Giambattista Valli (Q5478)
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Giambattista Valli is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Giambattista Valli |
Giambattista Valli is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
2005
founder
trained
designer
“I’ve named this collection Very Valli because, in a time of global uncertainty—politics, the economy, the climate—I felt the need to turn inward, seeking clarity within myself,” said Giambattista Valli before today’s show. His mood board featured quotes he penned, a sort of manifesto of his guiding principles: “The weight of lightness,” “The past is for culture, not for nostalgia,” “A look is a silent statement,” “Age is a mental posture.”How can fashion help alleviate the world’s current distress? Valli said that this question weighs on him daily. “We are privileged to do what we do,” he said. “Our responsibility is to remain grounded in reality while also conveying a sense of beauty and lightness. Although it may seem oxymoronic to say that lightness has a weight, these two opposing concepts need each other. Reality and dream, depth and levity.”The collection read as a conversation between those conflicting energies. Slender silhouettes played against billowing forms; short hemlines alternated with ankle-grazing lengths, and flat ballerinas coexisted alongside stilettos. Valli crafted his signature couture shapes—cocoon-draped dresses, short cocktail pieces with poufed skirts, and ball gowns with undulating trapeze skirts—using poplin, cotton organza, and jersey, keeping them unstructured, light, and dynamic. These same simple fabrics were also turned into the fluttering feathers beneath the ruched peplums of bodices, the rosettes embellishing necklines, and the floral-fringed hems of abbreviated tunics.For the finale, Valli offered a series of flowy, draped mousseline dresses in fresh sherbet hues; they looked flattering, vital, and individual. “The women I design for aren’t paradoxes or clones but personalities with independent minds and distinct tastes, engaged in today’s reality,” he said. “They don’t need fictitious narratives, nor to be the parody of someone else. I feel privileged to be at their service.”
27 September 2024
India is never far from Giambattista Valli’s inspiration. Whenever he can, he retreats to Jaipur to immerse his senses in the pink healing aura of the city. The experience of laying down among the scented shrubs and marvelous flowers of the Suryagarh gardens in Jaisalmer is a feel akin to “a caress for the soul,” he said. He wanted this couture collection to replicate the same sensation of “supreme bienêtre.”“It isn’t about India, rather about a sort of surreal conversation that for me is very real,” he explained backstage, flanked by a humongous bouquet of flowers whose effusive smell wafted in the air. The conversation Valli envisioned was between the languid Renaissance grace of Botticelli’sPrimaveraand the enameled perfection of exquisite Mughal miniatures, whose images were plastered on the moodboard. He pointed out that during the Renaissance, Florentine artisans, skilled in the art ofscagliola, an elaborate marble intarsia technique, traveled to Agra to work on the Taj Mahal. “It was a conversation between cultures,” said Valli. “That’s what I find fascinating, and I believe that such dialogue is of the utmost relevance today, in our present troubled circumstances.”Valli also believes in the healing power of beauty, and flowers are the ultimate embodiment of botanical pulchritude. Indulging memories of “the abundance of floral garlands strewn outside every Indian temple,” he lavished blooms throughout the collection. On delicate, fragile silhouettes, tulle bustiers and corsets were variously draped in delicate-hued floating chiffons mousselines, with blossoms burgeoning from the décolleté, or shrubs cascading from the shoulders, or bouquets printed like blurred shadows on organza, or else petals interspersed between flimsy layers of georgette, billowy “as if blown by the wind.”Sculpting volumes through draping is one of Valli’s fortes—he never met abouillonnéeshape he didn’t like. Here his play was gentle and concise, in an airy crescendo of colors and shapes “as if they were notes from a score.” Two Indian musicians performed live at the show: Valli apparently wanted to bring us up to a different frequency. “That’s the caress for the soul I was talking about,” he said. “People today think that beauty isn’t cool. Nonsense.”
24 June 2024
A visit to Giambattista Valli’s airy, bright, and very elegant showroom, just near the Opéra Garnier, is never just about fashion, even if there is a mind-boggling array of covetable clothing, shoes, and bags. It’s about stepping into a lifestyle. The way the designer sees it, making clothes is about sharing a very specific dream of beauty, but that’s only half the equation: the other half depends on how the wearer chooses to interpret them.“It’s a different way of looking at femininity that has nothing to do with age or body type,” he said. “[This woman] is not afraid to support her feminine side, because she knows it can make her even more powerful.”He also no longer puts stock into rules about season or occasion. “I don’t want to listen to those things anymore,” he said. “Everything can be everywhere: why save platforms for evening if you want to wear them with your bathing suit? It all depends on who you are, the layers of your life and culture—that’s what’s important.”Living without rules and constraints was the throughline for a collection that moved from a crisply cut beige blazer inspired by the saharienne to shiny, croc-embossed vinyl coats, summer jackets in Chantilly lace, prints inspired by Florentine frescoes by way of the Taj Mahal, or sparkly tweeds in fresh, summery hues of olive, marigold, or peony pink. That last shade also cropped up on bucket bags, in smooth leather with a removable pouch or in a handwoven, edge-painted version called Weave. (Of the palette, the designer said, “I always say you have to smell the colors because if it smells fresh, it works. If it smells dusty, it doesn’t.”)There was plenty here for modern-day Swans, be it a four-leaf clover crochet or eyelet number for the beach or cocktails or a bouclé shift worked into sailor stripes that could be worn as a tunic over slim trousers or, as shown here, a sassy little dress with petal, pearl, and crystal-embellished patent leather platforms. Several pieces in draped jersey looked like they could go pretty much anywhere; so did a long coral dress with a tie in back. The rosebud prints and other florals will certainly connect with the designer’s base, too. Not all were as they might seem, however: upon closer inspection, one breezy little white peplum top revealed layers of work involving woven ikat, lace and silk cord.And that, Valli said, was the point. “Not everyone will understand all the work that goes into something like that, but they don’t have to.
