and successful design partnership. It’s to be hoped the parting will be managed in as grown-up and tactful a way as these two have always carried on. Even if there are tussles going on backstage, all’s well that ends well is an elegant look for Valentino.
6 July 2016
As a couture house,Valentinoaspires to perfection through the completion of an incontrovertibly finished garment built to the whim and want of its customer. And conventionally, for something to be finished it must look finished, with all the innards of its construction tucked out of sight. Yet what about when that construction has beauty too? And what if being able to see it adds to the experience of inhabiting it?This, clumsily outlined, was the thought process behind a Valentino menswear collection thatMaria Grazia ChiuriandPierpaolo Picciolisaid today was first catalyzed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.” Spanning a catalog of artists running from Rembrandt to Rauschenberg and beyond, it displayed works left incomplete, or, in some cases, at least seemingly so. Some were studies, others discarded projects, and a few morenon finito: works whose authors had left elements of the skeleton visible to highlight the contrast with the flesh.“We were very impressed by this exhibition,” said Piccioli: “The works in it allowed you to see the human process behind the conversation between the artist and the viewer.”Thus, many of the pieces in this collection werenon finitotoo. Perhaps the most striking decorative flourish that Chiuri and Piccioli unpicked was the magisterially tailed roaring panther design taken from a 1967 Valentino couture silk used in an evening dress currently in the collection of the Chicago History Museum. While the original had rhinestone eyes on a dress that was perfectly finished, here it was the rough-around-the-edges visual metaphor for the practice of the whole collection. So on the back and front of cotton field jackets the panther was expressed in an un-inserted intarsia whose edges were left raw and tufted. He snarled at the shoulders of collegiate jackets but was left beheaded. Other non finito elements included the pins left shinily peeking from the unvarnished leather fold of welts on black derby shoes, the irregular fringe of yarn left trailing at the hem and in the body of ribbed, sometimes camouflage, knits. The necklines on smooth bibbed cotton shirts otherwise peppered by broderie anglaise perforations were left collarless and undone. Camouflage was reduced from its conventional five layers of color (plus base fabric) to three.
The irony was that from afar these details were hard to appreciate in a collection that at first sight and without the great privilege of the designers’ preamble appeared almost uniform. You had to look close to see the variation in what was presented as repetition. That added up to an astute rationale for a collection that also featured a lot of customization details available to the customer—monogramming on felt wool cashmere embroidered overcoats, field jackets, and parkas. The collection reflected the habit of man to inhabit the familiar, or as Chiuri put it: “Man is very close to the idea of uniform. Modern uniform in which you represent yourself. Your personal idea. But we really believe that our man is also modern, also clever, also something not regular.” The radical proposition here was not some awkwardly wrought Big Suit whose otherness wheedled needily for attention, but apparently military-industrial clothes whose handcrafted semi-deconstruction signaled their otherness only to those with the eye to see it. This was post-modern luxury mufti par excellence.
22 June 2016
President Obama and Raúl Castro shook hands back in April 2015 a gesture symbolic of the warming diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba. That was all fashion needed to turn the island country into the inspiration point du jour. Stella McCartney name-checked Cuba a year ago at her Resort 2016 presentation, Chanel flew planeloads of journalists to Havana for its Cruise 2017 show last month. Now,Valentino’sMaria Grazia ChiuriandPierpaolo Picciolihave taken a metaphorical trip to Cuba of their own.After a relatively muted Fall collection of ballet pinks and black, their new Resort clothes were a jolt—dense with color, print, and embroidery. “The thing we love about Cuba is the many different memories of the place—African, Spanish, ’50s America,” Chiuri said over the phone. Piccioli picked up the thought: “It gave us a real freedom to mix, like a souvenir, lots of pieces together.” As promised, they touched on their greatest hits, offering apropos tweaks: Their beaded lace evening dresses were made new with large painted wooden beads, and their familiar camouflage jackets came in a softer washed material, as if they’d been worn over and again and had gone through the machine more than a few times. The national flower of Cuba, the white ginger lily, is known locally as mariposa, or butterfly, which happens to be the Valentino house mascot. Here, they flitted over washed and pleated cotton voile dresses with a humble texture. Extending that feeling, a floral print used for a sleeveless dress and full culottes had a handmade batik-y look. Elsewhere, they washed and overdyed a brocade coat, and despite its signature Valentino-red shade, its raw edges and generally undone aspect felt new for the designers. In a fashion world plagued by designer comings and goings, more than seven years in, Chiuri and Piccioli are still refreshing their signatures. That must take its own kind of special diplomacy, and they deserve a cheer for it.
13 June 2016
A pianist was playing compositions by John Cage and Philip Glass, as a stream of girls dressed as dancers going to and from rehearsals and performances walked past her on the runway. TheValentinoshow today was about ballet, or more specifically, the modern dance movement and its “happenings,” but forMaria Grazia ChiuriandPierpaolo Piccioli, it was also a deeper commentary on slowing down and living in the moment. “We always think fashion is cultural, not just about delivering clothes,” said Chiuri. “We want this show to be about living your moments, feeling each moment uniquely. I really love fashion. This job we do is a good opportunity to describe the time we’re in.”You can read into that, the designers’ abstract response to the speed of digital information and the new hue, and cry over the rush to make everything in fashion available to buy the minute it’s seen. If anyone stands as a shining example of doing the opposite, it’s these two. No matter what theme runs through their collections, the important thing is the phenomenal success they’ve built by letting a recognizable identity develop over the years, and never skimping on the skill that goes into making their uniquely beautiful clothes.Exploring the worlds of Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Diaghilev, and the Ballets Russes brought up the imagery of dancers’ warm-up clothes, the layering of dresses and tutus over sweaters and footless tights, coats tossed over stagewear on the way home from theater, and of a whole corps de ballet of fragile, glitter-sprinkled tulle costumes for the grand finale.In a season when few designers have thought about eveningwear, the huge variety of jeweled and crystal-embroidered nude-color tulle dresses, with their high necklines and delicate-yet-decent transparencies, will surely add even more to Valentino’s surging profits, although they are not news from this house. The beam of the fashion spotlight always searches out the avant-garde and the different—and this season it picked out the simpler, more flowing shapes; the fluid jersey dresses; and the extraordinary things in chartreuse, bottle green, and champagne-color silk velvet. Among the long, slim coats, all immaculately tailored, it was again the “outlier” fabrics that jumped out—a trench in black leather, an edge-to-edge raincoat in slick burgundy patent.
As for time standing still in the magical moment of a performance? It didn’t quite—the notion of fashion’s endless march was not banished by the traditional runway show format. Yet Chiuri and Piccioli definitely help women conquer time in another way: Once bought, these are clothes to be worn and cherished for a lifetime.
8 March 2016
Speaking toMaria Grazia ChiuriandPierpaolo Piccioliis always like hearing an Italian art history lesson in stereo. In one ear, she is talking about Mariano Fortuny, his Delphos dress, and “aged” velvet, and in the other, he’s speaking about Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller and their “expressionist dancing.” All of this exotic early-20th-century Venetian-pagan romanticism was sewn lightly into the Valentino Haute Couture collection and trailed around by barefoot nymphs with gold metal serpents writhing in their tendriled tresses.There’s something so recognizable about aValentinodress today. It’s almost invariably floor-length (although there’s the odd short one, too) and seemingly demure, though plenty of gauzy, sparkle-sprinkled transparency and more than a few plunging Grecian necklines come into it. But really, it’s the incredible things these designers and their Roman workforce can do with fabric that makes each dress a paradox of age-old hand-wrought elaborateness and youthful simplicity.The designers’ treatment of velvet alone could fill a chapter. Here it came pleated, painted, and patinated, and at one point, woven and knotted into a web. Then the colors: dark mossy green, deep burgundy, absinthe yellow. The pièce de la résistance was in green velvet brocade, worn by a redheaded girl—it had a train, and a sheer bodice on which the pattern of the brocade had been cut out and reappliquéd. It was one of those completely stunning dresses that will lodge in the memory of haute couture highs.Backstage, one of the things the designers were talking about was striving for timelessness. That involves a fashion contradiction in terms: Every season has to be different, yet for a house to make a long-term impression, it needs to stay the same. At Valentino, they have all that happening, and this season there were some dresses that made time stand still.
27 January 2016
Yes, it’s fashion protocol, but pinning one’s mood(s) to a board to telegraph a collection always seems an act of casual faux-creative cruelty not unlike skewering a once-fluttering butterfly in a vitrine. This evening atValentino, though, the mood board was a beautiful, beautiful thing: because they—there were four densely packed indexes of influences—helped enormously to delineate the outrageous variety of thought mustered byMaria Grazia ChiuriandPierpaolo Picciolias they mustered this collection. From Burroughs to Kerouac via mixtapes, Pearly Queens (Gucciwent there, too), punks, wage slaves, Paul, Mick, John, Sid, Sartre, ethnicity, and several dissertations’ worth more.So what was the unifying factor?Chiuri said: “It’s about groups. AboutOn the Road,Into the Wild. It’s about a trip around the world but also into yourself.”Piccioli added: “It’s starting from the idea of existentialism. As coming out from a safe situation and rethinking the new, a sense of being a man in the world. Existentialism was born between the two World Wars and it became more strong after the Second World War, after dignity was destroyed. You have to find your own individuality, your own way to express yourself.”The upshot was that this was a valiantly sincere effort to engage with the real problems of now through the entirely insufficient medium of gorgeously made menswear. After a long—borderline worryingly long—black turtleneck section that came spiked with studded businessman but was an ode to the founding fathers of ontological dissonance (Jean-Paul S and Albert C), this collection exploded into mood board–spawned variation. The point was to present man as his own narrative device, his own protagonist, author of his story. Yes, the fact that it was done so within the remit of a fashion show was perhaps unintentionally ironic, but the message stood. Clothes are articulated only by their wearer—but this Valentino show collection gave you something to say, beautifully, straight out of the box.
20 January 2016
Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli have got to be fashion’s most prolific designers. Two weeks shy of their haute couture presentation and one week shy of their men’s show, the designers were in New York today, showing off a new Pre-Fall collection. At 84 looks, it was one of the season’s most prodigious. Thematically, it spanned worlds. The inspiration, they explained from a temporary showroom set up in Andy Warhol’s final Factory, the wood-paneled office of which apparently remains unchanged from the early ’80s, was Elio Fiorucci. The Italian designer, who died last year, was a New York institution whose own influences came from everywhere. “He was local and global,” said Chiuri, “and we think that fits with the way we work.”Having plumbed the depths of their own Italian heritage and, most recently, explored African themes on their Spring runway, Chiuri and Piccioli merged west (New York and other bits of Americana) with the east of Japan here. The way the showroom was divided accentuated the differences. New York was irrepressibly colorful and smothered with stars, fringe, tie-dye, and the Chrysler Building kitschily picked out in metallic sequins. The Japanese section was subtler, with an emphasis on neutral hues and humble wabi-sabi embroideries of cherry blossoms, clouds, and flying birds on outerwear featuring traditional quilted linings. Bamboo prints turned up on simple long-sleeved dresses, pajama sets, and button-down and pleated skirt combos. But in fact there was a lot of cross-pollination. A karate gi got the tie-dye treatment, and Mt. Fuji mingled with red, white, and blue fireworks on a minidress and a double-face coat.The designers said they were drawn to Fiorucci for the pre-Instagram, pre-Internet, pre-everything time he represented in fashion, for the joy of discovery a trip to his store guaranteed. We can’t vouch for the store (its demise predated our arrival in the city), but we can vouch for this collection. It was a delight all the way through.
13 January 2016
Maria Grazia ChiuriandPierpaolo Piccioliwere thinking deeply about Africa when they were designing for Spring, and not on a whim. For more than a year, tens of thousands of refugees from Senegal, Nigeria, Eritrea, Mali, Gambia, and elsewhere have been making the harrowing journey across the Mediterranean to southern Italy. Packed into unseaworthy vessels, many are dying in appalling circumstances before they reach shore, a humanitarian crisis Italy has been dealing with by patrolling the seas, saving survivors, and giving them sanctuary. As in Germany, which has been receiving hundreds of thousands fleeing from the war in Syria, there has been a backlash against the new arrivals from some quarters. And this is what theValentinodesigners want to counteract. “We probably feel that the greatest privilege in doing our work is that fashion can give a message,” said Chiuri. “We think every person coming here is an individual, and we can show that we can improve ourselves by understanding other cultures.”“The message,” added Piccioli, “is tolerance. And the beauty that comes out of cross-cultural expression.”On appearances, you would not necessarily guess at the very real and fraught situation running in the background of this serene and heartfelt Valentino collection, but the research, and the lengths the designers had gone to to educate themselves, resulted in some gorgeous fusions between Italian and African traditions. They met in the textiles and the way the Roman influences Chiuri and Piccioli had used in their couture show segued into tribal treatments—the strips of leather that began as a gladiator reference became studded; the Roman sandals gained carved ebony heels; the pagan necklaces of their former show now appeared in white ceramic, suggesting abstracted teeth or shells; and the house expertise in embroidery produced tiny beaded Masai-derived patterns and bold peacock feather trims.Both designers pointed out that their respectful borrowings are hardly new; they are part of a history of Western assimilation that goes back to Picasso and Braque’s embrace of African art in the 1920s, which, Chiuri said, “was the birth of modernism in art.” It came over as most modern in this show when it was at its most subtle, as in the black dress embellished with multiple layers of suede fringing, or in the manipulation of tie-dye patterns used as a camouflage-like material for summer utility jackets and cargo pants.
In the end, though, while customers may not even notice the roots of the simple, breezy cotton printed Valentino dresses they are buying, the important thing is that the designers have used this opportunity to spell out where they stand on an issue very close to home. It will definitely be heard in Italy. Fashion is a frivolous and joyful thing, but that doesn’t prevent some of the people who are making it from having inquiring minds and a public conscience.
6 October 2015
Rome is the beating heart of the Valentino brand. It's the city where Valentino Garavani founded his couture house in 1960. More than half a century later, as global as the company has become, Rome remains the headquarters. Though they typically close couture's abbreviated week in Paris, in the seven years since Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli took the reins at Valentino, they've rarely designed a collection that hasn't showcased their own Italian heritage in one way or another. This season, they brought their collection home.The day began with an exhibition of couture dresses from previous seasons hidden in the closed-to-the-public places all over the city that have inspired them. It was one spectacular venue after another. The Biblioteca Casanatense, a public library lined with thousands of books and a smell so evocative you could hardly forget it. An 1840 marble bath in a palazzo still in private hands. A third-century AD Mithraic grotto discovered in the 1930s. Walking out of the last stop on the tour, which was the painter Giorgio de Chirico's apartment-turned-museum, you wondered if the runway show itself would be able to measure up.There was no need to worry. With the sun setting on the ocher walls of the Piazza Mignanelli, and locals hanging out of the windows to take it in just like they did when Valentino himself staged shows in this square, the setting was as perfect as it gets. And the clothes were absolutely the location's equal. A few people grumbled about the emphasis on black, but Chiuri and Piccioli had an answer for that. "Rome is just a little bit noir, a little sinister," Piccioli said. In any case, there was nothing plain about the black pieces, especially not when they were accompanied by Alessandro Gaggio's striking gold pendant necklaces. Leather flowers trellised a sheer tulle cape, while minuscule beads added substance to a lace gladiator minidress. And the repeating arch motif on a floor-length, double-face wool and velvet cape? Straight off the Colosseum's walls.An eagle, a symbol of imperial Rome, clutched a red ribbon in its beak on the collection's first dress. It was the same bird that contractors found on the ceiling of the house's Roman atelier during its recent renovation. What a metaphor. There were ancient symbols all over the collection, from the wheat stalks on a golden lace dress to the griffin embroidery on a floor-length poncho.
But you didn't need to be a historian to appreciate just how ravishing it all was, or to feel the connection between the couturiers and this city. By the time Chiuri and Piccioli rounded the wooden set on their victory lap, the whole crowd had stood for an ovation.
9 July 2015
"Ireallylike that coat," said Zayn Malik, with meaningful emphasis, indicating a two-tone, weave-patched olive field jacket in what looked like drill (but wasn't, obviously), as he examined Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli's board backstage. He won't be the only one. This was a really excellent amalgam of clothes that hordes of men will want to wear, realized in a manner that only a house with the resources of Valentino and the particular sensibility of designers such as these could achieve."Cultures become one culture—that's what we find exciting," said Chiuri. "At the end there is no real reference. We love to go around with our mind and our inspiration to create." The designer's comment was both a dissembling and a truth. It sidled away from accuracy because, of course, there were reams of references here—guitar straps (on backpacks), souvenir jackets (this season's key outerwear piece realized here in leather jacquard), military (like, everywhere), punk (slyly quiet), and the universal passion for denim (handmade in Rome). Add to that Native American (but not necessarilyNorthAmerican) weaving, Hawaiian shirting (thermal printed), and Spanish summer footwear, and we were swimming in more signifiers than a Barthes convention. Ergo the supposed lack of reference: Because when your mélange is so rammed with ingredients that it becomes a soup, who can really say what the prime ingredient is?Ultimately these were deeply wearable clothes of an elevated construction. The denim was hand-stitched and thermal-bonded, with one overcoat reassembled from a myriad of patches in a different wash. The military-flashed chinos and Malik's favorite olive jackets were a silk-cotton mix that you could, if you're brave, throw into the washing machine. The studding on the backpacks and closing jackets was turquoise, true, but not too ornate to imagine flashing for yourself. Perhaps the only off notes were the leather shirts and fanny packs—one of which, to the uproarious amusement of Valentino's honorary president, Giancarlo Giammetti, slithered to the knees of its excellently unflappable model mid-walk. Why off notes? Because in this collection they seemed rare examples of stylized rather than real fashion—not a concentrated reflection of what man on the street might unselfconsciously wear and relish.