To me, luxury is about what you express. It’s just a choice in life.”
20 June 2024
“She was my swan, my forever muse,” said Giambattista Valli. Backstage, his moodboad left no doubt as to who he was referring to: the late Lee Radziwill, who he befriended and to whom he dedicated the fall collection. “She definitely opened the portal to my understanding of timeless beauty; I revered her mental and cultural posture, her impeccable eye for editing,” he said. The late André Leon Talley felt the same admiration; he once said of Radziwill: “She edits herself. She edits her wardrobe. She edits her life.”The naturally stylish Radziwill favored a sleek, uptown minimalism that coexisted with a more haute bohemian side. On Valli’s moodboard, photos of her at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, looking divine in an almost severe white column dress, alternated with images of her chic, serene interiors, decorated by Renzo Mongiardino or Christian Liaigre with a flair for the exotic and the delicately floral. Valli picked up Radziwill’s penchant for sophisticated restraint as well as her charming taste for herbariums, Mughal and boteh patterns, and for an almost impalpable shade of Indian pink.Silhouettes alternated from the slender to the softly eccentric; elongated tailored coats and short A-line shifts were interspersed with accents of flou and a dash of the botanical—floaty chiffon dresses printed with Shalimar florals, trench coats embroidered with bouquets of roses, short pinafores ornamented with paisley motifs. The palette of ivory, black, and what Valli called “Lee’s pink” emphasized his edited approach. Concise, terse, tinged with whimsy, the collection would certainly have got Radzwill’s stamp of approval.
1 March 2024
In the pristine backstage area at Giambattista Valli, a massive bouquet of fabulousTrianonroses in delicate wisteria hues drew the eye. “Flowers, roses, nature — they’re noble and eternal, they’re a caress for the soul,” Valli said. The effervescent, excessive volumes of his couture collection were inspired by fresh blossoms, and by the soothing power of nature.Valli believes that couture rhymes with the notion of amplification, and resonates with everything “out of the ordinary.” His is a practice similar to an art form, where shapes are sculpted through draping, and volumes are created by listening to what fabrics are whispering, or, as he puts it, “what they have to say.” For Valli, the art of couture is in the gesture, and in the technical prowess of the atelier, a work of magic that, in a sort of cryptic charade, he described as “the opening up into the infinite beauty of the unfinished, and into the unfinished beauty of infinity.”He started the collection from the toile of a simple bustier bodysuit; the show’s opening look, it came in pitch-black velvet and adorned with white roses trimming its off-the-shoulder neckline. Fresh roses were also laced into the model’s hair, which gave an air of romantic Botticellian beauty. The corset served as a template, elongating into a series of embellished minidresses from which tulle draping ballooned in a variety of inflated shapes, with intricate asides of fine-pleating and extended swishing trains. Interspersed among the abundance of rustling taffeta silks in pale colors, some printed with ombré shadows of flowers, were a handful of outstanding numbers in obsidian-black velvet. They added a dash of regal drama and dark romance to an otherwise whimsical repertoire of elysianfilles-en-fleur.
22 January 2024
Black and white at Giambattista Valli? And no reference to the jet-setting lifestyle of his fabulous muses? What’s happened? Zooming from his studio in Paris while prepping for next week’s couture show, he conceded that he felt the pull of urban life and of being present in the here and now, explaining that he has been intrigued by the black-and-white charcoal drawings of artist Robert Longo’sMen in the Cities,which depict with stunning photographic precision humans in motion, caught in gestures of falling, walking, or running, as if propelled by a rhapsodic, unrelenting energy.Gestures and movement were what pushed Valli to express a spirit of dynamism in a sleek pre-fall collection, intended for the intense rhythm of city living. It focused on slender, elongated lines for short day dresses that can easily transition into cocktail options, slim ankle-grazing coats, and cropped suits in feminine proportions. Yet “everything is dedicated to the comfort of the gesture,” he said. “In every dress or jacket there’s a space carefully conceived to provide freedom of movement and ease.”The collection’s feel was young with an upbeat sense of lightness and subtle hints at the 1960s, “like the look in some of Antonioni’s movies.” But Valli will never be a stark purist, as his sensuous Roman background always looms large, as well as his flair for Parisian chic and romance. Evening numbers were ethereal, flowing concoctions of intricate embroidery, Chantilly lace, and sequins, or printed with abstract florals and leopard spots.His “flower obsession” got the better of him in the “Ribbon Bouquets,” an extravagant 3D appliqué made of thin organza strips embroidered on a pale pink tulle base. What Valli’s delicate creations seemed to express was a longing for comforting, embracing, tender gestures. “Lightness of spirit is something you achieve,” he said, brushing aside the idea that the feeling is synonymous with frivolity or coquetting. “There’s definitely a weight to lightness.”
16 January 2024
It was a big day today for Giambattista Valli, or, as he put it, “a double-big day.” Not only did he show his spring collection, he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of the greatest honors the French Republic bestows upon citizens, French or foreign, who have distinguished themselves for their contribution to the world of arts and culture. The ceremony was held at Musée Picasso: “It’s a huge honor for me and I’m humbled,” said Valli. “France is a country with a profound sense of freedom of expression. It has welcomed and supported me in building my vision and my story.”Valli may well be part of the French fashion community (he has been living in Paris since the ’90s), but his Roman roots are never far from what feeds his creativity, which is imbued with Italian sensuality as well as a Parisian sense of effortless chic. This osmosis between different cultures brought him to reference the Grand Tour, the cultural expedition popular among the bright young things of the 18th and 19th centuries, a sort of romantic pilgrimage of knowledge around the Mediterranean, with Italy and its ancient past and ruins being a favorite destination. “It isn’t an elitist inspiration in the least,” he said backstage. “For me, the Grand Tour is a sort of metaphorical journey of introspection, a quest for self-improvement and knowledge, an appreciation for the beauty of our culture’s history.”His mood board was plastered with images of the exceptional micro-mosaic jewelry reproducing archaeological sites that at the time was brought back as souvenirs by the young, often eccentric travelers, together with cameos finely inlaid on volcanic lava and gypsum reproductions of urns, capital cities, and mythological figurines. Micro-mosaic medallions were one of the visual leitmotifs of the collection, printed on white poplin-cotton column dresses with peplums or off-the-shoulder bodices, and on black silk georgette, loosely draped into fluid, flowing frocks.The collection had a fresh, light feel to it. Decorations and embellishments, which Valli usually indulges as exuberant traits of creativity, were kept to a minimum, reduced to crystal-studded mid-heel sandals and graceful tiaras made of rows of white-gypsum fleurs d’oranger. Embroideries were treated with delicacy, hinting at exoticbotehmotifs and abstract “grotesque” curlicues. The transparency of white macramé lace and the iridescence of sequins added to the overall sense of breezy vibrancy.
A few tailored pieces were introduced for rhythm—a cropped bellboy white jacket worn over a bell-shaped black miniskirt; a sharp-cut, broad-shouldered white blazer paired with a deep-red duchesse minidress—as well as a few summery brassiere-and-miniskirt ensembles in lamé-bouclé tweed, which had a svelte, lithe vibe. Yet what stood out were the long, sensuous dresses that are the designer’s forte. Variously draped, with feminine plays of swirling ruffle and airy, floating volumes, they made the case for a pared-down, lightweight, modern, fresh version of Valli. His personal Grand Tour seems to have brought him to a rather good place.
29 September 2023
Giambattista Valli thinks that today privacy is the ultimate privilege. To emphasize the concept, he staged his couture show in his new headquarters, an intimate set of cream-carpeted rooms scented with rose petals scattered all around, with gilded chairs lining the walls like in an old fashioned,très chicsalon de couture. “BuI I don’t like the wordluxury,”he said backstage. “I preferexcellence.”Valli is no reductionist, yet his collection harked back to a purist idea of haute couture. On his moodboard he plastered vintage black-and-white archival photos of ateliers in the ‘50s alongside recent images taken in the workshop of his actual maison. You couldn’t tell the difference of one from the other. “That’s because the idea of couture floats over the times, it doesn’t really belong to a specific era,” he said. “I believe that modernity is rooted in classicism.”Going back to the essence of savoir faire, mastering the intricacies of the technique to achieve new weightless volumes, or boundary-pushing constructions: “It’s about the artistry that goes into making an exceptional garment,” he said. Every dress was conceived as if it were “a personality” in itself; silhouettes were distinct yet never contradictory, expressing character and singularity—fluid columns, billowy cupcakes, masterfulfloudrapings, structured crinolines. Reducing the palette to a precise color scheme—deep black, stark white,Bois de Roseand a few calibrated bursts of absinthe and silver—gave further clarity to his message, and keeping the styling neat added a note of concision.Yet there’s always a certain Italian ebullience to Valli’s sensuous approach to couture, filtered by a Parisian flirty nonchalance. The opening look on Ella Richards, a black bustier dress with an asymmetrical crinoline lined by undulating volants in white organza, was a case in point. Revealing bare legs and worn with flat velvet ballerinas, it conspicuously activated the iPhones of Valli’s young “swans” in the front row. The finale on Olympia of Greece, a voluminous pale-pink merengue of rosettes in plissé tulle surmounted by a sequined heart-shaped bustier, was likewise a quintessential Valli creation: frivolous, fun, with a dash of impertinentje ne sais quoi.
3 July 2023
Le charmeof the French Riviera cast its spell on Giambattista Valli this season. Valli’s clientele is chic and “nomadic,” as he puts it, and resort is the time of year when weddings and parties around the globe abound. He’s often invited to the same occasions, so he knows the lifestyle. “People come to me when they’re in the mood for happy times,” he said in his Paris atelier. There’s certainly no room for sadness if you’re swathed in a cloud of a dress in weightless chiffon printed in a mint green paisley pattern, or in a billowy silk slip embroidered with exquisite bouquets of wildflowers.For Valli, “nonchalance is terribly chic.” He believes that young generations today are attracted to ease and excellence, “they don’t want to be billboards parading logos around.” Instead, they favor finesse and a spontaneous way of dressing up unconcerned by seasons or occasions. And for him, the word luxury should be banned from the dictionary. What he thinks is meaningful is rather how society is opening up to the power of self-expession. “When I cut a dress,” he said, “I leave a sort of free space within it, that allows the personality of the wearer to inhabit it and to make it her own.”The collection conveyed a breezy feel with a touch of the whimsical, highlighted by a variety of delightful botanical motifs in fresh colors printed on light, feminine fabrications. There were plenty of zesty options for Valli’s nomadic spirits—short and form-fitting or long and flowing. What tied it all together was the grace with which the designer inbued his creations. He said, “the weight of lightness, that’s the feel I wanted to convey.”