"We believe that it is important that we translate couture culture into something that people can wear every day," said Chiuri, "because couture does not always have to be something very expensive with cashmere double. You can do couture also with denim. We want to translate this value into pieces that you can use in your real life." This philosophy is almost absurdly straightforward, yet so few designers seem to consider it. More fools them. This was a collection to covet with your head, your heart, and your line of credit.
24 June 2015
Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli's design signature by now is familiar. Their simple, covered-up, almost prim silhouettes act like a canvas for the embroidery and beadwork of the Roman house's atelier. The marvel is how they keep remaking them each season—this one included—creating desire anew. Resort found them scaling back not an inch on the detailing, yet the effect was more folksy than flamboyant. They showed a long black net dress stitched all over in the tiniest of beads with sneakers, and it made perfect sense. The workmanship is close to couture, but Chiuri and Piccioli very much intend their pieces to be worn every day."We were thinking about freedom, and Diana Vreeland's famous quote, 'The eye has to travel,'" Piccioli said via phone from Rome where they're working on their men's and couture collections. Their reference points ranged far and near, encompassing vibrant Native American motifs, made in collaboration with the artist Christi Belcourt, a member of Canada's Métis tribe, and the garden flowers and animals that have been part of their vocabulary at Valentino for years. There were leather intarsias of the continents and a nod to the Far East with the dragon embroideries decorating the backs of jackets and coats. The world is flat, they seemed to be saying; everybody in Valentino! If only. Beyond the exquisite beadwork, the loveliest pieces were the subtlest: softly pleated dresses both short and long patchworked from different prints and laces. They'll weigh next to nothing in a carry-on; the lucky girl who wears one will win best dressed no matter her location.
16 June 2015
A fashion face-off of epic proportions occurred in Paris today. Derek Zoolander and Hansel, aka Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, made cameos at the tail end of the Valentino show, each doing his best "Blue Steel." Judging by the audience's reaction,Zoolander 2, which is currently filming in Valentino's home base of Rome, is going to be a Very. Big. Movie. But even without the crowd-pleasing surprise appearances, this would've been a memorable Valentino show, long on Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli's signature dresses, but rendered in such exquisite new ways you fell in love all over again.More often than not, Chiuri and Piccioli go to their Italian origins for inspiration. For Fall they looked at Emilie Flöge and Celia Birtwell, two women who were both artists and muses (Flöge to Gustav Klimt, and Birtwell to her husband, the designer Ossie Clark, as well as the painter David Hockney). The new perspective energized them. Flöge, who was a couturier in her own right and rejected her era's de rigueur corsets, gave the designers the collection's gentle A-line silhouettes and the gold leaf effects on fox-fur coats, as well as lit-from-within quilted velvet coats. Birtwell, who is still alive and kicking and collaborated with Chiuri and Piccioli on their Pre-Fall collection, supplied the dragon motif that decorated a black trapeze dress.But there was much more at play here, from the casual new vibes of oversize fisherman knit sweaters worn with A-line midi skirts to the sensual efficiency of silk crepe dresses unadorned but for some subtle contrast piping. It's a testament to Chiuri and Piccioli's talents and experience that they're as adept at an understated tie-neck blouse and wide-leg culottes, or an away-from-the-body black dress paneled in tonal strips of leather, as they are at their lovely eveningwear. Inevitably, though, it's the gowns that get the attention. There were too many knockouts here to mention them all, so we'll pick our favorite: a long-sleeve black net dress embroidered with gold and patchworked with geometric tufts of mink that could have stepped right out of a Klimt canvas.For Tim Blanks' take on Valentino, watch this video.
10 March 2015
Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli are in the mood for love. Their inspiration board was lined with quotes from Shakespeare, bits and pieces of Dante'sInferno, and the paintings of Marc Chagall, hopeless romantics all. Chagall, in particular, captivated them. "He had an incredible life, very hard, but he maintained his optimistic vision," Piccioli said. The painter's Russian ancestry provided a leitmotif for the embellishments that are so central to the designers' aesthetic. There were leather flowers appliquéd to rough-hewn linen, naive needlepoint embroideries on long pinafores worn over smocked shirts, and a shearling vest densely decorated with leather paillettes. The Russian pieces were far from humble, but their craftiness pointed to the differences between Chiuri and Piccioli's version of the brand and that of its founder. In this case, at least, they wanted for a touch of Valentino's glamour."In some ways, you are flying when you are in love," Chiuri said, apropos of a pair of tulle gowns, one embroidered with rainbows and the other with clouds of silver lamé. It was a beautiful sentiment, and we commend her for expressing herself so earnestly. Sincerity of Chiuri's kind is a true rarity in this business. Nonetheless, the clothes were best when they weren't wearing their heart on their sleeve. A velvet dress straight out of fair Verona in a luminous shade of light blue was striking in its simplicity. Its sisters, a caftan shape in quilted red velvet and a strappy black velvet style with a bodice in the shape of wings, were the show's undisputed highlights—sophisticated, rich-looking, and grown-up. The gown with the molten gold bodice will surely be another favorite. Its skirt is stitched with a line from Dante'sInferno, which is fitting. A girl would go to hell and back to get her hands on it.
28 January 2015
Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri are remarkably democratic types for designers who work in the most rarefied strata of luxury fashion. They see heritage as a group effort. Their mood boards, one of the fashion industry's better backstage treats, celebrated that idea with images drawn from the heydays of the Ballets Russes in Paris and the Beat generation in San Francisco, both of them moments when poets, painters, and wild-eyed dreamers came together to create something new. Chiuri had a striking word for it: "contamination."And the contamination today wasrealcause for celebration. Through the miracle of the Interweb, the designers had found a young Melbourne-based artist named Esther Stewart. Her geometric color-blocked paintings became the inspiration for some of the clothes and all of the carpets that lined the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, where the show was held. "Geometry is a new form of decoration," said Piccioli. It certainly contributed to the strongest looks in this collection.But decoration in other forms has become one of the most distinctive features of Valentino. The Spring collection currently in stores is bedazzled with embroidered butterflies. Why give up on a good thing? For Fall, the butterflies became midnight moths, dark blue embroidered on a dark blue jacket. Other feats of embroidery were the map of the planets that swathed one blouson, and the owl whose wings spectacularly wrapped from back to front on another. There was something quite grand and wild about these conceits that sat slightly to one side of the neat, precise, tailored looks, all of them complemented by a white shirt and narrow black tie in a symphony of uptightness. The leathers and shearlings had the same precision, the sense of nature tamed. And yet they weren't a drag, because even though Piccioli and Chiuri are remarkable technicians, they also have soul. "In the '60s, people wanted to create a new language," Piccioli said. "If you can change aesthetic values, you can change the values of society." And that, my friends, is the very definition of a grand design.
21 January 2015
Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli signed up the British textile designer Celia Birtwell, the ex-wife of the late Ossie Clark and the woman behind his floral prints in the 1970s, as well as the Italian Pop Artist Giosetta Fioroni as collaborators this season. With a dozen collections to make a year (13 if you count the one-off couture show they put on here in New York in December), it's a wonder the Valentino designers don't do this kind of recruiting more often—especially when you consider how lovely their Pre-Fall collection turned out.Birtwell contributed floral prints and embroideries inspired by Sandro Botticelli'sLa Primavera, and Fioroni designed a heart motif stitched with the phrase "Your eyes are the eyes of a woman in love" that appeared on everything from sweaters to gowns. The peace-and-love vibes were intentional. "We want to believe in a fantastic future," Grazia Chiuri said over the phone from Rome, acknowledging that current circumstances make a positive point of view an imperative. Fashion can't change the world—would that it were that easy—but even a committed nihilist would be hard-pressed to deny the beauty of a series of sheer gowns embroidered with stars, planets, and swirling constellations.The daywear offerings were expansive in other ways. Camo-print separates are starting to feel a bit tired and they didn't really jibe with the designers' theme. But their cropped jeans and denim flares here looked extra sharp.
13 January 2015
The Grand Tour. It's a concept that lives mostly in our minds these days. As Maria Grazia Chiuri pointed out backstage, "In the past, the English and French came to our country to improve their culture; now all Italian people go to England or to New York." But theoretical or not, the grand tour proved to be a transporting theme for Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli's Valentino show this afternoon: The collection was poetic, graceful, and beautiful.Chiuri and Piccioli touched on many of Italy's patrimonies, from its antiquities all the way down to its kitsch. Centuries-old interiors—the country is cornice heaven—provided blueprints for a series of colorful dresses printed with vivid flowers and arabesque forms. Another group of dresses was patchworked from what could've been souvenir scarves. Neapolitan pastel stripes decorated a shrunken sweater and the broderie anglaise skirt it was paired with. And Rome got its moment in the spotlight, too: A softly draped powder blue shift, loosely gathered at the waist, looked like something Diana the Huntress might've worn, save for the band of beading around the neckline. But the designers lavished special attention on the seaside, printing some gowns with starfish and snails, and embroidering others with shells, sailing ships, and underwater creatures like the Portuguese man-of-war.It wasn't just finery on the runway. Linen shirts with asymmetric necklines and a chunky ribbed sweater worn with lace-inset denim would make fine touring clothes. But as always, it was the workmanship that astounded, be it extravagantly done, as the feather-embroidered numbers were, or more naively wrought, like those sea creatures. "In this moment when everything is synthetic, digital, and flat, you need something more human. To dream, you need to feel something, not just to see," said Piccioli. That's not just a fine reason for a grand tour, it's a manifesto for modern life.
30 September 2014
The past is never dead. It's not even past. Rarely at Couture has that seemed truer than it did this week. Donatella Versace channeled the fifties, Raf Simons leaped centuries, and Karl Lagerfeld merged baroque and brutalism. Capping it all off backstage at Valentino today, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli were talking about the Pre-Raphaelites, who themselves exalted all things classical. The goddess gowns on the runway were 21st-century interpretations of 19th-century interpretations of Roman togas.Paired with gladiator sandals that laced up to the knees, the dresses also signposted two of the week's other relevant themes: youthfulness and ease. The Valentino designers have always loved a long, fluid shift. In the past they've read as noble or nun-like. Here, tied at the waist with long lengths of leather ribbon, they looked like innocence itself, or innocence on the verge of being lost. (It was somewhat ironic that the voluptuous Kim Kardashian was in the front row; these were not clothes for girls with boobs and butts.)That caveat aside, the collection was lovely. Romantic, but with a nice sense of rawness. Credit goes to the sandals, the leather strapping, and the naive, almost rustic quality of the wool and leather embroideries. The gold and black sheaves of wheat on a white wool dress were simple but striking. Hand-painted daisies on nude organza were subtler. Which isn't to say that Chiuri and Piccioli neglected the lavish. On the contrary, a coat in gold lamé embroidered with pearls, paillettes, and silk thread was as opulent as anything on the runways this week, and the same is true of a tulle toga embroidered with yet more pearls and crystals.But for all of that finery, the dresses that cut the strongest figure were barely more than single pieces of fabric draped elegantly and asymmetrically across the shoulders—Haute Couture versions of the bedsheet dresses we all played at making as kids. As the Pre-Raphaelites would've put it: Back to nature! Up with beauty!
8 July 2014
Pasolini, Picasso, Cocteau, Kerouac…that's a pretty special posse of male muses. Translating the essence of that wayward crew into clothing seems like a challenge too far. Nevertheless, they were the outsiders and rule breakers who inspired Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli's new collection for Valentino, and, with a little effort, you could detect their perverse contrariness in clothes with a silkily decadent edge. "Silent sedition" was the claim lodged by the show notes. In the context of menswear—"a world of rules," as Piccioli said—the densely decorative nature of the Valentino collection was insinuatingly otherly. Embroidered butterflies, beasts of field and forest, flowers like a starburst of fireworks, symbolist Odilon Redon's deadly blooms—this was scarcely the stuff of an ordinary menswear collection. Neither were the sinuous, pajama-like silhouettes.Chiuri and Piccioli have carved themselves a substantial niche in haute couture. That's the spirit they want to bring to menswear. Not bespoke, because that's normally about suits, but couture as an experimental forum, an artistic point of view. The first six looks in today's show were couture options, but they were profoundly ordinary: a polo, a K-Way, a trench, and so on. Perhaps that was the point. Customizing something as banal as a polo shirt would truly exalt the individual. But that notion infected the whole collection. The white shirttails that floated out from under sweaters? Cotton, right? Wrong. They were wool as fine as silk. Such numbingly perfect craftsmanship is like a drug. And that tracks back with absolute efficiency to the muses for this collection—driven individuals attempting to escape their doom through an obsession with style. The power of fashion!
24 June 2014
Monastic, artistocratic, modest, and even prim have been terms applied to Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli's Valentino almost since they took over in 2009. Throughout the past year or so, the designers have been putting the accent on the label's (and their own) wilder side, turning most often to animal motifs to get their message across. With Frida Kahlo as one of their jumping-off points for Resort, parrots and monkeys—both of which appeared in the artist's famous self-portraits—played starring roles in their new collection. But if this was the season Chiuri and Piccioli left those early associations behind for good, it's not because of the exotic flora and fauna they depicted via print, embroideries, and appliqués. Nor was it Kahlo's peasant ruffles and suede fringe that did it.In the end, somewhat ironically, it was an archival moment that gave this collection its vivid zing. A psychedelic print from a 1973 Valentino show—the program notes called it "visually disruptive"—inspired the graphic, multicolored designs that made up the boldest looks in this huge eighty-three-outfit lineup: a chevron mink over a contrasting-stripe frock, checks with zigzags, and achemisierdress in pixelated stripes. Extrapolating on that idea, they came up with sixties-ish shift dresses in interesting color combinations—lemon yellow and petal pink, or turquoise, Kelly green, and coral—that were almost as eye-catching but easier to wear. Elsewhere, Chiuri and Piccioli continued to explore the butterfly camouflage prints and embroideries that have become best-sellers for the brand. Pretty, but they were no competition for those energetic stripes and colors.
15 June 2014
Valentino is a Roman house. It's a fact that Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli have been keen to celebrate of late. A year ago, remember, they were exploring the paintings of Dutch masters and Delft pottery. But here, on the heels of a lush Couture show inspired by Italian opera, they were looking at Italian Pop art from the sixties and seventies. The work of female artists Giosetta Fioroni, Carol Rama, and Carla Accardi decorated their mood boards. "They were rule breakers," the designers said beforehand. "Nobody believed that women could be artists."Fioroni and co. inspired Chiuri and Piccioli to do some boundary breaking of their own. The opening series of optic florals were a zingy, graphic departure from the romance of their previous collections. They popped. But as bold as they were, they were clearly, recognizably Valentino. Chiuri and Piccioli have been helming this label for five years now—doesn't time fly? This show cycled through many of the ideas they've brought to the house, much of them with a mod sixties flavor this season: the shirt-collar dresses, the embroidered tulle gowns, and capes of all kinds—in lace, in leather, in drapey silk crepe, and in versatile double-face cashmere that could be pinned back to create an alternate look. Chunky but featherlight cardigan coats as well as leather patchworked into a multicolored harlequin motif on a midi skirt that they paired with a bibbed blouse looked the newest.The designers devoted a significant portion of the show to eveningwear, and it shined a light on the couture-quality work they're doing here. Butterflies, which appeared in their Haute Couture and Pre-Fall collections, multiplied all over long dresses, but so did roses and birds. The presentation ended with a navy tulle dress embroidered with a naively rendered heart over one breast and stars on its skirt, lifted from Fioroni. When Chiuri and Piccioli came out for their bow, Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti stood to applaud and offer kisses of congratulations. The outpouring of affection felt like an appropriate recognition of the duo's talents. They are this house's beating heart.
3 March 2014
Fifty-five looks for fifty-five operas. The Valentino designers Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli were after something new for Couture this season, and they found it in the age-old tradition of opera. The show opened with a nod toLa Traviata; Giuseppe Verdi's score was embroidered in black on the long, full skirt of a parchment-colored tulle dress. After that, Chiuri explained, "we wanted to describe the character of each [opera's] protagonist in a primordial way." By the end, they had called out all the greats: Puccini'sLa Bohèmeinspired an elegant navy cashmere cape and silk crepe sheath. Bizet'sCarmenproduced a pleated bronze tulle gown with silver-gray guipure lace embroideries.Admittedly, the connections were sometimes tenuous, but that didn't detract from the austere beauty of simply draped silk marocain dresses in earthy shades of sienna, green, and mahogany. Or the divine splendor of a gold thread dress embellished with four thousand smoky gemstones that took twenty-five hundred hours to affix. The monastic and the regal are the twin signatures of Chiuri and Piccioli's work chez Valentino. Both sides of that aesthetic presumably appeal to Florence + the Machine's Florence Welch, who was perched near Giancarlo Giammetti in the front row.The surprise was all the animals—a veritable menagerie of them, or as the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns would've had it, acarnaval des animaux. A swan, a snake, and a peacock made from feathers that wrapped around the waistline of ballerina tutus…lions and elephants on a double-face cashmere dress and a coat (not embroidered, mind you, but built into the fabric of the garments, like a puzzle)…even a gorilla and its baby were spotted tucked amid the leather floral appliqués of an organza cape.The creativity of the set dressers at the Rome Opera House had a profound effect on the duo this season; Chiuri and Piccioli invited the opera's artisans to paint the show's runway and backdrop. But if theatricality is a virtue onstage, the more realistically the creatures were rendered here, the better off the clothes were. By contrast, a satin tiger practically pounced off the skirt of the finale dress. The workmanship was second to none, but the designers may have overestimated the big cat's charms. All in all though, this was another bravura performance.