12 June 2023
Giambattista Valli’s circle of cross-generational muses has always been pretty star-studded and includes young European royals like Charlotte Casiraghi. Today his portrait of a lady was inspired by a style maven of a bygone era, Josephine de Beauharnais, who was famously married to Napoleon Bonaparte for only five years. Thanks to Ridley Scott’s much anticipated biopic of the infamous 19th century emperor and empress due out later this year, their somewhat fraught love story is primed for rediscovery. Valli isn’t the only designer in a nostalgic mood—historical references have been popping up all season, from wasp-waisted 1950s silhouettes to the power shoulder of the 1980s.For Valli, the nods to Beauharnais’s exquisite wardrobe came through in embroidered vests that were worn over minimalism flared jumpsuits in pristine white or tucked under oversized sequin-trimmed tweed jackets. Arguably the most compelling use of tweed in the new collection appeared on a neatly tailored ankle-length frock coat.The designer added menswear to his lineup for the first time with knit ribbed rompers that were straight out of Harry Styles’s closet and a long semi-sheer tunic embellished with strands of gold sequins. Valli is known for his fanciful eveningwear and regularly dresses a slew of celebrities for the red carpet—Ciara, who sat front row in a new season polka dot sheer dress, among them. Surprisingly it was the more down-to-earth looks that stood out in the lineup this time, most notably the marabou feather-studded cropped white jeans. Paired with a practical moto boot and not the painful vertiginous heels, the more traditional cocktail-hour fare gained a sense of ease that felt modern.
3 March 2023
There’s nothing like the gorgeously sumptuous escapism of a Giambattisa Valli haute couture show. Never mind what darkness there may be around us, his purpose is to create a permanent dolce vita of overwhelmingly pretty color and optimism. “In this confusing moment I like the idea to bring the spectator through, to a holding moment of relaxed and peaceful effortlessness.”And there it all was: Giambattista Valli’s recipe for visual relaxation therapy, laid out before us in yards and yards of sugar pinks, pastel blues, and orange sorbet. He had a pinboard full of inspiration pictures of Beverly Hills as a starting point this season. That’s where the sunshine colors came from, he said. Asked about the starting point for the two stunning liquid silver knotted and draped siren dresses somewhere in the middle of the collection, he replied, “Oh, they’re just draped like she’s got out of the pool and just tied it around her. Easy, like a pareo!”Perhaps there really are women who casually dress like that around their pools. If so, you can guarantee that Giambattisa Valli knows them. But really, it’s as easy as ever to see exactly where these airy gowns and vast opera coats are certain to be seen. They’re absolutely made for the awards season, for the first Monday in May, events, and weddings.If anything, his exuberant style has become yet more expansive and voluminous this season—although amongst all the trains and poufs and bows, he also has a keen eye for satisfying the new-nakedness. In a huge Giambattista Valli gown, a woman can have it both ways: she can also show her legs and have slices of her torso exposed by those ingeniously-swathed drapes.The options for glamorous comings and goings on red carpets are almost unlimited. And not necessarily limited by age, either. There are stately coats and columns galore here, fit to make a mature woman feel like a queen. But that’s Giambattista Valli all over: always thinking about keeping everyone happy.
23 January 2023
Nonchalance is one of those words that captures the aura of something, in this case a sophisticated ease. It’s an attitude and approach that Giambattista Valli carries over from his own life—the designer is famous for wearing his precious natural pearl necklace with jeans and a sweater—into his latest pre-fall collection, which balances glamour and practicality. Both luxuriously fringed tweed cardigan jackets and jeans in cropped and boot-leg cuts seem made for motion.As we all know that the pace of fashion is untenable in terms of the environment, it was nice to see Valli carry over the spring’s “paglia di Vienna” or rattan pattern to use on denim, rather than abandon it. We need more of that kind of thinking. The floral prints, paislies, bows, and prettiness associated with the house were all present in the collection. While some of the printed pieces felt rote, there was newness in the silhouette, which was slimmer, sharper, and closer to the body. The opening look, a top and skirt of exquisitely worked sequin embroidery worked in a sort of coromandel pattern, was clearly an investment piece, and epitomized the allure of the house. “I want to give something more special, [something] dreamy,” said Valli. “You know, the dream is very important. Especially in a recession, people love to buy less, but to buy better, and I think this is very important.”
18 January 2023
Giambattista Valli is not a political designer, but he is an emotional designer: a creative who is sensitive to the world around him and reacts to it through the medium of his work. And so, it felt appropriate to ask the Roman dressmaker about the political situation in his home country, where the far-right’s Giorgia Meloni is on course to becoming prime minister. “It’s very scary and provocative. For women, it’s very unexpected. I was very lucky to live my life in a very complex way. I don’t think that’s the luck of everybody. This is always my search and my lifestyle and my answers to what’s happening right now,” he said, gesturing at the colorful running order that graced the wall backstage.Because what’s unfolding in Italy reflects the un-nuanced mentality of the hard-hearted populist wave that’s on the rise around the globe, the single word Valli chose to describe the thoughts behind his show was poignant: “Emotion.” He presented it in an empty former department store by the Arc de Triomphe—“a white box you can fill with emotions”—and scored it with a rousing electronic soundtrack that kept building momentum. “The idea is to share my emotions with my customer–not only business,” he said. “I want to give colors with smell, taste, and textures, and inspire feeling in the draping, the lightness, and the billowing. You want to wear them, you want to smell them…you almost want to eat them.”Valli found his palette in a collage of flower markets, buildings and landscapes in Asia, and Botticelli paintings, and rendered every exit in its own shade of joy. His emotions materialized in a look that evoked the glamour of the Roman aristocracy in the 1960s. Luxurious, louche and graphic, it was all about colors and trimmings, maxi-earrings, crystal bindis, turbans and big shades. “I always loved the idea of nomadic. But more than ever–and in my country first of all—it’s nice to have no limits; no borders. I want to see the horizon and get inspired by other cultures. Be curious, be nomadic,” he said. Valli demonstrated his hand-spun craftiness in a jacket and shorts covered in a trompe l’oeil print that mimicked bergère before the real deal manifested in various straw dresses woven like bergère.Two-piece concoctions centered around the bra top, and gladiator influences in skirts and bejeweled sandals cemented the Roman mood.
It was echoed in silhouettes that had an ancientness about them, which also fed into the notion of the nomad, like tops and dresses ruched, draped and twisted into themselves, or finely beaded fringe dresses whose shapes were defined with gilded braids. In a season that’s been hellbent on making a goth bride of us all, Valli’s front row—including Paris Jackson and Kiernan Shipka—seemed relieved to see some color. Asked if he wasn’t tempted to join in the veiled gloom, Valli shook his head and smiled: “No, no, no. This is a summer collection. Halloween is mostly in the winter!”
30 September 2022
Giambattista Valli was not about to make any timid, scaled-back statement when he returned to the couture runway in Paris for the first time since 2019. “I think the most powerful lesson of the last couple of years was really to enjoy the moment, live in the moment,” he mused backstage an hour before he sent out 59 extravagant looks. After all, this is his 10th anniversary as a couturier. And nothing in Valli’s world succeeds like joyful excess.He called the collection ‘L’Instant’ and smothered the set with party balloons. On his inspiration board was a picture of people eagerly jostling to get into Studio 54 in New York in the 1970s, juxtaposed with photos of rambling roses in an English garden. These symbolized the “two sides of the coin for me,” he said. “The first part is when I put a line on white paper; the other is expansive, like when you give someone flowers, bouquets of flowers.”Valli most certainly knows how to entice a girl have a good time. The opening all-white looks—“simple” in his mind—were a glorious parade of ostrich and crystal-trimmed dresses, accessorized with fabulously oversized mirrored butterfly sunglasses and giant glittery chandelier earrings. To match, there were puffed-up hair-extensions lacquered and beribboned in homage to the aristo-dos concocted by Mr. Kenneth of New York and Alexandre de Paris.Valli’s superb command of techniques got him, an Italian, elected by the powers that be in Paris as a worthy member of the haute couture fashion week a long time ago. He reminded us of exactly why that was the case as he treated us to a bravura demonstration of flou, opera coats made entirely of curled feather, tiny dresses that were mostly made of swags of crystal necklaces, dense silver and paillette embroidery, and crunchy looking 3-D flower embroidery.By about look 37, Valli had given himself over to the expansive, voluminous, single-punchy-color side of his nature. He is an amazing colorist. At some point, when the ruffles had become as dense as humanly possible, it looked as if the girls were carrying entire, neatly clipped hedges and lawns as trains. Bravo to Giambattista Valli for all the moments that he’s lit up the Paris runway like this.
4 July 2022
Giambattista Valli considers himself “the most French of the Italians,” he said over Zoom from his Paris studio—which coincidentally is located in the historic abode of Jean-Baptiste Lully, the Italian composer who was the in-house musician at the court of king Louis XIV of France.Valli is a longtime Paris resident, and a French flavor has insinuated itself into his collections since the beginning. For him,le style Parisienis a state of mind, or rather “a posture,” as he called it. Asked to expand on the subject, “French women have an attitude of natural confidence,” he explained. “They don’t care about following the latest trend, or being fashionable and high-maintenance; they’re very independent. Beauty for them has nothing to do with perfection, rather with a certain allure; sometimes they just dress their lips with a touch of red lipstick and off they go. They’re verydécomplexées.”This attitude of breezy chic and natural ease was what Valli wanted to capture in his resort collection, which he called En Plein Air. Waxing poetic about “the feel of the air dressing your body, of the breeze on the skin,” he said he was inspired by the grace of the treillages adorning French gardens—but do not expect a ride in the wilderness chez Valli, rather the luxe andvoluptéof manicuredgazons. Lightness was the mot d’ordre of the collection: romantic full-skirted bustier sundresses were printed with green trellis motifs, delicate three-dimensional embroideries of garlands of flowers decorated long chiffon slip dresses, and cocktail ensembles were embellished with floral lattice works.Taking a turn towards an escapist attitude, part of the collection conveyed a more exotic note, “as if French gardens traveled to Marrakesh or Jaipur,” said Valli, who picked up on the post-pandemic desire of exploring the world again. Fluid summer dresses in a warmer palette of saffron, papaya and tangerine were embroidered with intricate images of roses and jasmines; they will be perfect to enjoy “the happy times we crave” in style, said Valli, for whom “beauty gives your soul moments of instinctive, complete happiness. Beauty is definitely the best therapy,’ he said.