21 January 2014
Couturehas been a watchword for the Valentino men's collection under Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri. The exigencies of the fashion calendars mean that menswear and haute couture fall naturally one after the other in January and in June, but it's more than temporal coincidence that throws them together where these designers are concerned. Couture "is the DNA of our brand," said Piccioli, "and what we think is good to get into every single thing we do."The opening of the new Valentino men's store on rue Saint-Honoré tonight allows the designers to make couture for men a reality. Their Fall show was designed to show off the possibilities. Piccioli and Chiuri proposed five couture coats in double-face cashmere, handmade in the Val atelier in Rome's Piazza Mignanelli and adaptable to a man's any and every whim. Theirs were long, swingy, and in one vivid case, stripy, but the choice is his.The introduction of this men's couture only further ratchets up the degree of luxury Piccioli and Chiuri have made it their business to sell. But the twist at their Valentino is that with each new turn of the gilded screw, the look of luxe gets less and less. The collection has never looked looser. Suits have mostly melted into pajamas; trousers into jeans; shirt-and-tie into sweatshirt-and-scarf. (On occasion, it is loose to the point of self-parody: cashmere coveralls and fur bucket hats are glamorous absurdities.) Everything is more than it appears to be—(couture) coat, (bespoke) jeans, (monogrammed) sneakers. The Valentino man has it his way, though with such patrician discretion that only his tailor knows for sure.The premium is placed on the known rather than the new—a reverse engineering of the ideal wardrobe—which helps to make the pieces especially covetable. What these designers realize that many of fashion's novelty artists seem not to is that it's easy to want what you already have and love. Artists' egos be damned. "The ultimate luxury is to do whatever you want," Piccioli said. Which makes Valentino menswear the most elegant instigator of anarchy.
14 January 2014
Eccentricity. That's the concept Valentino's Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli trumpeted for Pre-Fall. On the phone from Europe, where they're working on the men's collection they'll show later this week and couture for the week after, they called out Isabella Blow and Anna Piaggi, women who were known for dressing with plenty of personality, as role models. The collection's streamlined, effortless silhouettes will be familiar to Valentino watchers. Eccentricity was conveyed via decorative motifs—most significantly the butterfly, although owls and eagles turned up, too. Butterflies appeared elaborately inset, intaglio-style, on the front of cashmere pullover tops and on the back of cashmere capes, their wings stretching seam to seam. Other times, the designers embroidered colorful flying creatures all over a coat and layered it on top of cropped trousers in a jacquard version of the same motif. "A storm of butterflies," is what they called it. A suitably bold description.The level of workmanship always astounds here, and the designers' output is usually prodigious; that holds true this season, just as it would at one of their Paris catwalk shows. It especially applies to their evening offerings. Gwyneth Paltrow was camera-shy at the Golden Globes on Sunday night—too bad, she was wearing a lovely dress from the house that was stitched neckline to hem in tiny turquoise seed beads and gold thread. Indeed, there are enough gowns in this Pre-Fall offering to dress all of the nominees at the SAG Awards this Saturday, but it will be an especially lucky actress whose stylist nabs the gown in silvery-blue lace with the feathered collar and cap sleeves.Individuality is one thing, but in the end, women often like to belong to a group. That's why this season's heather gray cashmere astrology sweaters, each with a different sign of the zodiac, like the gold pendants on the designers' Spring runway, are sure to be a hit.
12 January 2014
Valentinos Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli took opera as their source material this season. The micro minidress with beaded lace collar that opened their Fall collection has been replaced by a more worldly and well-traveled fringed cape embroidered with turquoise, coral, and red in a pattern that was hard to pin down. Grecian? Egyptian? From somewhere else in North Africa? All you need to know is that Maria Callas' Medea, from Pasolini's film version of the classic opera, was on the mood board. Chiuri and Piccioli's muse is no longer a girl with a pearl earring. She's a mythological sorceress.Innocence, then, has been replaced by something not altogether darker for Spring, but certainly more mysterious. It lent a richness to Chiuri and Piccioli's recognizable silhouettes. As they said beforehand: "It's a fashion opera. A show has to be a show." Even as flat sandals adorned with golden scarabs reasserted the realness of the collection, some of the long black lace gowns embellished with brightly colored details looked not all that unlike costumes or indigenous dress—elevated to the hautest levels, of course. It's exactly this sort of stagecraft that has the world's most photographed young women vying to wear Valentino; they were all there today arrayed in the front row. And they'll rush to get the more ornate pieces here: a dress patched together from silvery squares that looked like armor, a monastic romper (interestingly, not an oxymoron chez Valentino) in organza embroidered with tiny strips of leather.As at their July Couture show, Chiuri and Piccioli savvily balanced the extraordinary workmanship of their evening gowns with not-quite-humble daywear: crisp blue poplin shirts, cropped khaki pants, a suede dress with a fringe-trimmed cape back, and even a pair of jeans—if you can call them that—in dark denim with deep ruffles that began north of the knees. For the non-jet-setters in the audience, the really remarkable thing about these designers is that a rugby-striped cotton coat can cast as potent a spell as a dramatic gown made from the finest filigreed lace.
30 September 2013
As couturiers, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli found the idea of thewunderkammerparticularly appealing. "In a cabinet of curiosities, the pieces are very unique, very one-of-a-kind," Piccioli said. "We've tried to make something that is not only special, but also surprising, unexpected."The first surprise of their enchanting Valentino show tonight came on the macro level: The designers, not unlike others this season, put an emphasis on daywear. Couture is not only for ceremonies, they insisted. But wearing a herringbone coat collaged with double-face cashmere etched with lions' heads could turn even going out to the curb and hailing a taxi into a major event. Their cashmere sheaths with curving seams down the front to accentuate an hourglass shape were the least ostentatious and yet the most luxurious dresses of the week. Leonardo da Vinci's quote "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" was front and center on their mood board. The restraint of those dresses could expand the boundaries of the way we think about couture.Still, most clients want obvious bang for their buck. That's where the micro-level pleasures of the designers'wunderkammercame in. Take, for instance, the scrolls of cashmere caught between a layer of lace and another layer of net on a pencil skirt and matching coat. Or a long-sleeved black dress constructed from laser-cut black astrakhan embroidered with crystals that took five hundred hours to make. Or another coat that looked like silk Ottoman brocade but was actually handwoven from the thinnest strips of raffia. Or the pièce de résistance, a gown and the train that fell from its shoulders stitched with 2,200 river pearls and gold thread.There were other sublime moments: a long, narrow skirt in a mosaic of feathers, a tapestry coat embroidered with a dragon on its back. Chiuri and Piccioli established a sort of call and response between pieces such as those and others with an almost monastic undercurrent—see the brown velvet, lantern-sleeve, above-the-ankle dress. It's the Valentino designers' mastery of both extravagance and understatement that's the real wonder.
2 July 2013
It only sounds like an irony that the designers who hammer on about their men's world being inspired and informed by the world of couture should also have designed what empirical evidence suggests is currently fashion's most sought-after sneaker. Their prescription for the Val man is a well-finessed mix of high and low. Many claim similar ideals, but few have gone as far as to gild the humble Havaiana with a thong of crocodile, as they did for their latest trick, which will sell in the neighborhood of 600 euros when it reaches stores.That's "couture as culture," the organizing principle of Valentino menswear under Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri. It led them into realms where chinos come in chiné, printed with toile de jouy or embossed with a camouflage that conceals little flowers. In the higher echelons of womenswear, the designers use double-faced cashmere; here, a hooded jacket was double cotton.They started low, with the idea to create uniforms: their mood board was tiled with school uniforms, army uniforms, workers' uniforms—standard issue. Then they brought it high. The entire opening segment of the show was denim and chambray, but cut, sewn, and bonded into paneled suits and coats. The show wended its way into double-jersey plain white tees, polos, windbreakers, and a new five-pocket jean, more defiantly casual than Fall's natty suit parade."We started with the idea of uniform to give freedom to people," the designers said backstage. "Our proposition of beauty for men is to be free to do your own choices." Thirty-odd years ago, Katharine Hamnett made the T-shirt her soapbox and implored would-be world-changers to "Choose Life." Now from the other end of the high-low spectrum, one of the haute-est houses on Place Vendôme is using the same medium to say, Choose tees. In its own polished (and, admittedly, business-savvy) way, that's a rebellion, too. And for years before their ascent to the top spots at the label, Piccioli and Chiuri labored as workers in its mine. So revolution continues. It is impeccably turned out.
25 June 2013
Ease has been a key talking point over the last couple weeks of Resort shows. Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli work in the relative isolation of Rome, but they're feeling the new, relaxed mood, too. They do it the Valentino way, of course. There's nothing undone about their new collection, but it does mark the first time they've ever put denim in the lineup. They created four styles, but the one they're really getting behind is high-waisted, full through the leg, and cropped a couple inches above the floor. Casual pants, never a Valentino specialty, are another new focus for the duo. Other daywear pieces have the familiar look of uniforms—military, schoolgirl, maybe even a shade of factory worker in a pink pleated jumpsuit.It's harder to convey that sense of ease for evening. The pieces that came closest, in multicolor floral macramé embroidery on what looked like raw linen, were the best. A double-layer white tee worn with a narrow, midi-length skirt in that embroidery had a folksy appeal that felt fresher than the fluorescent pieces that were the designers' other focus for after-dark. It'd be fascinating to see them adapt those earthier ideas on their Couture runway next month.
16 June 2013
Vermeer'sGirl With a Pearl Earringstared out from Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli's mood board this season. At a preview, the Valentino designers were making connections between what they called the severe yet sensual portraits of the Dutch masters and their exquisite new collection for Fall. "We wanted to capture women in a private moment," Chiuri said. "In this show, the face is very important"—as it was for Vermeer and company. Making a study of white collars, Chiuri and Piccioli added them to many of their familiar looks. The collars came in laser-cut leather encrusted with beads or in "Calvinist" plain cotton piqué, and they decorated the simplest pieces, like long-sleeve A-line shifts in wool and short alpaca coats, as well as more ornate creations, including a tulip embroidered lace gown, and another elaborately traced in a Delft ceramics pattern.Severity may seem like an unlikely scenario at the new Valentino. The designers' lovingly and luxuriously embellished creations have revitalized the house, which is celebrating its new David Chipperfield-designed store on the Avenue Montaigne tonight. Unlikely or not, though, a modicum of severity is the clue to what made this show feel new, and winningly so. While perhaps less spare than those Vermeers, there was an appealing austerity to a sleeveless dress in ivory and grayish blue, a strand of large pearls circling its collar. Likewise, a pair of evening dresses, one red and the other China blue, were starkly beautiful, the only embellishments their regal portrait necklines.This is Valentino we're talking about, of course, so in the end there was no lack of intricacy in the details. There were gowns galore, many of unsurpassed beauty, and some too beautiful not to bring up. We're thinking especially of the Delft-inspired embroideries and a shorter Delft-like knit. But to prattle on describing them would be to defeat the point. They weren't the news; the austere grace was.
4 March 2013
Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli threw down a gauntlet with the ravishing Couture collection they showed for Valentino tonight. We all knew that beauty like this came at an exalted dollars-and-cents price. But the duo enumerated the human cost in the show notes that sat on everyone's seats. The most extraordinary outfit in the presentation featured layer upon layer of organza, embroidered with butterflies and birds, the whole lot wrapped in a tulle cage scrolled with crepe piping. According to the notes, it took 500 hours of hand-rolling to produce the piping. And that was just one of the outfits that featured the effect. One roller apparently developed carpal tunnel syndrome during the production of the collection.There were plenty more such examples of artisanal effort. To pick just one at random, it took 850 hours to embroider an organza jacket and skirt. The analogy the designers employed was a garden, where you see the grace and delicacy, but you never smell the gardener's sweat. "Couture has to be magical," insisted Piccioli, and that clearly included the power to make the graft disappear.So it was the magic that triumphed, in processes like a lace of multicolored flowers or a hand-painted organza. The subtle drama of an organza gown embroidered with crystals and topaz beads was summed up by its name: "Le silence de tournesols." Quiet sunflowers. That was as intriguing as Piccioli's revelation that the essence of the collection was contained in labyrinths, where nature meets architecture and science meets spiritual rebirth. Magic? Let's hope so.The almost penitent purity of Chiuri and Piccioli's past work for Valentino was nailed for good and all in the ivory cape dress worn by Julia Nobis, with a tracery of that devil's piping down the back. But new here was a finely honed appreciation of carnality. It was devastatingly direct in a dress and cape in black guipure (based on a nineteenth-century Venetian pattern, the notes obliged). And the designers injected regular shots of the house's signature red. They were a pleasing disruption to a show that was almost too much of a good thing. Understandable. How do you edit perfection?
22 January 2013
The pursuit of perfection is Valentino's current M.O. The show the label staged today at the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild was gorgeous, full of exquisite clothes worn by boys with not a hair out of place. It snapped into focus ever more forcefully the emphasis Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli put on the idea of couture, for menswear as much as for women's. Men's couture has its own long history and tradition: It's bespoke, and its hometown is London. That city was the inspiration for their new collection, though its young-gun avatars were more Carnaby Street than Savile Row. There was a wash of Italian suaveness over the whole, too—"We're from Italy!" protested Piccioli—but the designers' mood boards made the cultural mash-up clear: Antonioni here, Mick Jagger in his early, snarling years there. Elsewhere were his fellow Angry Young standard-bearers of London's swinging sixties.The sixties is a familiar well for designers to return to, but shock and awe, the designers said, wasn't the point. At least not shock. "We believe it's very important to give something that a man desires," Chiuri said, but that's only part of the story. Piccioli finished the thought. "You desire," he said, "what you already know. So we want to show what you already know in a different way, with different eyes. Our fashion is to make extraordinary what is ordinary." Thus their mission. There have been any number of collections with trim suits, trenches, and even Michael Caine glasses, but Valentino unsettles the settled notions. Take its Black Watch plaid. The designers start with blue wool, stitch in green, and then overprint black to give shadows and depth. Repeat with houndstooth and check. Old made new, awe delivered. (And for the multi-pocket flat clutches, safe to say no one in the sixties had those.)The collective gasp of the audience confirmed a hit. That felt right, though the London inspiration might just as easily have invited a yelp. The threat of danger and spleen attended the Angry Young Men, who never worried about mussing their menswear. That's a school of thought it might be interesting to see explored. In the meantime, Valentino remains more Sunday morning than Saturday night.
15 January 2013
Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli have resuscitated the Valentino label by applying, as they say, "the culture of couture to all categories"—even T-shirts. That kind of juxtaposition is integral to the current incarnation of the brand's DNA. Riffing on the idea of opposites for pre-fall, they were thinking along both regal and subversive lines. Regal, as in all manner of capes—from a quilted puffer version with a fur collar (part of a new Sub-Zero Couture capsule) to slimmer styles in elaborate macramé. Subversion entered the picture via glossy patent leather in white, black, and red. Red was Mr. Valentino's color, of course, but here it shed most of its romantic associations. They name-checked Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton circa the seventies. This was a racy red, and there will be no missing the woman who wears their fire-engine trench. In the end, though, that kind of flash was only a fraction of the story. Part of the appeal of couture-quality clothes are the hidden luxuries, and it doesn't get more subtly sensational than a crocodile coat bonded to cashmere, or a fur camouflaged with pelts sheared to different lengths. "We don't want to do generic pieces," Piccioli said. No chance of that. For their evening dresses, they focused mostly on softer colors like grayed-out florals and barely discernible pastels, along with a few reds. There were several lovely gowns, especially the hand-beaded red ones, but they seemed to be saving the wow factor for their real couture show in Paris next week.
13 January 2013
Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli's Valentino dresses make girls swoon. The modest shapes, the delicate fabrics, the exquisite embroideries—pull one on and you're suddenly Cinderella at the ball. This season, they've even whipped up crystal slippers accessorized with their signature gold studs.The designers said that the Rome of their memories was the inspiration behind the collection. In this, they're very much in tune with the Paris season, which, thanks to Raf's and Hedi's prêt-à-porter debuts at Dior and Saint Laurent, respectively, has been about revisiting the great couture houses' roots. Valentino Garavani—asalta modaas it gets—was sitting in today's front row.On the runway the clothes were more intimate in feeling than last season's folk-influenced show. Credit for that goes to the slipdresses that were the collection's foundation (in both senses) as well as the simple tone-on-tone embellishments the designers chose. Pointing to the tiny white seed beads embroidered on the powder pink bibs of several dresses, Chiuri called them "poor." Likewise the white sequins on white brocade. Again, though, the results were almost aristocratic. The Valentino duo gives you your princess moment, albeit with a subtle but important hint ofBelle de Jourkink.The collection started spare, with slipdresses in silk panama, the seams hand-tacked to leave a few centimeters of skin exposed. On other long-sleeve dresses in solid colors, seaming details around the neckline were the only decoration. Chiuri and Piccioli wouldn't have made bad minimalists, but that's not the heritage of the house they inherited. Instead, there were hand-painted black flowers on the white lace of a long dress; snakeskin cut into long strips and affixed to the organza of a shirtdress or a clear plastic trench (Deneuve would approve of that); a pair of Valentino red gowns; and, to finish, a long-sleeve number in blush-colored silk embroidered with tiny white beads in botanical patterns. Cinderella, eat your heart out.
1 October 2012
Look at Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli, so ascetic and spare with their dark clothes and modest demeanor, and you can only wonder at the intensity of the clothes they create. So, obviously, did the scribe who penned their show notes, as lost in the search for words to define the collection as everyone else was after the fact. That's because Chiuri and Piccioli are like the solitary writer who spins a magic kingdom out of his imagination. "Regal beauty," Piccioli said by way of explanation. "Sensual but severe." And if that had aGame of Thronestang, well, that fitted with a Couture collection that felt like a world we were allowed to enter without fully understanding what it was we were seeing.The mood board in their studio was dense with nineteenth century altered states: the symbolists, the decadents, a romantic spirit that combined ecstatic release and exhausted lassitude. Valentino is a house that traditionally readsred, but Chiuri and Piccioli dialed down to blue, introspection and reflection versus the extrovert essence of house habit. It made for a quietly spectacular opening in crepes, chiffons, and cashmeres with a lush sobriety. That same idea of modest luxury carried over into a full-length lace and chiffon floral dress, and a coat that was encrusted with cashmere appliqués of flowers and leaves in a pattern that was inspired by William Morris'Tree of Life. It was so ludicrously vivid that you could imagine the old boy himself would have felt one step closer to God when he looked at it.If there have been times in Chiuri and Piccioli's tenure at Valentino when they seemed a little stultified by respectful politeness, today felt like a once-and-for-all cutting loose. The way they introduced brocade, for instance, an oldish idea, but here zapped with yellow. Then there was the blue, of course, antithesis of all the house traditionally holds dear, even if the red did reinsert itself toward the end of the show (which only created a pleasurable tension for Spring). One of the most memorable outfits from this Couture moment in Paris will surely be the evening dress in navy plissé with the black shadow falling diagonally across it. Stark lushness—why does that notion sound so right with Couture in such transition?