13 June 2022
On his backstage wall, Giambattista Valli had pinned a photo taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1968 of a young woman sitting outside Brasserie Lipp looking all the rage in a cool, scanty outfit. Next to her was an older woman in a classic 1940s silhouette sending her a stern look of disapproval. “It’s what I learned from Paris,” said Valli. “Women here have a very feminist attitude in a very modern way. They’re very complex. They don’t care about any critics. They just want to be themselves. This I love about French women. They’re very free, very faithful to themselves.”In Paris, history repeats itself. Anyone who’s ever worn, oh, say, a head-to-toe tie-dye outfit from Dries Van Noten’s ‘Rave and Renaissance’ collection to Brasserie Lipp circa 2014 and been shown to a table in the very back room despite a half-empty restaurant would recognize that attitude. It’s what creates the balance between chic and cool that keeps this city on its toes, and what adds the magic ingredient—a little spark and edge—to the frilly, romantic girlishness of Valli’s work. After all, we’d get bored if there wasn’t something to rebel against.His collection was founded on the dichotomies that exist between generations. It opened with a replica of the skimpy white shirt dress worn by the girl in Cartier-Bresson’s photo, and continued that ’60s hemline until skirts turned into flared trousers and the protests of ’68 began playing out before our eyes, albeit romanticized through Valli’s porcelain lens. A faux fur-trimmed floor-length jacquard coat evoked the Afghans worn by students during the revolts, and cut a clear contrast to the more classic, ladylike silhouettes Valli threw into his line-up to illustrate his Parisian point.Like many designers this season, he said things had taken a slightly different direction over the last 12 days—referring to the war in Ukraine. Wanting to express a sense of hope and optimism for future generations, he styled the models’ hair in a wet fashion to symbolize a rebirth, replaced his original soundtrack with an emotive Max Richter piece, and infused his show production with a certain somber calm. Valli’s walk down revolution road concluded in a series of beautiful tiered tulle gowns so light and ethereal in their bouncing volumes there wasn’t a maître d’ at Lipp who wouldn’t surrender.
7 March 2022
In the first days of 2022, as Covid numbers were rising in Paris, Giambattista Valli’s phone started ringing. “Most of my couture clients were still on holiday. They were calling me, saying, ‘Oh my god, it looks so depressing in Paris at the moment. We’re skipping it.’” When members of his team began to drop like flies, one positive test after another, and pre-collection buyers were canceling their visits to the French capital, he decided to rethink his approach.“We’re becoming a statement kind of house where there iseverything,” he said during an appointment at his rue de Boétie headquarters. “I thought, I want to take the viewers’ hand and walk them through all the floors of the maison, to show that whether it’s a candle, an haute couture dress, or a t-shirt, we put the same expertise into the making.”The film he created in place of a show combined his pre-fall 2022 and spring 2022 haute couture collections on one runway, freely alternating between industrial and artisanal clothes-making to illustrate that point. “The industrial side of our ready-to-wear is very, very high,” he pointed out. Neither collection came with a reference. This time, Valli said, it was all about demonstrating his instinct.“I wanted to open her wardrobe and see what was in there,” he explained, the ‘she’ being his customer. And while it’s no secret that his couture clients aren’t necessarily the same as his pre-collection customers, at this stage in the life of the Giambattista Valli brand, it’s all about showing the synergy that exists within his house. It’s going well for Valli, who is expanding and currently renovating his second building for fancy showrooms and offices.“We have a new market. You can really see that in the collection. It’s a great exercise for us, because the teams are growing. We have new buyers who love the couture, but they see there is a connection between the two,” he said. “We are small. We’re not Dior or Chanel. In a way, this is very positive, but we still have a conversation between all of us,” he noted, explaining how his studio and ateliers work. “There are no walls. Everything is open, even mentally.”Now, it’s about communicating the continuous, concise romanticism of the Valli brand.
At the apex of the pyramid, you have the couture gowns Valli poetically calls “nervous,” likening their eccentric and unpredictable volumes to Marcel Proust’s belief that “patients with a nervous disease are the salt of the earth” (a quote Pierre Bergé used about Yves Saint Laurent at his funeral).A few floors down the Valli pyramid, you have the frilly, girly, sexy, easy romance of his pre-collection garments: a popified cordial of Parisian glamour to which you need only add water, et voilà, you have a lineup of bouclé skirt suit variations, jaunty debutante dresses, and light-as-air summer’s day flou. Valli can do this with his eyes closed, and while it shows no super obvious signs of the complex engineering of his haute couture experimentations, the spirit is there.As for that engineering, it looked no less extra than usual. Valli’s couture is, as he rightly says, “a timeless moment flowing between past and present.” Like them or not, his tiered layer cake ballgowns and ballooning silhouettes are bursting with a kind of life and optimism to which you can’t help but surrender, especially on a rainy day in Covid-plagued Paris.
17 January 2022
In the first days of 2022, as Covid numbers were rising in Paris, Giambattista Valli’s phone started ringing. “Most of my couture clients were still on holiday. They were calling me, saying, ‘Oh my god, it looks so depressing in Paris at the moment. We’re skipping it.’” When members of his team began to drop like flies, one positive test after another, and pre-collection buyers were canceling their visits to the French capital, he decided to rethink his approach.“We’re becoming a statement kind of house where there iseverything,” he said during an appointment at his rue de Boétie headquarters. “I thought, I want to take the viewers’ hand and walk them through all the floors of the maison, to show that whether it’s a candle, an haute couture dress, or a t-shirt, we put the same expertise into the making.”\The film he created in place of a show combined his pre-fall 2022 and spring 2022 haute couture collections on one runway, freely alternating between industrial and artisanal clothes-making to illustrate that point. “The industrial side of our ready-to-wear is very, very high,” he pointed out. Neither collection came with a reference. This time, Valli said, it was all about demonstrating his instinct.“I wanted to open her wardrobe and see what was in there,” he explained, the ‘she’ being his customer. And while it’s no secret that his couture clients aren’t necessarily the same as his pre-collection customers, at this stage in the life of the Giambattista Valli brand, it’s all about showing the synergy that exists within his house. It’s going well for Valli, who is expanding and currently renovating his second building for fancy showrooms and offices.“We have a new market. You can really see that in the collection. It’s a great exercise for us, because the teams are growing. We have new buyers who love the couture, but they see there is a connection between the two,” he said. “We are small. We’re not Dior or Chanel. In a way, this is very positive, but we still have a conversation between all of us,” he noted, explaining how his studio and ateliers work. “There are no walls. Everything is open, even mentally.”Now, it’s about communicating the continuous, concise romanticism of the Valli brand.
At the apex of the pyramid, you have the couture gowns Valli poetically calls “nervous,” likening their eccentric and unpredictable volumes to Marcel Proust’s belief that “patients with a nervous disease are the salt of the earth” (a quote Pierre Bergé used about Yves Saint Laurent at his funeral).A few floors down the Valli pyramid, you have the frilly, girly, sexy, easy romance of his pre-collection garments: a popified cordial of Parisian glamour to which you need only add water, et voilà, you have a lineup of bouclé skirt suit variations, jaunty debutante dresses, and light-as-air summer’s day flou. Valli can do this with his eyes closed, and while it shows no super obvious signs of the complex engineering of his haute couture experimentations, the spirit is there.As for that engineering, it looked no less extra than usual. Valli’s couture is, as he rightly says, “a timeless moment flowing between past and present.” Like them or not, his tiered layer cake ballgowns and ballooning silhouettes are bursting with a kind of life and optimism to which you can’t help but surrender, especially on a rainy day in Covid-plagued Paris.
17 January 2022
“Don’t be scared of beauty,” Giambattista Valli declared before his show. “Sometimes people don’t know how to handle things that are really beautiful.” He didn’t spell it out, but his statement—also printed over a backstage mood board collaged from floral boudoirs, palatial gardens and pretty porcelain—felt like an eye-roll to a fashion climate where romanticism is often deemed cliched. With the exception of couture shows, the industry and its followers can be a bit emotionally unavailable. Certainly, if you want street cred in fashion, waxing lyrical about “ugly cool” is a safer bet than effusing about neat floral dresses.“There are some that can do it very well,” Valli said, referring to a different kind of fashion to his own, “but not everybody has to like that. There are different facets to fashion, and I think I’m very strong in this one.” Returning to the runway, it felt like he wanted to remind us what he’s about. A sucker for romance, Valli is a dying breed in a fashion world obsessed with catering to the supposedly subversive tastes of the new generations. Plenty of those kids have the same princess dreams many have had for centuries, and Valli is here to answer their calls.His collection was a young and fresh take on classic romanticism—little light jacquard suits that looked like watercolor flowers, featherweight flouncy pink dresses, and bouncy plumed cocktail numbers—but infused with the sex-positive attitude of a new generation. That side of things manifested not least in a panting soundtrack, but also in body-centric looks comprised of crop tops and full skirts, barely-there peasant mini dresses, or transparent ruffled evening gowns that left little to the imagination. “I like the idea of new feminism: girls, who have the power to be girls, in heels and T-shirts, almost naked, free to be themselves and not hidden,” Valli said.This designer knows what his fans want: the well-fixed young romanticists who keep in touch with him through social media. “All this time we spent in joggers and hoodies,” he paused. “Now, I can sense my customer wants something extraordinary.” Taking over the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris—which houses some of his favorite Picabias—Valli wanted to stage an intimate experience to go with his philosophy of beauty: something effortless and undemanding. “People do huge venues with enormous decors where you see the collection from far away. Me, I like intimacy: being seated next to the clothes,” he said.
If you attended the show with the mindset of a contrasting brand, wanting—if not expecting—to see something hard and “wrong” and provocative, clearly Valli’s collection wouldn’t be your season highlight. But for the clients, who lined the row across fromVogue’s, decked out in their Valli confections like pearls on a string (and for the likeminded global audience that will tune in online) this was just the light, delicate, frothy, sexy beauty to satisfy those post-pandemic desires.
4 October 2021
Being in Paris right now is like a never-ending rush of blood to the head. After a year-and-a-half of a very different reality, the spirit of re-emergence in the city is both elating and overwhelming. Often, the effect is intoxicating: You feel happy but not entirely in control of the situation. “It’s le goût du louche,” Giambattista Valli said during a preview in his Rue la Boétie couture salons: ‘a taste for danger,’ you might say.In the background, Mozart’s ominous “Lacrimosa” was playing quietly on the soundtrack from his season film, perfectly scoring the scene he had set for his collection.“In Paris, there’s an energy that’s so beautiful, so youthful, so fresh. Everybody is out. There is this kind of generosity of happiness and sharing, and being all together, and getting this lightness back again,” Valli reflected. “To me, going out now is the idea of really living in the moment.The past is very heavy and the future is very uncertain, so it’s about being open and free. You make no expectations. You just get ready. And you have this slight sense of danger—in a positive way—because you’re going out facing the unknown. It’s very open.”He portrayed the re-emergent atmosphere in a collection underpinned by the allure of unpredictability. Frothy tulle cloud dresses, nonchalantly draped chiffon gowns, and frivolously plumed sequined column dresses threw their pastel lightness around the showroom like there wasn’t a care in the world. Across from them, another mood was lurking in the shadows: an obscured ballroom dress swathed in black tulle, a severely tailored shantung trouser suit dramatically covered in a black silk crêpe cape, and a clerical men’s ensemble composed of a black linen caftan with a matching cape. It wouldn’t have looked out of place at the party inEyes Wide Shut.Valli attributed the latter to “a Ryan Murphy atmosphere.” He wasn’t talking about Halston, although he was impressed with the actress who played Elsa Peretti, but ratherAmerican Horror Story, and the surreal, cultish, sinister mood that sets its tone. On the other side of the Netflix spectrum—although not a Murphy production—is, of course,Emily in Paris, which would be a crime not to ask Valli about. “It was the most refreshing thing about being in lockdown in Paris,” he declared, forgiving its many Parisian clichés.