3 July 2012
In two weeks, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli will show their Couture collection for Valentino. Today, they returned to Florence for the second time to show their men's collection in a city they say is especially hospitable to traditional menswear and the word most on their lips was "couture."Their ambition for Valentino menswear, the designers agreed, was to bring the workmanship of couture to the world of men's. "We believe that couture is a culture," Piccioli said, "a culture that you can translate to all categories, men's, too. It's more masculine in a way, this obsession about the detail inside." Last season, they mentioned couture, too, but while the Fall collection skewed sartorial, Spring was sporty. The duo played with iterations of the polo shirt, recreating it in mixed, fused fabrics (piqué and poplin), redressing it as a popover, and exaggerating its proportions to make it fuller and rounder. Not a single tie was seen on the runway, and the best suits came in Japanese denim. Every look was accessorized with sneakers, each bearing a tiny row of rubber studs, the kind that, in metal, have made their women's accessories such fetish objects. "I think you need fetish today," Piccioli said. "You need something you desire." It's easy to imagine these trainers fitting the bill, though Piccioli admitted his own desires ran more to the new, shrunken messenger bag of the season, just the size for an iPad. "The new size is iPad size," Chiuri added.That, in a sentence, keys the importance of innovation to the designers. For all the talk of Couture, Chiuri and Piccioli are just as interested in developing new techniques and building upon existing ones: fusing materials, bonding seams, mixing fabrics. That innovation doesn't necessarily extend to the aesthetic. Their look tweaks tradition, but the clothes themselves remain staunchly wearable, and their message was edited almost to military strictness. (Maybe a touch too much so, though the designers mentioned their desire to cast a fresh eye on uniform dressing.) There were several versions of a flat-front, tapered chino, some with a multi-fabric stripe that recalled track pants and tuxedos both. The duo's take on the Teddy jacket brought several materials into the mix—mesh, cotton, nylon, and neoprene—but kept the shape recognizable.
If there's an analogue to this collection, it may be Phoebe Philo's work for Celine: smart, inside-out upgrades to clothes that are more desirable than revolutionary.All the camouflage notwithstanding (it's made here, for the record, by heat-bonding rather than printing), revolution's not the aim. Who needs it? Valentino is enjoying its own natty pax Romana. The audience left murmuring orders. Chalk it up to whatever you'd like: couture, innovation, uniform, fetish. It's hard to ask for better than that.
19 June 2012
Andy Warhol's portrait paintings line Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli's mood board for Resort. The artist's neon pinks, sky blues, and electric oranges all came together on their show-opening long tulle dress appliquéd with lace flowers, while its silhouette—the high neck, the long sleeves, the full skirt—could've belonged to one of his sitters. Nan Kempner, maybe, or Marisa Berenson.The designers see both the Pop colors and the sixties shapes as antidotes of sorts to our current hard times. The clothes are surely uplifting, not only because they've been constructed to be almost weightless, but also because MG and PP are so focused on their clients' pleasure. The single pantsuit in the collection came in a leopard print, and exquisite guipure lace meant there was little that was workaday about their button-down blouses. Where these clothes will be getting a workout is on the party circuit. One of the first to hit the red carpet will be the black tulle gown with the leather bodice. Warhol, we've no doubt, would've loved it.
10 June 2012
There's some irony in using folk costume as inspiration for clothes as haute as the ones Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli make at Valentino. The fashion on their runway today was of the people, but not for the people—it's for a rarefied, very lucky few.For Fall, the designers wove an enchanting, globe-trotting story through the sweetly feminine silhouettes they've established as their own over the last few ready-to-wear and couture seasons. Pasolini's Medea was on their mood board, along with other photos of women in native dress torn from film, fashion editorials, and real life. A white coat-dress was stitched with red and blue thread in a native motif—Russian maybe, or Greek, the mix was the message. Another was made from a densely woven jacquard that looked like an Oriental carpet. A lot of craft went into the pieces, but they weren't craftsy. In fact, black leather gave the duo's by-now familiar dresses and jumpsuits a new edge; it was characteristically softened with macramé seams and passementerie details.Daywear was the distinct emphasis here with smart-looking frog-closure coats and Aran sweaters dotted here and there with crystals. For evening, Chiuri and Piccioli proposed long, loose-fitting shorts in black leather with a sheer beaded tunic and an embroidered velvet vest—black tie, but with a modern kick. Their other after-dark ideas had a more demure look thanks to above-the-ankle hems and, more often than not, long sleeves. The best came in multicolor crystals that reproduced that carpet pattern. Talk about a magic carpet ride.
5 March 2012
A conversation with Pier Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri before the presentation of their new couture collection for Valentino quickly took a turn for the metaphysical. "If you don't think about fashion, you just do clothes," said Piccioli. "Fashion needs culture or it becomes empty." The duo found their cultural spine in the finest flowering of French thought, keying in on the eighteenth century's Age of Enlightenment and particularly the return to "real" values that Rousseau endorsed in his State of Nature philosophy. "Couture is a real value," Piccioli added. "It's not superficial."But it was Marie Antoinette role-playing in her little farm on the grounds of Versailles who provided the collection's ambience. The first model seemed to arrive in the salons of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild on a breath of cool country air. Sprigged flower prints covered almost everything. An antique fabric alchemy transformed taffeta into equally antique-looking blurred floralchaîne.The sense of precious old artisanship was also evident in the swirlingbouillonédecoration. The volumes were diaphanous, bucolic, like the cloud of point d'esprit scattered with organza lace cutouts. The designers sought a "deep lightness." It was beautifully exemplified in dresses with up to five layers of lace and organza.Examined up close in the atelier, the workmanship defied comprehension. The stitching was so fine it was invisible. It signaled the heart-stopping delicacy that distinguished the collection. But there was a real resilience, too. Hence the use of cotton amidst the lace, organza, and filigree, as in a coat with tone-on-tone embroidery that felt embossed. Hence also the flat shoes, which loaned their own kind of grace to the purity of an ivory coat dress decorated with tiny spirals (Piccioli compared them to stucco). Achaîneskirt had deep, useful pockets. Smocking was a rustic detail. There was a casual quality that made the clothes ultimately feel more modern than their long-sleeved, high-necked, and lace-gloved propriety would at first suggest.Chiuri pointed out that she and Picciolo come from an accessories background, where they learned to tell a big story with a small object. That skill is now writ large in the collections they are designing at Valentino. Today's story was their most exquisite yet.
24 January 2012
Pier Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri remember the eighties as a time of innocent glamour. And for pre-fall, they set out to re-create that spirit. "We believe in desire," Chiuri said. "In this moment, when everything is so hard—especially in Italy—it's important to give a good dream." And who hasn't dreamed of dancing with Bianca and Mick at Studio 54? The new Valentino collection includes riffs on Mrs. Jagger's famous white tuxedo and the poofy party dresses associated with the era when that nightclub reigned, but the designers—as is their practice—used a light touch. Miniature bows by the hundreds were embroidered on the net bodice of a minidress and delicate lace was inset in chevrons on the top of a long black velvet gown.The designers have made fine dressmaking their calling card since settling in at Valentino several years ago. This season finds them focused on tailoring. In addition to a couple of smart nods in the direction of Valentino Garavani's 1960's tailleurs and the aforementioned tuxedo, their high-waisted, tapering trousers looked fresh with slip-on loafers. A strapless red jumpsuit decorated with a single rose is destined for the red carpet; we see it on Emma Stone at the SAG Awards on the 29th.
16 January 2012
Once upon a time, women had a dressmaker; men had a tailor. The law of supply and demand elevated those services into haute couture and bespoke, which have, ever since, been the summit of human achievement when it comes to cut and cloth. But they've also remained a Venus and Mars-style proposition, which gave Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli's proposals for the latest collection of Valentino's menswear a twinge of subtle subversion. Inject the spirit of couture into the traditions of menswear?Well, Chiuri and Piccioli felt it was worth a try. They were, after all, the special invitees of the 81st edition of Pitti Uomo in Florence, and that honor usually inspires designers to stretch their creativity. In their case, there was an added impetus. Valentino staged his first fashion show in Florence 50 years ago, and the designers who carry on his name wanted to give their menswear a sense of his legacy. "Memory is very important to innovate," said Piccioli. "We wanted the same language in a different moment: the sharpness of shape, the belief in workmanship. We wanted to sculpt lightness."Their mood board told the tale. Monochrome images of Mastroianni and Delon in the early sixties, at the pinnacle of their male gorgeousness, were echoed on the catwalk in leanly tailored jackets and narrow trousers cropped over sockless shoes. The sharpness of white shirts and skinny black ties amplified the sixties feel, but at the same time, they had the new-wave flavor that niggles at the edge of so much that Chiuri and Piccioli do. Not darkness or danger, insisted Chiuri. "It's something private. This is not a show-off collection. You need to look inside." That in itself is a criterion of traditional couture—that a garment could be so perfectly crafted that it would look just as good when it was turned inside out. And here that challenge was met with thermal sealing—or bonding—rather than seaming. Not only was the result surprisingly light, but the internal structure of jackets bonded with traditional horsehair linings was a joy to behold. Same with a black leather jacket bonded with cashmere or a peacoat bonded with shearling. The notion of life on the inside peaked with a green leather jacket that had a perfect little coin purse zipped into its interior. So perfect, in fact, that there was something obsessive bordering on fetishistic about the detail.Piccioli did indeed acknowledge that "obsessive perfection" is a spur for him and his design partner.
At the same time, they insist they understand how a confident mix of sportswear casual and tailored formal is the essence of modern menswear. Here, their version of the mix was evident in the way a coat was thrown capelike over a suit (it was "sportiest" in a glazed denim). The look had an almost sinister precision that felt like the very opposite of casual. On the contrary, the fact that Chiuri and Piccioli have faith that there is a young man who will follow them where they want to lead is reassuring in the current climate.
10 January 2012
Too ladylike, too precious, too little-girlish, too vulgar. Any of those outcomes could've befallen a show as laden with lace and flowers and embroideries as was Pier Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri's latest for Valentino. But they didn't, not for a second. The designers turned out their best collection yet—one dress more seductively, calmly lovely than the next, many of them walking out on flat sandals or lace espadrilles that helped give the outing its fresh feel. "Fashion is a dream, and in this moment we need dreams," Piccioli said beforehand. The only thing that could poke a hole in the duo's fantasy is the fact that us girls don't have enough real-life occasions to wear these frocks.Oh, how we wish we did, but in fact there was a lot more here than the red-carpet confections that attracted Jessica Biel to the front row. The designers opened with short frocks in off-white or black in a cotton lace fabric that made them into everyday sort of propositions, or they inset lace into paper-thin leather for a halter dress and a snappy trench. Other short styles in away-from-the-body tent shapes had a dressier feel.A quick peek at the designers' mood boards revealed pictures of Georgia O'Keeffe and Tina Modotti and photographs by Deborah Turbeville. Piccioli and Chiuri mentioned Mexico in the early part of the twentieth century as a source of inspiration, "but not so much a geographical place as a state of mind." The notion came through strongest for evening. The puffed shoulders, the long sleeves, and the hems that fell above the ankle, along with the dresses' hand-painted floral prints and velvet flower appliqués, gave them a slight folkloric feeling, but it wasn't overpowering. "Beautiful" is the word we heard over and over as we left the show.
3 October 2011
A mood board methodically arranged with haunting pictures of the last tsar's family and their lost world cued the fairy-tale princess feel of Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli's new couture collection for Valentino. One dress—dévoré-ed flowers on a sheer background, with pleated tulle wings flying from the shoulders—was so Neverland-ready that it was a wonder it didn't elevate then and there from the catwalk.A similar magic infused much of the rest of the collection, even daywear like the tweed suit that was gilded with gold and platinum. There was a fearlessness in the fact that so much of it was so old-fashioned, in specifics like the buttons running up the sleeve of a governess-y pale crepe gown or down the back of a black cashmere coat, or, more generally, in the neo-medieval restraint and decorum of long-sleeved, floor-length gowns. One, in black velvet, was practically penitent. But Chiuri and Piccioli's signal achievement has been to turn the old-fashioned into something new and irresistible. "A sense of memory," was Piccioli's cryptic clue. "Not nostalgic," Chiuri added quickly. True, how could they—or any of their glamorous young clientele—possibly be nostalgic about a period they had no direct experience of? But what the designers seemed to be talking about was the way they have managed to take the foundations of haute couture—the incredible, time-consuming, numbingly detailed techniques—and applied them to their own curious vision. Take that penitent black velvet gown, for instance. A few outfits later, it opened up into a delicate Gothic lattice that was suggestively contemporary.Delicacy as a signpost of technique was also obvious in a cocktail dress spun from a net of crystals, or a petaled skirt with a tracery of platinum. Hair-meister Guido Palau's fragile gold-and-crystal diadems were a sterling accessory. But equally, there were outfits that seduced with their straightforwardness. A Cossack-collared white wool jacket over a long skirt saw the White Russian princess in daywear mode. And a simple panne velvet gown—braided at the neck and waist, slashed open at the back, and rendered in an elusive shade ofeau de nil—was quite possibly dress of the week.
5 July 2011
Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli have made a gorgeous fragility their calling card at Valentino, albeit one that occasionally snaps back with spiky studs. That made it all the more surprising to find such raffish hardiness at their second men's collection for the label. Men aren't women, of course. But they can, it turns out, find space for a few studs on their accessories, too.Chiuri spoke of "mixing tradition with the new—the traditions of couture, the English men's tradition, the Italian men's tradition." The shapes she and her partner proposed aren't radical. They're rough-and-tumble classics: military and safari jackets, K-Ways and camp shirts, cargo shorts and hooded parkas. But a couturelike precision about fabric and fit distinguish these from the bins at your local army surplus supply. Far from it. The parka's plaid is patchwork, not print. The featherlight unlined chambray blazers are woven through with silk to catch the light. An olive-green take on camo isn't camouflage at all—it's the darker side of Hawaii-ana, a leafy print of palm trees covering anoraks, shorts, and short-sleeved shirts.Camouflage by palm frond—that is to say, luxury hiding under the cover of utility—isn't a bad metaphor for the collection itself. At Valentino, denim, linen, and cotton drill are upscaled to fairly exquisite heights. (A leather version of that camp shirt is soft and pliant enough to be almost nylon—down the rabbit hole of luxe and out the other side!) The different registers—high and low, sporty and luxe—work together seamlessly. Seamlessly as the bonded leather-and-chambray bomber, let's say. "The new man can tie all these moments together," Piccioli said, gesturing at a Hawaiian shirt here, a military jacket there.That military jacket—you could see it on Travis Bickle, plucked out of the cab and set atop amotorinoin Milan. And given the chance of la dolce vita instead of Manhattan madness, just imagine how that story might've ended.
22 June 2011
The house of Valentino has many signatures, from red gowns to day suits, bows to lace, but the one thing that Pier Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri have made their calling card since taking over two and a half years ago is lightness. You'll find plenty of red-carpet gowns and evening dresses in their Resort lineup, but not a single corset. That gives frocks embellished with hour upon hour of delicate beadwork, tulle embroidery, and lace appliqués the unstructured ease of a T-shirt, andthatmakes the designers very popular with the beautiful people—from Carey Mulligan, who chose one of their Fall numbers for a photo op in New York last week, to Euro social Matilde Borromeo, who wore a dress by the duo for her walk down the aisle earlier this month.Speaking of weddings, Piccioli and Chiuri's new collection includes some white dresses in cotton and organza lace that would thrill the sort of bride who balances a taste for luxury with a low-maintenance attitude. "Effortlessly pretty" is how they described them, and the characterization fits for their floral garden party dresses as well, with calla lily prints so light they appeared almost sun-faded. In truth, though, there was nothing effortless about the construction of these clothes or their accessories. The designers have launched a capsule collection of ten pairs of shoes called Timestrings. On the instep of each is inscribed how many hours, minutes, and seconds were required to construct it. A clever idea, but again, what really charmed was the ease of the studded pavé flat sandals they showed with all those dresses.
20 June 2011
The Oscars provided an interesting case study in Valentino then and now. Representing the "then" camp was Anne Hathaway in an archival red glamour gown dating to the mid-aughts. And in the "now" corner: Florence and the Machine's Florence Welch in a high-necked, semi-sheer lace dress from the Spring haute couture collection by Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli. Welch's dress walked a demure-naughty divide that the current designers have made their signature. After refining the look for evening over the last couple of seasons, they've turned their attention to day.That balancing act might be tougher to pull off when it's light outside, but the duo came up with some intriguing propositions. The idea could be as simple as pairing a ribbed crew-neck sweater with a tiered black lace skirt, or as complicated (for their seamstresses, not for the women who wear it) as a dress that spliced a grid of lace onto leather. From a distance, a dark, blackish-red cashmere skirtsuit looked the picture of upper-crust propriety, but up close you noticed the small studs that dotted the torso. Those studs, by the way, have quickly become a new house signature thanks to the popularity of the label's studded T-strap shoes.Chiuri and Piccioli injected newness into their eveningwear in the form of prints—feathers, lilies of the valley, and an abstract lace-check pattern. Also sounds demure, right? Wrong, the unstructured silhouette is almost as easy as a T-shirt. Welch was front-row bopping and singing along, but with its focus on glamorous daywear, this collection could go a ways to making fans of women who don't have a red carpet to walk every night of the week.
7 March 2011
"If fashion is about today, then today it's time to go back to elegance," said Pier Paolo Piccioli, after a collection that put the seal on his and co-designer Maria Grazia Chiuri's creative stewardship ofValentino. "Elegance is subversive," he added. "The real subversion is culture." And, in the duo's eyes, haute couture is a way to flex some cultural muscle.Piccioli's somewhat opaque words actually helped to explain the paradox of the collection: how something so blatantly pretty, pale, and light could also feel like it had an irresistible germ of, if not subversion, then at least oddness. It wasn't just the penitent hair and makeup, or Freja's opening outfit, in all its vestal virginity. Chiuri said there was a secret in the collection, in the way the pleats fell, the way the sheer fabrics seemed about to reveal something while keeping it hidden. That secret was presumably the girl inside the clothes. If she was covered up, she wasn't demure. The models walked with a diffident hauteur, hardly innocent.Chiuri and Piccioli's signatures may be delicate—lace, bows, flowers, plissé—but underlying that delicacy is an intense emphasis on workmanship. "Researching lightness, subtracting weight," said Piccioli. The process of subtraction applied equally to the openwork on the seams of an ivory crepe dress (daywear in this collection) and the lace insets that made the trailing eveningwear seem barely there.Put today's show together with the duo's ready-to-wear and the menswear line they launched in Paris last week, and you get the inescapable sense that they have a genuine vision for the Valentino brand—coherent and seductive, every way you look at it.
25 January 2011
The notion of tweaking eveningwear for day is taking off this week. Alber Elbaz did it at Lanvin, and atValentino, Pier Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri launched a capsule collection called Techno Couture that reimagines some of the house signatures—the roses, the ruffles, the ruching—in easy-to-wear stretch wool. The resulting black and white dresses are still plenty feminine, but you don't have to wait for a big night to pull them off. As in the duo's recent runway collections, the look was younger and hipper than it was during Valentino Garavani's own heyday, an effect compounded by a new focus on daywear. Nylon trenches in foundation colors topped knee-length lace frocks, some of which came with simple T-shirt-like bodices. Hanging on racks in the studio were flaring seventies-style trousers and elongated cardigans, the most covetable with a black mink front and a knit back. Another gem was tucked away in the showroom: A stripey turtleneck sweater fused with lace and shown with a leopard-spot A-line skirt (not pictured in the slideshow) looks destined for the front row at fashion shows next month—who will be the lucky insider to score those samples? A trio of puffer coats drove home the designers' message: Valentino isn't just a red-carpet brand. Then again, if you ask us, a long, black lace and organza dress with a slight empire waist and a removable pearl collar would look smashing on a certain pregnant starlet on the awards show circuit.
10 January 2011
Pier Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri have connected with the in crowd. The studded patent kitten heels from their last collection are among this fashion season's It-est shoes—no small feat, considering the kind of girls we're talking about are used to wearing 110-mm stilettos to lunch. Something about the duo's new take on Valentino's signature elegance looks fresh to the under-35 set, and they're buying. In response, perhaps, the designers' focused Spring collection wasn't so much a step forward as it was a refinement of ideas they proposed for Fall.In other words, there were a lot of ruffles, and even more lace—the former, especially, rendered more subtly this season. The show's most memorable dress boasted a floral motif embroidered from gold foil thread, but lace stitched from strips of crinoline on tulle and cut into a coat-dress, skirts, and even a pair of shorts also displayed incredible couturelike workmanship. In step with the season, Piccioli and Chiuri did long-sleeved maxi dresses belted high on the waist, including one in Valentino's signature red.But even their party girls can't live on cocktails alone, so daywear didn't get short shrift. The season's omnipresent shirtdress came in a deep pink crepe, ruffled skirtsuits were cut in straightforward cotton or denim (yes, you read that right), and a black leather jacket was spliced with raffia. This time, shoes came with a slightly higher heel and gold chain ankle straps, and last season's studs reappeared as trim on day bags.Valentino, the man himself, seemed pleased as he was escorted backstage afterward. This collection will keep the young Hollywood and Euro-aristo sets in dresses all summer long.
4 October 2010
Couture embraces worlds. The day that began with Elie Saab's stolid womanliness ended with Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli's reconceptualization of Val's gal as a dolly bird—all short skirt, dropped waist, baby doll, and kitten heels. The mood was compounded by the name the designers gave their collection: The Dark Side of First Love. If that notion has a Lolita tinge, Chiuri and Piccioli made the clothes to match. They even dropped a cage over one girl to let you know she was trapped.Teen psychodrama may fit with the kind of "dark side" idea they've sometimes toyed with in the past, but it was downright peculiar in a couture context. Still, as a pitch to amuchyounger customer (and those girls were out in force in the front row today), the collection was a major success on its own terms: haute couture for theTwilightgeneration. From the little black dresses in gazar that opened the show to a trapeze coat in ivory crepe that tied with bows down its front to the tiers of ecru lace trimmed with feathers, the clothes had the spirited dressiness that you see now in Valli's gals, for instance. They weren't saccharine, either—that dark side lurked in the black gazar sheath that underpinned a sheer dress trimmed in huge organza flowers or a baby doll in ruffled tiers of powder pink.And look closely and it was plain to see that Chiuri and Piccioli had done their research on classic couture shapes, however abbreviated they might be here. But that will be scant consolation to mournful clients of the ancien régime.
6 July 2010
Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli have won the hearts of the Hollywood and social sets. For proof, one only need look at the red carpet—Sarah Jessica Parker and Dree Hemingway wore Valentino couture to the New York premiere ofSex and the City 2and the Cannes amfAR gala, respectively. Now, the designers have set their sights on their fabulous clients' daytime wardrobes. Taking cues from both the late sixties (when Valentino Garavani was one of the first couturiers to use logos on ready-to-wear) and the current runways, where sportswear classics are so in vogue, Chiuri and Piccioli put the focus on strong, statement outerwear. They turned out a navy cashmere coat trimmed in leather with brass turnkey closures and subtle Vs on the pockets; a mackintosh in sporty cotton camel, but with a couture shape; and a lean trench dress cut from green Chantilly lace and leather. Heritage, but with a slightly dangerous edge, is how they like to think of it. The same description fits for the eveningwear, in which cheery garden party florals slowly fade to black on the hems of sleeveless dresses and strapless gowns. Well, most of the eveningwear. There were a few perfectly pretty flower-strewn frocks for occasions when edge is out of the question.
20 June 2010
The shoes at Valentino—blush-colored patent-leather kitten heels trimmed in metal studs—are an apt metaphor for the direction Pier Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri are taking the storied label. Former accessories designers under Valentino Garavani himself, they're utterly in touch with all of the house's romantic, ruffled codes, but they're determined to modernize it with their more dangerous, youthful sensibilities. Their biggest success so far: dressing fashion favorite Chloë Sevigny in one of their Spring gowns for the Golden Globes back in January.Today, the experimental films of Kenneth Anger, who sat front-row, gave the proceedings a bit of edge, but the contemporary feel came from the clothes themselves. Yes, there were ruffles by the yard, but they decorated little cropped leather jackets worn over party dresses just as tiny. There were scads of lace, too, but the designers patchworked it irreverently together with point d'esprit and leather mesh. And they didn't ignore Valentino's signature color, red, which looked fresh layered with a powdery nude on the final draped gown. That, however, wasn't the collection's most showstopping evening number. That title belonged to another dress, made from tiers of lace hand-embroidered with thousands of minuscule, shimmering lilac beads.Giancarlo Giammetti, the house's co-founder, famously criticized the duo's most recent couture show on his Facebook page as a "ridiculous circus." He was all smiles tonight, as were some young editors, whose collective reflections can be summarized as, "Wow, I want to wear Valentino for the first time."
8 March 2010
A Garden of Eden in cyberworld. That was the central conceit that Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli worked up for their third Valentino couture show. The influence ofAvatar—the blue-sprayed shoulders—and the urge to make something modern out of barely there chiffon seemed the twin driving forces behind the collection. There was little continuity here with either their first heavily structured show or the second one, done almost entirely in black lace. Yet the contradiction between wispy draping and fantasy-tribal styling (a Rodarte-led thread that a couple of designers have picked up this week) was a topical enough device to make the collection seem current. Although Chiuri and Piccioli are now clearly addressing a wildly different world from the one Valentino held entranced, there were pieces that showcased the house's skill base. A couple of wrapped, draped chiffon dresses (one done in brick red in memory of Valentino tradition) and a jacket with black patches jigsawed onto a base of near-invisible flesh-colored georgette were youthful in the way this label needs to be if it's going to attract new clients.
26 January 2010
Anyone looking for proof that it's a new day at Valentino need only have tuned into the Golden Globes, where Chloë Sevigny nabbed an award in a gown by the label's new designers, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli. It wasn't so outré that Mr. Valentino would have disapproved, but it was definitely more avant than anything the label's founder was doing before he retired. That's a good way to describe the duo's pre-fall collection. The lace, the exquisite beadwork, and the ruffles and frills the house is known for are still there, but they're executed in a more modern (read: shorter) way. Now in their fifth season with the house (counting couture), Chiuri and Piccioli did red for the first time. But we're not talking your typical Valentino red chiffon. Instead, they showed a patent trench, leather motorcycle pants worn with a fox chubby in the same hue, and a party dress of red paillettes sewn onto nude tulle. Piccioli called it a "dangerous red." It's risks like those that should pay off with the young crowd they're wooing.
19 January 2010
The collection Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli presented for Spring couldn't have been more different from their reverent ready-to-wear debut of just over six months ago. Continuing down a path they started on during Couture in July, the duo is now designing with a new Valentino generation in mind—one that likes its party dresses short and isn't afraid of sheer. "We wanted to tell a new fairy tale," Piccioli said backstage. "We're proud of the house heritage, but we wanted to give a personal point of view."He wasn't kidding in one respect: There wasn't a red dress in sight. Instead, he and Chiuri romanced the soft tones of nude, rose, lavender, gold, and gray that have become the big color story of the season. Their methods included swirling organza around the body and tying it off with a flamboyant bow, embroidering tulle T-shirt dresses in antique laces and geometric metal paillettes, and printing chiffon with black orchids. A couple of fitted leather jackets and minis embellished with laser-cut rosettes provided a bit of edge. Glass slippers didn't figure in this story, but the London-based milliner Philip Treacy did whip up some fanciful footwear with lace wings arcing upward from the heels.In sum: This was a well-timed step forward for the new Valentino duo, one that put the brand at the center of some of Spring's key trends and started to give it a new relevance.
5 October 2009
Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli, Valentino's former accessory designers, had a hard entry into the haute milieu of couture last season. Though anointed by the approval of their former boss, their first outing was so stiff and reverent it seemed as though the house would be fossilized in the past. So today it was good to see the pair breaking away into a collection of pretty (but not too saccharine) black, lacy, ruffled dresses that, layered over nude, had much more delicacy and leggy youthfulness. Some of them had the simplicity of T-shirts; others came with short dance skirts, bustled and ruffled and sometimes glinting with muted silver beading. Close up, the workmanship that went into each ripple and shadowy layer of tulle was inimitably precious, yet somehow the designers successfully dodged the hazard of veering into overdone froufrou. The collection wasn't entirely perfect—the boxy coats seemed to come out of an old-world time warp, and the presence of so many evening dresses tipped the end of the show too safe. Still, there was a lot here to indicate a good sense of direction, although it'll be a couple of seasons more to see if these designers can follow through in a consistent way.
7 July 2009
The fanfare of their first haute couture outing behind them, the new Valentino designers, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli, presented their ready-to-wear collection today, and while the label's retired founder wasn't visibly cheering from the sidelines as he was in January, his spirit was certainly present. As former accessories designers under Mr. Valentino, the incumbent duo are keenly aware of the house codes, and today they adhered rather dutifully to the ladylike sensibility for which these clothes have always been known.Elaborating on several of the ideas they presented in their sixties-inflected couture collection, Chiuri and Piccioli showed sleeveless sheaths and coats with fan pleating below the ribs, some accented with a jeweled brooch. There were evening coats with gradated crystal beading, deep fox-fur cuffs and hems replacing couture's feathers. Cocktail dresses and gowns, meanwhile, featured draped and shirred bodices, but despite bold colors like emerald, golden yellow, and turquoise, they erred on the staid side. The same goes for those camel and bordeaux cape-backed lunch suits. A long leopard-spot cape with a wide band of fur at the hem had a younger feel.Overall, capturing the youth vote with this collection will prove a challenge. Mr. Valentino, of course, was popular with ladies of a certain age, but he always was—and continues to be—quite tapped in with the fabulous crowd. In order to move the label forward as the new designers' mandate requires, a little less reverence for the past and a little more attention to what the palazzo set is wearing now will be in order.
9 March 2009
Following the not entirely elegant dismissal of Alessandra Facchinetti after two short seasons and the promotion of the accessory team as her replacements, the house of Valentino needs to regain its sense of equilibrium. Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli had backup on their first outing as haute couturiers. The retired Valentino Garavani and his entourage descended into the arena (a grand domed lecture theater in the Sorbonne) to endorse the debut, taking their ringside seats amid the kind of applause that might have once been accorded to a Roman emperor.What the new duo showed was a respectful collection that returned Valentino to all its familiar bases. If not exactly literal throwbacks, the cream suits with stand-up sixties collars, fan-pleated coats, draped red dresses, and stately bejeweled ensembles of crystal-embroidered coats over chiffon spelledLa Dolce Vita, loud and clear. It was all very cautious, and so very ladylike that today's skinny young models looked strangely out of place in such womanly designs. On the other hand, this was only the first outing for the Chiuri-Piccioli team, and a rush to judgment on any new designers should be resisted until they've had a chance to settle into their responsibilities. Moving forward and finding relevance for the brand in ready-to-wear is their next task—and their first attempt at that will be under the microscope in a matter of weeks. For the moment, though, a cooling down of the drama around this house is the best that can be hoped for, and as Valentino moved backstage to congratulate his protégés, he looked pleased enough with what they'd done.
27 January 2009
A few days ago, a Valentino executive was quoted in the Italian press as saying it would be "inelegant" to comment on the rumor that Alessandra Facchinetti is on her way out. Never a truer word has been spoken, especially as the announcement that she had been handpicked (by the current owners, from a large field) to succeed the retiring Maestro was released on September 5, 2007. That is, not even 13 months before Facchinetti had to put her third collection for the house on the Paris runway. Yet another case, then, of the increasing speed of the revolving-door syndrome that is luring in and spitting out so many tender young talents at old, established brands under new ownership.So watching Facchinetti's show was a weird experience for those who had been tracking signs of her sensitivity to aspects of the house canon—in particular, her gentle touch with chiffon and ruffles, modernized by a refined taste for no-color colors. It was always going to take time to do a good renovation job on Valentino's daywear—frozen as it is in the time of the ladies who lunched—and, sure enough, Facchinetti's answers weren't quite there yet. For Spring, they came in the form of soft, drapey silk polka-dot dresses, and shorts suits with raised, coiled, jeweled embroidery settled in necklines or as epaulets. The embellishment was over-heavy, but you could see what the designer was getting at in the way of softening and relaxing a look that formerly only sat well with an over-lacquered hairdo. Certainly, much more needs to be done to resolve that issue in this house, and Facchinetti's device of a curved-up, sporty side slit (the sort you see on running shorts) didn't help matters much.Still, to give her credit where it's due, Facchinetti's subtle, pale lemon and violet nudes later on did evoke the elusive quality of femininity that is expected of this label. And when it came to the big test—the red draped georgette evening dress—hers was unarguably lovely: a one-shouldered affair, made to look modern with the addition of flat jeweled slippers. The collection might have benefited from a follow-through on the fuzzily frothy blouses that could have been spot-on as a great selling item for Spring. In the end, though, a poignant sense of might-have-been hung in the air as Facchinetti took her bow. Whatever transpires next, the task of continuing this brand's integrity is surely not going to get any easier.
2 October 2008
First steps on a couture runway are daunting for any young designer, especially if she's following a master like Valentino. Alessandra Facchinetti carried it off with quiet grace and a point of view that promises to bring a breath of fresh air to the house. "I researched embroidery, looked at van Dyck and contemporary paper sculpture," she said. "I was looking for a strong way to interpret romance, but without the usual sweetness."While maintaining respect for Valentino's oeuvre of pristine lunch suits, flowery embroidery, and red dresses, she managed to express her own flair for making chiffon flow and flutter in an immaculately wispy way. The van Dyck reference gave her the idea for playing with lace in pale wool embroideries, laser-filigree cuffs, and buttons—all elements that contributed to her redrawing of the outlines of Valentino's classic suitings with curved, slightly space-age volumes. If there was a glitch, it lay in some of the overloaded embroideries made with knotted skeins of wool, minute silver plastic cogs, and tiny hemispherical domes of georgette and metal. (Understandable, though, because which designer wouldn't let the thrill of experimenting with the capabilities of Valentino's in-house sewing experts go to her head?) The result was too heavy when cut into some of her curviform suits, and the overembellishment similarly weighed down a hopsack strapless evening gown.What made that instantly forgivable, though, were the moments when Facchinetti lightened up her designs with a waft of chiffon. There is something incredibly refined in her choices of barely-there tints of ivory, nude, eau de nil, dusty pink, and lilac, and in her finishes: minuscule rolled hems on trumpet sleeves, petal-like ruffles fluttering in the small of a back, and flyaway trains. As fragile as these might seem, they're a signature to build on, and one that Mr. Valentino, should he inspect this collection from afar, might feel rather happy to behold.
1 July 2008
Emile Hirsch is the new face of Valentino's menswear, which tells you plenty about where the house is heading under Ferruccio Pozzoni. Once upon a time, the designer talked about Helmut Berger and David Sylvian as benchmarks. Now he wants to get a young clientele interested in dressing up. And his latest collection was nothing if not dressy—though it was also slightly airless in its emphasis on out-and-out luxe. Like the checked jean jacket over a shawl-collared, double-breasted waistcoat and a stock-tied shirt. Clothes for a modern peacock? (Check the lilac shoes that completed the outfit.) But if Valentino himself increasingly emphasized the value of leavening "important" pieces with jeans and T-shirts, Pozzoni has unwittingly given the wearer similar leeway: Don't dress up the double-faced plonge-leather jacket, or the coat in navy mohair. And accept the cream canvas cotton suit as a casual new version of eveningwear. The designer momentarily blanched when that suggestion was made—especially because he'd already offered a spectacular linen tux as an alternative to conventional eveningwear—but he quickly came to terms with a different perspective. Which suggests he may be the tugboat to turn this battleship around.
26 June 2008
In her third collection for Valentino, Alessandra Facchinetti sketched a portrait of a lady in soft hues—pearl gray, icy white, and blush pink—punctuated with pops of chartreuse and rich fuchsia. The chic yet restrained suits she showed for day had soldier jackets with peplumed backs and rows of tiny covered buttons. Release came in the form of ruffles, which fluttered throughout the collection but found their most elegant expression in organza gowns. Smartly paired with metallic flats, these embraced the bodice before wafting to the floor.
19 May 2008
As the cliché goes, Alessandra Facchinetti has big shoes to fill at Valentino. Today she slipped into them with the tact and sensitivity of a young Italian who appreciates the storied heritage of the house, but is quietly resolved to say something to a new generation. "I think the things Valentino created were timeless," she said. "I wanted to take something from the cleanliness of the sixties structure, but at the same time make things soft and light. But there is nothing too obvious."In modernizing the Valentino standards, the day suit, the coat, the frothy blouse, the delicate dress, and the red gown are just a few of Facchinetti's challenges. In this first outing, appropriately low-key and staged on a small runway, she managed to demonstrate enough of a flair for fragility, precision, and pristine finish to make sense of them. Most importantly, though, she quietly cut through the potential for twee to show how a modern girl might wear Valentino today. The show began with a pale beige-tinted cashmere suit with a stand-up collar and a skirt gathered into deep folds in front, followed by an off-white chiffon sleeveless dress with a belled, multilayered feathery skirt, belted with an enameled metal bow. That struck a sound note—respectful, but not too sweet—that followed through in Facchinetti's handling of chiffon blouses with petaled necklines, vertically pleated dresses inset with abstract garlands of 3-D flowers, and two pleated georgette dresses that captured something essential about the romantic, drifty fantasy of a Valentino woman's lifestyle.At the end, Facchinetti had the courage to put out two red chiffon dresses that, if pretty, fell some way short of the traditional Val showstoppers. Still, she had her own moment of head-turning excellence. It came when she put an immaculately cut black coat with a beautiful uprising scroll of a flounce in the back over a fluttery pink chiffon dress. That was the number that had women chattering as they left the room—proof enough that Facchinetti had survived her baptism by fire.
27 February 2008
When it came—and it's been a long time approaching—Valentino Garavani waved his last goodbye in a room literally lined with the ultimate image of his contribution to fashion: the gorgeous red gowns he has worked from first to last. It was just one red gown, actually—projected on the walls and worn by all of the models who filed out moments before Mr. Valentino took his final walk down the runway to a standing ovation. Uma Thurman was there to salute him, along with Lucy Liu, Alber Elbaz, Miuccia Prada, Nadja Auermann, Eva Herzigova, and Claudia Schiffer.Valentino is nothing if not classy, though, and despite the tears among his audience, friends, and staff, he exited the stage without overplaying the sentimental moment. Maybe he felt the memory of his last haute couture—his legacy for the future—shouldn't be overshadowed. Right enough: What he showed was a fitting conclusion to 45 years of celebrating the happy side of femininity and—at least for one young woman in the audience—a lesson in technique, joie de vivre, and the principles of old-school glamour. The woman in question: Alessandra Facchinetti, the ex-Gucci designer who, from now on, will carry the Valentino flame.It wasn't a retrospective, but the essence was all there: the Val way with double-faced coats and little luncheon suits; the fragile beaded chiffons; the cocktail sheaths; the love of lace, flower prints, and succulent satin bows; the magical draping; and the manner in which he cut a column and arranged an asymmetric shoulder strap just so. If it didn't all belong to the contemporary swim of things, there were standout moments that were both relevant to fashion right now and timelessly gorgeous—an airy pink gazar trapeze coat over a fondant orange shift; a white tailored dinner dress with a raised waist, short sleeves, and collar beaded in silver crystal; or a one-shouldered white satin dress with a knotted strap, splendidly walked by Natalia Vodianova. "Impeccable," of course, is the word—perhaps the one Valentino owns, above all other designers. He's a hard act to follow. But if Facchinetti captures that pristine state of fashion loveliness and turns it in a modern direction, she'll be heading on the right path.
22 January 2008
Ferruccio Pozzoni, newly appointed creative director of menswear at Valentino, has one very distinct memory of the legacy he's been hired to perpetuate. It's an eighties-era image of David Sylvian—the lead singer of the group Japan who was once known as the best-looking man in the world—wearing a Valentino tux. But for his first Valentino collection, Pozzoni's inspiration was actor Helmut Berger, renowned in his day for his exceptional good looks. Clearly, male beauty is a Pozzoni preoccupation, which is no doubt why his dream is to design men's haute couture at Valentino—mere bespoke is simply too classic for his tastes.There may have been glimmers of Pozzoni's nascent ambition in the clothes he showed, particularly the eveningwear, with its revisionist pairing of black and midnight blue, a mink-lined cashmere coat, and a pair of graphic plaid pants, deep-pleated, beltless, and available to order. After all, his background is Prada, Miu Miu, and Brioni, which led one to hope for a hybrid of luxury and edginess (remember, there were collections when Valentino himself carried off the same juggling act with great success). The designer did make a cautious stab at independence from current trends by opting for a constructed shoulder in his jackets versus the soft Neapolitan tailoring that currently has menswear in its grip. And there were quirky sartorial touches—a three-piece suit in tan mohair had a matching tie—and some deluxe outerwear suggesting that Pozzoni has a grip on what's needed. He might have pushed things further, but perhaps caution isn't such a bad thing in these early days after the much-mourned retirement of Valentino himself.
17 January 2008
Valentino retires after his couture show in January, but fashion waits for no man… or woman. Alessandra Facchinetti's pre-fall collection for the house, her first as Val's successor, was on display at the New York showroom on Thursday. The young Italian, who officially ended her deal with Moncler earlier this week, stayed true to Valentino's ladylike sensibilities, while injecting a bit of her own flair for proportion play, fabric manipulation, and couturelike embellishments. Elegant pod-shaped coats with belled, softly gathered sleeves were juxtaposed against tweedy suits comprising short, epauleted jackets and cropped, cuffed trousers. A narrow sheath was decorated with an origamilike fringe across the bust. For evening, which is of course Valentino country, Facchinetti experimented with high-necked blouses and long narrow skirts that tuliped below the knee, or floor-length dresses in which capelike sheaths were layered over narrow, belted columns. Going forward, it will be interesting to watch how she negotiates this old/new balancing act.
6 December 2007
Last-chance alert: If you've ever harbored any vague fantasy about owning a Valentino, act now, or kick yourself forever. The designer's final ready-to-wear show before handing over the keys to his house was always going to be a souvenir-hunter's prime opportunity, but far better than that, it turned out to be one of his most appealingly modern collections in quite a while. Crisply puncturing the potential for a predictable end-of-era wallow in sentiment, Valentino played it as an upbeat, fast-paced whirl of breezy, pretty, drop-dead gorgeousness that blew any lingering sense of ladylike stuffiness to the winds.If there's a problem, it's only being spoiled for choice. What to pick from the head-spinning plethora of dresses on offer? It could be something from the brief, sugar-pink group that opened the show. A short, one-sleeved shift, perhaps. Or maybe it should be something with Val's signature ruche-and-drape going on? For anyone with a curve and a penchant for the eighteenth-century milkmaid vibe, it would have to be the dress in dustyeau-de-nilchiffon with the flirtatious décolleté and swirly skirt. How about a Val bow? You'd find them on a taffeta-spotted sleeve, or sexily implanted along the spine of a slim ivory gown. One of his georgette flower prints? That little sheath with a garland of 3-D petals in the hem and neckline. Still, at a time like this, why not go for broke? When it comes to the ultimate evening hour, it's down to the final two in the goddess category: the vibrant Valentino red, or the amazing black column with a flip of silver tied at the shoulder. Oh, sweet agony.
2 October 2007
If the scale of Valentino's anniversary celebrations helped to fuel the retirement rumors (it sure would have made one heck of a good-bye party), the man himself chose to address the speculation by doing what he's been doing best for the past 45 years: He designed a collection of such seemingly effortlessluxe, calme, et voluptéthat it made the thought of a world without Valentino unlikely—no, make that impossible.Sure, the ingredients were there for an elegy: an imposing venue a stone's throw from the Vatican (with walls covered by framed photos of past glories), a front row of his peers (Karl, Giorgio, Donatella, Tom, Diane), and a tear-drenched audience. But with this Fall couture show, Val skipped a laurel-resting meditation on his career in favor of a strong, sleek, and shiny take on the occasion dressing he excels at. He trimmed away the volume, allowing himself but a handful of fishtail gowns, and the same sense of editing applied to the color palette, which was notably restrained: black, brown, ivory, plum, and sage, with counterpoints of pink and the designer's signature red. Lamé added a subtle sheen in draped tops and skirts.But if all that felt like a contemporary way to deal with old-school glamour, Valentino's mastery of classic couture embellishments—from embroidery to fur and feather trims—meant that opulence was never absent. A suit sparkled with threads of Lurex; another in an exploded houndstooth pattern was hemmed in a thick wool fringe; the bodice of a ruched lamé skirt was studded with multicolored stones. The expertise of the atelier was mesmerizing in an effect called "pages," layers of organza that fluttered like a stack of tissue paper as they moved around the hem of a skirt or the shoulders of a cape.There are 45 years of evening extravagance on display in the exhibition that accompanies Valentino's anniversary. And yet what seemed significant in this collection's evening looks was, once again, what amounted to a kind of restraint for the designer: Take a long dress in black tulle with a sparkle of crystals, for instance, or a gown with a quiet cascade of pink ruffles. Given the significance of the milestone, it seemed reasonable to expect a blowout finale of Val red dresses. Instead came a handful of icy pink satin gowns, a cool, clear way for Valentino to let us know he's still got a few surprises up his sleeve.
7 July 2007
Valentino might be deep into preparations for his 45th anniversary celebration in Rome, but he hardly cut corners for his 43-look resort collection. The designer, who knows his customer inside and out, showed appropriately ladylike dresses and suits—some embellished with floral appliqués, others made up in prints, and many trimmed in lace. His signature red dresses always catch the eye, but a white column, worn sari-like over a beaded tee, was the show's knockout.
26 June 2007
Valentino's latest collection was presented as a static installation. The idea was that a crowd of gilded young men were propping up a nightclub bar while they waited for a showgirl revue to start. On came the lido dancers, off they trooped, and that was it. (The models' lack of interest in the bare-breasted women behind them seemed unfeigned.) It was a curiously low-key affair—or as low-key as anything featuring a half-naked female in a huge feathered getup in the middle of the day could be—especially after last season's sumptuous parade of menswear at its best.But the muted presentation actually suited the clothes. The emphasis was solidly on the classic: double-breasted suits, peak-lapelled sport jackets, gray flannels, pinstripes, windowpane checks, polka dots. Valentino's signature luxe was evident in the cut and the fabrics—in fact, it was easy to envisage the designer himself in many of the outfits—but thatsaveurof the louche that usually gives his men's collections their sly resonance was missing. Sure, there was a pink silk jacket here and a blouson in dark-green crocodile there, but that old break-the-bank Val magic was under heavy restraint. Perhaps he's saving it for his 45th anniversary extravaganza in Rome in two weeks.
24 June 2007
Watching a Valentino show, it's hard not to be overcome by a wistful attack of the "if onlys." If only we women really were that precious and adored. If only we had leisure to get together the Veronica Lake hairdo and the immaculate makeup. If only there were still gentlemen to put us on that pedestal…Of course, its a wildly difficult stretch to imagine such a thing today, but in a season when so many designers are referencing forties movie-star glamour, Valentino Garavani is one old-school master fully qualified to take us there—if only for a few fabulous flashbacks. Once past the daywear—where he worked on puffing up the shoulders of shifts with fur sleeves, and glamorizing tunics over pants—the gorgeousness flickered intermittently into focus. But you had to keep your eye on the ball—or at least, the right ball gown: Valentino is one of the few designers still operating who persist in showing 70 outfits on a runway—a distinct challenge to a modern audience with an attention span permanently set to "tell it to me quick." Still, the lettuce-green satin dress, delicately ruched in the front with a sparkle on the shoulder, the cream column with a draped knot in the bodice, a hyacinth off-the-shoulder gown, and, of course, the showstoppers in Valentino's signature red made it well worth the wait.
27 February 2007
With his spring couture, Valentino revisited his all-white collection of 1968, the year in which he designed Jackie Kennedy's wedding dress for her marriage to Ari Onassis. And to underscore the memory—at least, for those who have the recall—he presented it in a series of intimate, tulle-curtained salons reminiscent of the show in the Sala Bianca in Rome that propelled him onto the world stage.On a cold Paris night in January 2007, in a different world, it was perhaps asking too much of his audience to comprehend the full import of the reference. In any case, there was nothing necessarily historical about the clothes, only a series of plays on Valentino's signature details—the satin rouleaux edgings, the bias-cut ruffles, the silk draping. For his loyal couture customer, who appreciates such things as a neat coat over a little beaded dress, there was plenty that will appeal, and the fragile white gowns will speak volumes to a girl who seeks a dainty red-carpet silhouette in which to set herself apart—ask Cameron Diaz.Ironically, though, it wasn¿t all the white that set the fashion crowd talking, but a singular piece of daywear: a collarless, Empire-line princess coat. It was sugar-almond pink and perfect—so perfect, in fact, it left a sense of frustration that the maestro could have done more in the same vein. Perhaps Valentino is hanging fire. Word has it he¿s preparing a major celebration for his next couture show in July, when the full scope of his métier is certain to be laid out in myriad splendor.
21 January 2007
The show's backdrop of scrolling binary code instantly screechedThe Matrix, but Valentino's eye on the future remained mercifully untainted by any dystopian flimflam. Instead, the designer claimed inspiration from all the well-dressed young men he sees emerging from stock exchanges in London and New York. If that is indeed the case, those guys deserve an award this season, because Valentino's collection was nearly flawless. Using the finest fabrics and the plainest palette of white, gray, charcoal, and camel, the designer wove a serene vision of sartorial perfection. Tone-on-tone pale shades—white, cream, bone, ivory—in velvet layered over cashmere (to isolate just one example) were so lulling, in fact, that the appearance on the catwalk of a pair of black leather pants, followed by a black leather jacket, had a jarring effect (even though they were in the softest plonge).Sartorialism is a menswear theme for Fall 2007 (cued by the exhibition in Florence devoted to the influence of Savile Row), but Valentino's signal achievement was that nothing about his attention to the details of a classic man's wardrobe was odd, bland, or dull. (You don't truly know tedium until a bespoke obsessive has opened his mouth.) Instead, there was a seductive ease and a genuinely aspirational (as in, "I wish I had that") edge to a single-button double-breasted suit in a Prince of Wales check, never mind the layers of various shades of gray cashmere or the black knit cardigan coat with its buckled closings. A monogrammed cashmere dressing gown struck a bit of a bum note when it came to eveningwear, but you're likely to be too taken with Valentino's daywear to dress for dinner anyway.
15 January 2007
His label might be just nine months shy of its forty-fifth birthday, but in a season when a buzz about "lightness" is in the air, Valentino proved he holds the franchise on old-school loveliness with as much authority as ever. Remarkably, his spring collection made some of the lifelong themes of his work—delicate dresses, lace, bows, and, of course, the color red—seem quite beautifully relevant at a time when so many edgier upstarts are stabbing around the territory.Exhibits: a little ivory polka-dotted organza dress, with ripples of pristine frill running around the shoulders and throat; and a shapely scarlet strapless goddess gown, dramatically wrapped with an expertly knotted, flow-away georgette drape. Either of these, plunked in the middle of an emerging designer¿s collection, might be deemed trend-hitters, not to mention streets-ahead in terms of accomplishment. There was a reason this thought cropped up amongst the fragile sugar-pink and lavender chiffon, tiny puffed-shoulder sequin jackets, and multitude of prettily placed bow-motifs: The hair had turned modern, rather than lacquered and bouffed. It was just enough of a context change to make another generation stop giggling at the back and pay attention.Even if hip kids aren¿t about to rush to Valentino right now, this presentation put down a marker for what the label could be in the future. There is no word about succession in this house—Valentino is still enjoying himself far too much—but any aspiring eye out there would do well to study the detail in this collection. Valentino¿s inimitable touch with pleating and ruffles—flat, accordion, tiered, fluttery, crisp, frisée-edged—was a kind of master class in the essence of this brand.
3 October 2006
With a nod in the direction of Russia—and perhaps a wink to the female members of the superspending emergent oligarchy—Valentino opened his Fall couture show with a black swing coat heavily decorated with folkloric embroidery. He took his themes from Russian palaces, art treasures, and handicrafts, but themes never deflect this designer too far from his lifetime's focus, which is simply to make his women feel special. By outfit three, a superb bubble coat in black duchesse satin that was reminiscent of the fifties but perfect for a young woman of today, it was apparent he was going to break up the references with a few beautiful pieces untethered to any narrative.Bell-skirted cocktail dresses and skirt suits in embroidered tweed or topped with minute gold-lace cardigans could bear a glancing resemblance to Russian dolls or icons—but it doesn't really matter. What does is that the silhouettes look young and right for the moment, and that the handwork is extraordinary. Evening dresses stood as a master class in the flawless refinement that has been his trademark since he opened for business in Rome in 1959. One in particular, a draped black-chiffon goddess gown with an asymmetric shoulder strap fastened with a ribbon cockade, had a timeless beauty any woman would cherish. In the week that he celebrates his Légion d'honneur, the audience gave Valentino loud applause for the lifelong and unwavering pursuit of his vision.
4 July 2006
It wasn't so long ago that Valentino was bemoaning the depredations of modern air travel, foremost among them being that people no longer dressed up for their journey. Last season, he issued his own corrective, with a luxurious collection that was tailored for travel of the highest order. So what to make of his latest manifesto? "Say good-bye to the private plane, it's time for the easy jet." Could it be possible that this most imperial of all designers has suddenly decided to become a man of the package-tour people?Well, no—not exactly. The first glimpse of a crocodile blouson put paid to that notion. But the fact that it was shown in a camouflage green and paired with rolled army shorts hinted at a shift—if not a sea change—in sensibility. Though the designer was his usual immaculately tailored self when he took his bow, he imagined his customer as somewhat rougher and readier than he's been in the past. A Prince of Wales suit positively slouched, its full pants spilling over sandals. Asauvagestreak showed through in python-printed shorts, graphic ponyskin accessories, and the crocodile inserts on a cable-knit cardigan.Of course, rough-and-ready is strictly a relative notion with Valentino—what looked like a sloppy rugby shirt was actually woven from a fine cashmere/silk blend. And that classic navy blazer and gray flannel combination would hardly frighten the horses. But, just like the bursts of "Sympathy for the Devil" that tried to break through on Frederic Sanchez's sound track, there was a sense of Valentino having a little fun with the beast within. For Pete (Beard)'s sake, he even proposed pajamas as eveningwear!
28 June 2006
Leave it to Valentino to come up with a staging scheme to rival the Oscars. His Paris set, with its tall flight of steps at the back of the runway, was easily the match of the Kodak Theatre, the venue upon which a billion pairs of eyes would be trained in a little over 12 hours.Descending that staircase, Valentino's models paused for a few moments to let the audience take in the view—a tableau vivant in black and white that drove home his essential message about "the sexiness of black." Then one by one, they took to the runway in double-layered—"two-fold," according to his program notes—blousons and coats, or houndstooths, herringbones, and chevrons, all of which contributed elegantly to the two-tone theme.Less successful was a passage of sequined graffiti prints in jarring Easter egg colors that paid too direct an homage to the eighties art star Jean-Michel Basquiat. Valentino must know that his clients prefer their contemporary art on their walls, not on their cocktail dresses. The quartet of Valentino red gowns that closed the show were truer to his classic aesthetic. Now that this color has taken center stage, who better to turn to than the master himself?
4 March 2006
The desert was the inspiration for Valentino's spring couture, which he sent out against a vast projection of hypercolored sand dunes and sky. Of course, the collection had nothing whatever to do with rough nomadic wanderers. What the designer seemed to have in mind was the sense of weightlessness all that heat can produce, hence the parade of light, fluttery, oh-so-feminine clothes. Valentino is one of the last masters of couture who knows what draping is all about. He can whip silk chiffon around a bod and into flying panels, quivery ripples, and filmy, flippy hemlines like no one else. And his finesse with beading on tulle—say, on the front panel of a curvaceous white dress—makes others' attempts look coarse by comparison.The fact that old-school technical wizardry still exists is something to be marveled over, of course. Whether the woman still exists who is cut out for such a genteel, highly wrought way of dressing—for wisteria polka dots, apricot silk, and cream suits—is another matter altogether. It all makes for a lovely spectacle, in a nostalgic way, but a bit of a frustrating one, too. With a tweak here and an edit there, it's possible to see how someone with Valentino's enviable array of skills might floor the competition with a slightly looser, less "done" version of prettiness that would be ravishing for the young woman of today.
22 January 2006
The cheap little lounging outfits they hand out on airplanes these days are enough to make Valentino nostalgic for the days when people would really dress to travel. Comfort be damned, nothing beats a handcrafted crocodile coat or a three-piece suit in the finest wool if you wish to present una bella figura in midair. That, at least, is the corrective vision the designer aimed to offer in a show that welcomed its audience aboard Valentino Airlines (the invitation was in the form of a first-class plane ticket).To an abstract aural backdrop of Brian Eno ambience and airport announcements—a mélange that successfully duplicated the dislocating drift of travel itself—Valentino paraded a mini-microcosm of characters from the ideal private lounge. It was rather like an update of the old Taylor-Burton starrerThe V.I.P.'s, and just as enjoyably lavish. Aside from the croc and camel hair, there were double-breasted pinstripes, an astrakhan coat, a trench with huge gold buttons, a satin jacket in creamy cappuccino, a leopard-printed ponyskin car coat, a shearling-lined blouson in mushroom suede, a gray silk suit...well, you get the picture.Val's fly guys were light years away from your average track-suit-clad schleppers, a fact underlined by the guitar-wielding longhair in a caviar-beaded jacket (what other kind of bead do you imagine Valentino would use?) and models Tyson Ballou and Will Chalker in full cowboy rig, strolling the catwalk hand-in-hand. Surprisingly, that was the season's first acknowledgment of theBrokebackphenomenon.
18 January 2006
Valentino's new rallying cry? "To stand apart from all the fake couture that has dominated the runways for the past few seasons." If that sounds kind of cocky, well, fair enough: This is a designer with four decades of experience under his belt, who's due to accept a Superstar award from the Fashion Group International this month in New York. More importantly, he's considering retirement, and the house has begun looking for a successor. His legacy is, understandably, on his mind.Whatever his motivation, Valentino rose to the challenge, upping his already haute luxe factor and sending out a spring collection that was fresher and lighter than it's looked in a long time. On a V-shape runway, he opened with the kind of tapered and cropped-above-the-ankle black pants that were in fashion when he launched his house. These were paired with crisp white shirts and short black jackets or skinny white blazers, along with matte red lips and ballerina flats. The classic color combination carried over into evening, where the winner among many memorable efforts was a dress of black organza ruffles tiered to the floor with clouds of white organza for sleeves.Valentino gave equal play to gorgeous color, which appeared in rose prints, and rich floral embroideries that captured the season's feel for Asian motifs. The single trademark red dress that closed the show came with one shoulder strap, in keeping with another recurring idea on the spring runways. His program notes may have alluded to perceived threats from the competition, but when it comes to jet-set elegance, Valentino has no rivals.
8 October 2005
There has never been a couturier who can tie a big, fat, gorgeous satin bow to equal Valentino Garavani. To those with a love of fashion history, the whole of his extensive and glorious oeuvre might be reduced to that one symbol. So perhaps that's why he chose it—picked out in glitter on the backdrop—as the central motif for his new collection.Self-confidence and total certainty about his clients are the sensations that radiate from Valentino's trulyhautecouture. His dainty sable-trimmed tweeds and cream-color, draped satin day suits speak to a world the designer and his ladies cohabit in a style serenely untouched by time. Details will come and go—this season it's bows, a smattering of fringe, inserts of crystal embroidered roses, satin rouleaux ribbons, perhaps a hint of Chinoiserie—but essentially it's all a matter of lunch, cocktails, and dinner as usual.At this stage in Valentino's career, it would be churlish—ignorant even—to do anything but sit back and marvel at his work. For young women like Gwyneth Paltrow sitting in the front row, the chance to dip into that precious bubble of fragile, protected femininity is a rare treat in a rough-and-ready world. And if his gowns—like the red, ruffled duchesse satin spectacular—rise above trend and have neverheardof edginess, then so much the better. Who'd want him to do anything else?
5 July 2005
Valentino and Capri go together like Campari and soda, and, this season, the designer honored that simple truth with a show inspired by his memories of the Blue Island. More specifically, the program notes referenced the gorgeous-but-penniless young men who, in the '70s, used their looks "to conquer all hearts" on the island. As Valentino remembered them on his boardwalk of a runway, these professional heartbreakers (let's not call them gigolos) must have been the best-dressed men in the Med.Characteristically, Valentino's summer was a dressy affair—think double-breasted seersucker suits or madras shantung jackets or lilac suede shorts—but there was a fresh, light touch to the clothes that felt new. The pale color scheme—vanilla, pink, blue, yellow, pistachio, dove gray—helped temper the formality of precisely tailored three-button suits. Then there were the playful surprises: a safari jacket in gingham or fiery red, a summer trench in checked shantung. Fine cashmere knits were embroidered with Deco-ish motifs that recalled the Cotton Club (Valentino apparently remembers a dancer on Capri who decked herself out in bananas à la Josephine Baker). And at night, the designer imagined hisjeunesse doréesetting out to seduce in a cream-silk, cotton-shantung tuxedo.
29 June 2005
Valentino's ultrachic collection filtered many of the strongest trends of the moment for the woman who wants her fashion leavened with a highly developed sense of well-bred elegance.Against a runway of smoky mirrored lozenges suggesting the Argyle pattern that appeared (via elaborate intarsias and appliqués) on clothing and accessories throughout the collection, Valentino opened with a battalion of skinny pantsuits. He was inspired by turn-of-the-century men's uniform pants with their high waists, impeccable cut, and gentle boot-leg flare. Even the palette of red, black, and beige emphasized this martial spirit—as did the sharp wool capes. And his abbreviated, high-waist jacket seemed to extend even further the leg of pants that already seemed to go on forever.But Valentino's loyal ladies also like to look feminine when the occasion demands, so those narrow jeans (with pockets in crocodile or python) and sable-trimmed bombers made way for airy lingerie cocktail frocks prettily composed of chiffon ruffles and dainty Valenciennes lace trim—protected from the winter weather with hourglass coats (one with the effect of corset cross-lacing in back to emphasize the point).Valentino showed some looks from his January men's collection, recalling the Russian theme that dominated that show. They reappeared for women in suede boleros with trim of curled ostrich feathers (in luxurious imitation of Mongolian lamb), or jackets in the ubiquitous astrakhan. Another crossover from the men's collection were the newsboy caps, making accessory news this season, and luxuriously reinterpreted here in sheared mink and crocodile.Valentino's couture touch brought exquisite workmanship to filmy lace blouses and brocade jackets as well as evening gowns that captured the season's passion for Victorian and Edwardian effects. A tiny beige and silver jacket that wouldn't have been out of place in the court of Nicholas and Alexandra was worn with slim flannel pants; a jet beaded capelet shrugged over a blouse frothing with lace; and courtly evening gowns had Tissot trains composed of tiers of ruffles. But Valentino can also pull off effortless chic, as he did with a superb white charmeuse crepe floor-length shirtwaist, trellised with lace ruffles.
5 March 2005
Around the world in 37 looks: that was the not entirely serious excursion Valentino Garavani took for the delight of his spring couture customers. Accompanying the sequence of outfits (jauntily named "Sevilla, No Bull," "Body and Seoul," "Courting Versailles," etc.) was a travelogue slide show, complete with sound effects—a bullring, a desert, the Parthenon, Kew Gardens, you get the idea. The designer's point, he said, was that "haute couture is now an entirely global affair."As always, the collection was delivered as a dashingly flattering compliment to his clients, whether they come from Asia, Russia, India, or South America. And what his audience really glimpsed, of course, was not the world at large but the luxurious interior landscape that Valentino has mapped out for himself since the 1950's—that old-school wonderland where women are treated as creatures made of spun glass. Nowhere else in haute couture is there a surviving vision of immaculate beauty—chignoned, ruby lipped, and pencil browed—like Mr. Valentino's. No one else works so devotedly to provide so many variations on a luncheon suit, from mixed-texture dresses and coats to jacket, blouse, and pant ensembles, trimmed with lace jabots, ostrich feathers, and big succulent satin bows.Sometimes, that's the pleasure of Valentino's couture—simply the fact that it still exists. But he also never fails to send in a breathtaking example or two of feminine, want-able, wearable relevance. Take "Paris Loves Lovers," for instance: an ivory satin cocktail bustier dress overlaid with a floating layer of black beaded tulle. Or "Hollywood High," a sinuous, palest-green sequined gown topped with a fluffy ostrich bolero. Both are guaranteed to cause not-so-ladylike, modern-world catfights in the run-up to Oscar night.
23 January 2005
According to the press release, Valentino was aiming his fall menswear at "the perfect metrosexual, an international urban narcissist." There are, presumably, males who would be thrilled to be thus categorized, but the stereotyping sold the actual clothes themselves a little short. What Valentino excels at in his work for both women and men is old world glamour. With their slicked back hair and their big, luxurious outfits, his models looked like they were headed for a go-see with Hurrell or Horst. As that release pointed out, Val doesn't "do" casual. He may well have opened with a boy in a military cap, t-shirt and jeans but the navy double-breasted coat slung over top was alpaca. The parka that followed was silk, its hood trimmed in black beaver.Brown, the color of Fall '05, appeared in every shade from beige to bitter chocolate in fabrics that begged to be touched: try a camel cashmere turtleneck over brown suede trousers under an alpaca coat. Still, Valentino didn't neglect the dressed-up monochrome sharpness that is so much a part of his classic-Hollywood vision of men: more than a quarter of the collection was black and white eveningwear. There were surprises—he showed a black suede safari jacket as part of this group, along with a waxed trench coat—but you just know that Val's heart was in the wool tux with the fur-collared cashmere coat that sealed the deal.
18 January 2005
After fall's hardcore Helmut Newton Valkyrie, with her wardrobe of tough suits and men's ties, Valentino did a complete reverse. His spring 2005 collection drew inspiration from a woman who travels the world, hitting the global trail with a few hippie looks and some personal charms. Of course, since she's a Valentino gal, her caravan is more likely to be a yacht, and the band she travels with will include her chef, hairdresser, and personal trainer. Nor is she packing light; courtesy of Valentino, she'll be well supplied with ruffled floral chiffon dresses, pleated cotton skirts embroidered with bands of gold, and small, fitted jackets strewn with beads, in a palette centering around lime, ivory, and earthy shades of ochre and brick.And as for those personal charms, she's wearing them everywhere: huge chunky pendants at the neck, a gold cuff on each wrist (some spelling out "VAL," others encrusted with enormous flowers), and leather belts in the shade of tan one might turn after too much top-deck sunbathing. Even those weren't left untouched. Some had buckles mounted with crystals, others were sewn with strands of pearls. Valentino, like every other designer showing in Paris this season, put a major emphasis on accessories. The best was a tan leather thong decorated with ivory-and-gold flowers; it's the kind of sandal that will go the distance even if your summer is spent in the city, instead of round the Greek Islands.This last point is crucial. Fashion is now in the process of redefining all its rules: what's glamorous, what's luxurious, what's casual, and what's appropriate, where and when and at what age. Valentino's response was to mix a welcome dose of reality into his bohemian deluxe looks. Sportier pieces, like silk charmeuse polo shirts and taffeta parkas, still had his glossy, luxurious style, but were far more suitable for everyday life.
9 October 2004
Valentino Garavani is the last grand survivor of the great days of haute couture, and after 50 years, his old-school conviction is something to be witnessed. His vision is of impeccably composed femininity: high, high chignons, red lips, and displays ofrichesseat all times of the day and night. In an era when “luxury” is an over-used buzzword, his clothes can still show what it used to mean to have all the time in the world to dress, when wealth was something only to be hinted at.With Shirley Bassey singing “Diamonds Are Forever” on the soundtrack, he sent out a sparkling, micro-pleated white dress with a tiny white mink bolero snuggled on top. That was followed by a white fur coat, belted in diamanté and falling into petaled panels. That extravagance—in your face, but somehow never vulgar in the modern sense—was his keynote. He used fur (fox, honey sable, mink, leopard) at every conceivable opportunity, in cropped jackets, on sleeves, trimming suits and coats, even fluffing erotically in the décolleté of evening dresses.At a time when many upcoming Parisian designers are looking to couture touches as inspiration, Valentino is there to show how a satin bow tied under a bust, or a voluminous skirt flared gorgeously in back, should be done. Some of his looks—from bustier gowns to glamorous jumpsuits with jeweled boleros—still carry the kind of fifties-to-seventies references that send the new generation into ecstasies. For that alone, he must be honored. Who in the world can sustain the lifestyle that supports this sort of wardrobe these days is another question, for another day. It’s a throwback to another world—but then again, what a world that was.
5 July 2004
It was his vacation in Thailand that inspired Valentino, but anyone would think he'd been on safari at some postmodern game park, from the animals that shed their skins for his collection. Ostrich, kangaroo, buffalo, pony, and crocodile were reincarnated as trench and pea coats, bush jackets, trousers, and shoes. The designer touched on the major directions of the new season—an army-green cotton suit covered a couple of bases, and his sky-blue florals embraced color and print—but he handled them in his own elegantly dressy way. His military men were definitely straight from the officer's mess—an epauletted shirt in chocolate brown was bandbox smart; the pink cotton canvas trousers that accompanied it quite clearlynotyour average GI's jeans. And there was a certain errant confidence in what probably passes for black tie in Phuket: blue cotton blazer, black mohair trousers, croc loafers. No socks, natch.
29 June 2004
With so much softness, lightness, and unabashed luxury everywhere this season, it would seem obvious for Valentino to take his collection in that direction, too. After all, what could be more perfect forle jet set? But the designer doesn't seem to feel that way. Instead, this fall, Val's gals are as intent on creating a charged erotic frisson as they are in looking elegant. Think of the work of the late photographer Helmut Newton and you'll get the general idea: predatory women who like to flaunt whatever God did (sexy curves) or didn¿t (serious rocks) give them.Valentino played up that feeling with references to the divine decadence of Marlene Dietrich in herBlue Angelera. That inspiration was best expressed by the black chiffon evening dresses that closed the show: slim columns, their simplicity complemented by a draped bodice or a back or front sliced to reveal an embroidered or satin bra.While the designer showed mostly black for evening (and put on the runway only one of his trademark red dresses, a taffeta number appliquéd with flowers) there were welcome flashes of color in his daywear: a reed-thin mauve silk charmeuse dress, a pale pink organza shirt worn with a floor-length ruffled skirt. To ward off a night chill, there were fur boleros that looked like a more substantial version of the evening shrug that has been a recurrent idea on this season's runways. Valentino might have been inspired by a platinum blonde from days gone by, but it's intriguing to think what a more contemporary version—someone like Gwen Stefani, say—might do with one of those dazzling evening dresses right now.
6 March 2004
Bows and lace, fragile-shouldered suits, sweet cocktail dresses, and the gorgeousness of grand-occasion evenings: these are the eternal province of Valentino Garavani. For spring, he decided to give all that with the extra oomph of sex. To a soundtrack of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” mixed with Missy Elliott, the models worked the runway with frizzed-out seventies hair, dark-lidded eyes, and an attitude of touch-me-if-you-dare narcissism.Valentino undercut the traditional, decorative propriety of his look with a new emphasis on nudity—or, at any rate, the naughty suggestion thereof. Peachy lace with a bustier of flowers opened the show, giving way to a series of suits, often redefined as jackets or coats over sheer chiffon or lingerie satin. While running through the gamut of day and night options, he trained the spotlight on the décolleté, strategically placing bows just there, swooping a neckline under a lace brassière, or drawing the eye upward with abbreviated boleros.The classic little black cocktail dress also advanced on the scene with erotic intent, its frilly front-on appearance belied by sheer panels of black lace running along its flanks. In the midst of all this, there were old-time couture-show conventions that Valentino still observes—like devoting a section to flowered silk dresses—which are dispensable anachronisms. At the same time, there’s something great (and increasingly rare) about seeing a master revel in the pleasure of glorifying femininity.
20 January 2004
When the fashion chat is all about the "new ladylike," it's not hard to give in to the methods of seduction Valentino has perfected. He's had "lady" down pat for years—for the genuine ones of the yacht-owning class, that is. His Spring collection covers the waterfront for that society, and those who aspire to it.Valentino knows exactly how to translate this season's messages about lace and lingerie into infinitely fragile corseted dresses with gently falling frills. How to tie up a little rose chiffon dress with a lavender ribbon. How to decorate a summer suede jacket with a smattering of sequined bobbles, and fashion a suit out of the lightest, palest liquid satin. Get him on the subject of nautical, and he will show (on his friend Naomi Campbell, no less) how pristinely perfect something as simple as a pair of white sailor pants and a navy silk sweater can look.There was also a theme of butterflies flitting through this collection in prints, on canvas day bags, belts, and hair ornaments, and set into the clasps of metal mesh evening purses. It all looked romantically pretty in the just-so mode that his clients adore. Yet the applause for this show was for the ultimately feminine evening pieces that appeared in his finale: an extraordinary turquoise draped jersey goddess dress, and a single, brilliant red chiffon ruffled gown, short in front and trailing out behind. It's the stuff of fantasy, certainly. But in Valentino's world, it's also the reality that will keep his many fans coming back for more.
11 October 2003
You can’t begrudge Valentino a little self-congratulation when it comes to red-carpet dressing. He opened his show with a rapid-cut video, shown on a huge screen, of all the high-wattage women—Sophia Loren, Julia Roberts, Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth Taylor, and Barbra Streisand among them—who turn to him when they need surefire glamour. And, as if to drive the point home, there in the front row sat Gwyneth Paltrow and mom Blythe Danner, sizing up the latest options from the maestro. The generational pairing was appropriate, since the collection confirmed the way in which, after 50 years of designing, Valentino is speaking to a new audience while remaining true to his heritage.How, exactly, does he do that? For day, among the neat, feminine coats and civilized tweeds, the occasional one now turns up in croc, with herringbone lining and belt details: a chicly modern combination of tough and pretty. But it’s at night that things really take off. Black-lace cocktail dresses—of the kind he’s been doing for a zillion years—come smothered in jet beading and with the lining jettisoned (still proper, but provocative enough to be youthful), and his tiny negligee dresses—confections of the palest satin, lace, and crystal embroidery—are some of the most mouthwatering little nothings seen in Paris this season.That’s not to mention the full-length, knockout gowns, of which there were a staggering array. He showed dramatic swathed empire-line silks; a simplified black and white, bead-encrusted flamenco dress with a deep kick frill; and a powder-blue draped-to-the-bosom look fit for the ultimate ice maiden. In other words, everything necessary to keep the red-carpet royalty coming back to Valentino for more.
8 July 2003
Dim nightclub lighting and a dirgelike soundtrack set an uncharacteristically downbeat tone at Valentino and seemed an odd foil to the ladylike clothes on parade. These were strongest when they played with themes from the house’s Spring couture collection and showcased the extraordinary detailing of which even Valentino’s ready-to-wear workrooms are capable.There was no shortage of stellar effects. Concentric circles of mink on the bishop sleeve of a shapely jacket suggested an archery target. An evening bodice, worn over a sunburst-pleated satin gown in the designer’s brilliant fetish red, bristled with singly mounted ostrich fronds. Bead embroidery was swagged across cocktail dresses to mimic lavish Edwardian necklaces. And there were plenty of the insouciant gestures that Valentino’s well-heeled customers relish, from the frothy ivory lace-and-chiffon lingerie blouses worn with black cocktail skirts to the marled knit cardigan coat fashioned for a Bloomsbury beauty and shrugged over bohemian ’30s beads. He also caught something of the 1940s spirit that has infused this season’s war-menaced collections. But pleated flippy skirts and neat hourglass jackets, swirled with curlicues of padded satin, evoked a young Duchess of Windsor rather than the sexed-up chanteuse singing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” that some other designers have taken as their muse.As always, Valentino seemed to have an eye on Oscar’s red carpet, sending out siren gowns lavished with pretty Lalique-esque dragonfly embroideries and a showgirl-style flapper costume drenched in lilac bugle beads. It is difficult, however, to imagine where his diva is heading in an overscale chiffon sweater thickly banded with Mongolian lamb—a fondue party in Saint Moritz, perhaps? Then again, if anyone knows the quirks of those lunching ladies, it is Valentino.
9 March 2003
No doubt about it: women adore Valentino. When it comes to the big night in the spotlight, modern starlets flock to put themselves in the hands of the maestro. And why not? Nothing is cooler than old-school expertise when timeless femininity, refinement and sheer gorgeousness are on the agenda.Come the next round of red-carpet events, expect to see the girls competing for first dibs on Valentino’s Indian-inspired Spring couture collection. Options include a slew of ladylike white day suits, some with draped satin inserted at the torso, others with finely pleated flippy skirts. For early evening, it could be something from a group of Nehru coats, done with three-quarter sleeves, slim, precise pants and a delicate inner piece of barely there beaded chiffon. Drama queens, meanwhile, are spoiled for choice. Will it be the signature red waterfall gown, the sugared-almond pink with the crisscrossed violet ribbon or the pearl-gray satin with a covering of silver lace? Let the battle commence.
19 January 2003
Can a lady engage in combat? Can she join up with the sports aficionados? Yes, if she's in the hands of Valentino Garavani. The Roman maestro used a Warhol camouflage print in army greens and browns for a sophisticated wardrobe of snappy short linen military jackets and coats and khaki knit jogging pants with high sandals.A lot of designers are in the military/sports zone this season, but the ladies of the Valentino corps are hardly a casual bunch. Their day uniform can consist of an olive jacket inset with brass rings, with the belt threaded through and tied in a knot, or brown leather patterned with mother-of-pearl, or as a bronze lamé safari jacket, all just so.For the evening review, it gets even better. Valentino's communiqués from his couture collection show up as delicate metallic-embroidered chiffons made into fragile capes, cardigans or dresses. And for the grand occasion, there's a full battalion of the designer's fabulous signature chiffon gowns.
7 October 2002
Now here’s a picture: Sean Combs, sporting a major diamond cross, lined up in the same row alongside Marie-Chantal of Greece and Gwyneth Paltrow. They came together to worship at the feet of one of the great masters of haute couture propriety, Valentino Garavani. Valentino’s couture, of course, is not even a shade rock ’n’ roll; it’s his generous, elegant femininity that elicits this multigenerational respect. Paltrow even felt moved to pull out her own camera and take a few snaps.This season, even Valentino took a tiny step toward the dark side that so many other designers are embracing, by making the snake a central motif and working it as a symbol both of Eve's temptation and of elegance, as it's seen in Chinese mythology. Snakes were coiled around heads, clasping waists or entwined on wrists and throats as jewelry. Upswept eye makeup and twisted chignons likewise suggested a bit of wickedness, but ultimately nothing diverted Valentino from his primary goal of making women look gorgeously pretty.Capes were a major design element; in daywear, they appeared in place of coats, or as half capes incorporated into suit jackets. For evening, they became sheer, glittering and fragile, thrown delicately over dresses or bustiers and pants. A chinoiserie theme ran through the collection, putting Valentino squarely into the resurging glamour trend. Embellished coats, patterned like lacquered cabinets, a black satin Chinese pantsuit trimmed with mink, and fluid high-necked sequined tunics over trousers looked beautifully chic. He rounded out the repertoire with a series of black lace and velvet gowns and topped it off with his signature red-hot finale dresses. If this is her temptation, then womankind’s done for, all over again.
9 July 2002
With a bounce of their blow-dried, lacquered hairdos, a crowd of blonde bella donnas stepped out on the runway, decked head-to-gold-booted-toe in Valentino's vision of uptown chic. The designers' classic themes were out in force in a collection that played on his reputation for ultra-feminine tailoring, and paid homage to his rich archive of eveningwear.For day, Valentino's coats, prettily cinched at the waist and full in the skirt, were trimmed with deep bands of fur. He showed city-proper tweed and camel and added excitement to suits with long, fluid pleated skirts by slitting them to show a flash of leg. He even nodded to the biker trend of the season by cutting the most curvaceous leather jackets in town. But Valentino's woman is no streetwise toughie. She prefers to shine at all times, which is why her accessories—boots, bags, gloves and metallic leaf-shaped belts—came in gold, gold and more gold. For dinner, she loves a black lace blouse with poetic sleeves, a cute tiered taffeta smock and a lovely high-waisted coat, fastened under the bust with a black satin bow. She's even happier when given license to go all out for grand evening events. Valentino is at hand to offer every glam option in the book, from floor length gold-sequined gowns, through stately black taffeta, right up to the eye-popping classic red dresses that closed his show in the time-honored fashion.
11 March 2002
“I wanted to focus on the top, on the bosom,” said a smiling Valentino backstage before his haute couture show. “I want the bosom almost out. The client, she loves this sort of look. In a certain way it feels less ladylike, less grande dame.”With a front row featuring Gwyneth Paltrow, Sheryl Crow, and Mario Testino, the Roman couturier needn’t have worried about attracting a dowdy demographic. And this collection, based on the Empire line and using light-as-air fabrics such as waffled organza, cloqué charmeuse and cashmere voile, felt pleasantly young and vibrant. A red wool Empire jumpsuit came with filmy gauze across the bust (which, of course, could be covered up with a matching cardigan). An ivory cashmere Empire-waist coat sat regally over a bone chiffon cocktail dress with sequin embroidery. A neat white double-wool suit featured top-stitching arcing its way just below the breasts.Then there were the prints—mostly bold florals in shades of green or softest pink. A pale-green chiffon cocktail dress featured a peony print, while a long white silk crepe dress with an embroidered lace floral motif was worn with a matching micro bolero. Nan Kempner and her five gal pals let out a collective “ooooh” at look 48: model Dewi in a floor-length, long-sleeve green dress with a red floral print and full pleated folds at the back. Oh, and cut very low at the bust.
19 January 2002
A rich vein of Latin American glamour ran throughout Valentino's Spring collection, which was heavily decorated with ruffles, folksy embroidery and waist-nipping corset belts.The designer's strong palette revolved around black, with flashes of banana, coral, aqua and lipstick red. But the emphasis was clearly on the silhouette, notably in some truly elaborate, beautiful pieces like smocked taffeta dresses with beaded georgette shawls, romantic chiffon tops and long skirts accented with turquoise and salmon embroidery. A shocking pink coat, worn with a ruffled shirt and shantung trousers, was in the best Valentino tradition.As usual, the designer saved his best for after 5. (This is, after all, the man who dressed Julia Roberts for her Oscar victory and Jennifer Lopez for her recent wedding.) Come red-carpet time, celebrity stylists will have no trouble finding plenty of scene-making gowns. Standouts? A black georgette column with bows; the combination of a ruffle-front ivory shirt and a high-waist fire-engine taffeta skirt with lace inserts; and a shirred tulle Aleutian extravaganza.
8 October 2001
Valentino's couture is not about flash-in-the-pan trends or jumping onto the latest bandwagon. The Roman designer stays at the top of his game by giving his illustrious clientele exactly what they want: graceful, impeccably crafted clothes that provide plenty of va-va-voom when needed.For this show, Valentino delivered immaculate pencil-skirt tailleurs, some trimmed in sable, others decorated with elaborate ruching at the shoulders. Several beige day dresses and wool coats were printed or lined with albino tiger stripes, while jackets were embellished with the designer’s signature fabric twist in the back or along the front. For after five, there were brightly colored, show-stopping gowns (like the Ferrari-red ruffled number that opened the show), as well as a group of airy, delicate dresses in pale shades, equipped with painstakingly embroidered jabots evoking Edwardian times.Valentino's accessories had a Deco feel to them: Stingray pumps featured a black stripe on the back of the heel, while others were covered in feathers to match the carefully constructed, circular-handle bags.
7 July 2001
"I'm inspired by clothes that are worn not because they are in fashion, but because they make women feel unique and confident," wrote Valentino in his program notes. The statement sums up his house's devotion to a loyal clientele of over 40 years, rather than to the often whimsical shifts of the fashion moment.All of Valentino's well-known classics turned up on his runway: elegant tailleurs, glamorous gowns and plenty of sparkle. Day wear was forceful and strong: Black crepe suits with embroidered off-white georgette shirts, pinstripe trousers and fur-trimmed vests all had a masculine air to them. Red-and-beige tweed pantsuits, long plaid skirts and fishnet tops provided more casual alternatives.Valentino's requisite evening gowns were mostly black crepe sheaths lavished with sequins; a strass-embroidered satin gown was embellished with panthers, and long taffeta dresses came generously ruffled. But no Valentino show would be complete without a shock of red: Alek Wek dazzled in a bias-cut backless number with a pinched waist and a sprinkle of ostrich feathers on the skirt.
12 March 2001
Heady doses of femininity are always a constant in Valentino's work, and this Spring brings plenty of nude backs, plunging necklines and romantic details to satisfy both his traditional clientele and a newer generation.For day, there are curvaceous suits with plissésoleilskirts, large rose appliqués and uniform-inspired piping and buckle fastenings—all executed with the masterful skill of Signora Anna Mercuri, who has been at Valentino's atelier for 38 years. Cocktail hour and evening are decidedly sexy: Bias-cut gowns with provocative décolletés shimmer with a constellation of beads, crystals and sequins. Sweeping skirts in metallic shades feature rose and petal bouquets at the waistline; wear them with an organza bolero or a lacy shawl.Valentino women aren't shy about their love of accessories, and they will find plenty of pencil-thin golden heels with floral embellishments to satisfy their most decadent cravings. Valentino's token concession to minimalism: the Lilliputian size of his new compact bags. Too small to accommodate a pack of cigarettes, they are meant to hold only bare-bone essentials: keys, lipstick and a couple of platinum cards. Then again, who needs anything more?
20 January 2001
Valentino has far too strong of a personal sense of style to let himself go with the trends—don't evendreamabout pop '80s references here. Instead, he delivered the polished, elegant clothes that his devoted clientele can always expect.Small wool or embroidered silk ponchos were a recurring element for both day and evening; linen and crepe suits looked sharp and sexy, fastened at the waist with a delicate bow. Sporty blouson jackets with zippers, balloon-sleeved chiffon blouses and skinny trousers were both relaxed and absolutely proper. The dresses made a bolder statement, evoking the laid-back grandeur of the French Riviera: Organza, taffeta and georgette gowns were printed with polka dots, large florals and graphic animal motifs in shades of chartreuse, mango and, naturally, Valentino red. Evening teetered on the decadent, with slender columns and minute, short dresses that dazzled with a shower of sequins in gold and pink—presumably, Valentino's recipe for a night of excess.
9 October 2000
If this is the season for ladylike clothes, this is Valentino's moment. No sly irony here, though. His real-life ladies lead a pampered limo life, apparently unchanged since the Duchess of Windsor's day. In fact, Wallis would have loved the '40s flared-skirt cocktail suits worn with fox muffs, the starburst of seams on the front of a double-face coat and the standout slim lace shirt-dress to the floor, embroidered with a trace of golden sequins and sashed in ivory chiffon.But the fussier effects may not have received that royal seal of approval. After some recent adventures in chic simplicity, Valentino now leaves no surface unembellished. Of course, if anyone can approximate haute couture detailing in ready-to-wear, it is he. A turtleneck sweater has a twist of evening gown drapery across the bosom; a cappuccino tweedy coat is hemmed in Persian lamb and embroidered roses. And that's just for starters.After dark, Valentino really pulls out all the stops. His more subtle looks worked bes—like a quartet of scarlet crepe cocktail dresses and the most luxurious trenchcoat in town reimagined as an opera coat, cut full to the floor in either champagne raw silk, black or Valentino red duchesse-satin. And let's hope that Va-Va's ladies own wardrobe trunks large enough to pack those giant crinoline ball gowns ruffled with organza fins—and that they find somewhere to wear them!
28 February 2000
Elegant, glamorous and gracefully cut are keywords when speaking of Valentino's work. This season the emphasis was on prints—floral appliqués, ivory polka dots on red crepe and lily of the valley embroideries. There were also some strong, less decorated pieces, like the stunning cashmere coat that opened the show, evocative of Jackie O. Also striking were his accessories: rectangular bags with cascades of beads and spindly high heels decorated with delicate, dainty rosebuds and glittering flowers.
4 October 1999