In many ways, the mood that inspired Valli’s collection is embodied by the joie de vivre of that series: that dewy-eyed appreciation for Paris and life, and the sense of YOLO that comes with the territory. “Why do people come to Paris?"They dream of la ville lumières. Paris is the only town that’s glamorous when it’s raining. All the lights reflect in the water,” as Valli so poetically put it. Being back in his crisply lit couture rooms, surrounded by tulle follies and Baudelairean vampire capes, you kind of felt like Emily in Paris yourself. Or, even better: the original Emily, she of Runway Magazine, whose dreams of the Paris couture shows could easily have fit inside Valli’s salons of plenty.
5 July 2021
A woman strolling through the Tuileries, on the way to a meeting with her lover, or to pick up her kids, or just enjoying the open air, her light, delicately embroidered dress moving with ease. This was the rather attractive image Giambattista Valli was sending through the ether during a resort Zoom from Paris. Who wouldn’t want to be that woman?“We need breath and nature, that sense of openness,” he said, adding that the feeling is one that will stay with him as a takeaway for a long time. What is also certain to stay is the sense of comfort we’ve become accustomed to during the lockdowns. Even a diehardcouturierlike Valli has to agree. “The business of sweatshirts and tracksuits has skyrocketed, the very idea of wearing a beautiful dress has been lost under the circumstances,” he said. “But I believe that now women would like to hear the sound of a pair of scissors cutting a piece of fabulous cloth for a beautifully tailored dress.”Those women will find plenty to like in Valli’s resort offer. Delightfully feminine as usual, it blends his savoir faire (“I’d call itexcellence, notluxe—a word I really don’t like,” he underlined) with elegant dynamism and ease of movement. “Even the T-shirts or the denim pants I’m proposing in the collection are infused with the cultural aspect of my atelier de couture practice,” he pointed out. The romantic silhouettes that are the designer’s signature were given a sleeker edge; his long, flowing dresses somehow streamlined and cut with a purity and lightness to make them charming propositions for every day. Embroideries and botanical prints were delicate and gentle; the intricate work on frills and volants was kept light, while fabrics had a fluid and breezy allure.“I was thinking of creating space and movement within the dress,” Valli said. “I wanted to emphasize a modern gesture of effortlessness. I’ve always respected a woman’s body: A dress has to be inhabited with ease, it doesn’t have to swallow the woman who’s wearing it. A dress must feel natural, like being a part of her. Women aren’t billboards.”
22 June 2021
When Italy loosened its restrictions, Giambattista Valli visited his native Rome. There, the naked streets—awaiting the return of tourists—gave him a rare opportunity to connect with the core of his hometown. “It’s the only moment you’re going to catch what Rome really is,” he said on a video call from his adopted home of Paris. Visiting the quiet villas and monuments, he could feel the Roman-Parisian culture clash within his own heart. It made him think of a like-minded spirit from another time: Pauline Bonaparte Borghese, the sister of Napoleon, who married a Roman aristocrat and shocked the city’s high society with her liberated French ways.“She brought a new attitude to Rome. She was getting naked with super comfort. It was very scandalous at the time,” Valli said. “When Paulina arrived in Rome, everybody was very conservative, very tied up in the pope and Italian tradition. She arrived and got naked and confident and didn’t care.” Her story rang a bell: “When I arrived in Paris from Rome, women seemed much freer—more naked, more confident about their bodies. Here, they don’t wear leggings in the winter. Sometimes they don’t even wear make-up, just lipstick. That’s different to Romans.”Looking to the near future ahead—a wardrobe for our impending reemergence—Valli detected in that attitude something he thought felt right for now. “That’s why I love this very short and confident silhouette: great legs and great brains,” as he put it. His collection was largely composed of short dresses with a big energy about them, fusing a Parisian silhouette with Roman floral embroideries and the ruffs and puffs of Valli’s haute couture language. “Get back in action,” he said. “It’s a silhouette for a new life and a freedom for women to express their femininity in their own way.”With consistent lightness, Valli transported the chic black-and-whiteness of French cinema—little bouclé skirt suits and workwear pantsuits—into a more romantic Roman mindset, eventually expanding his silhouette into prim ballroom dresses that never got fussy. “There’s a line of people waiting to get married, waiting to have parties, and we will want to get dressed,” Valli declared. “I’m tired of sweatpants!” Illustrating our return to the wonders of the real world, he framed models’ eyes with a painter’s brushstrokes as a memory of the Roman ceilings they’d been gazing at in awe, their eyes as big as teacups. “We say, ‘It stayed in my eyes,’” Valli smiled, ever the poet.
8 March 2021
“Go big and stay home,” Giambattista Valli decreed on a video call from Paris, adapting his oft-used mantra to a new normal. Now, wafting around in thousands of layers of taffeta may not sound like a regular lockdown evening to most, but trust last summer’s sales figures when Valli tells you: These people exist. Did he sell some ball gowns, then? “Did I, did I, did I! I have some very extraordinary Chinese clients who are looking for these statement moments. It’s also working really well in the Middle East, and there’s commitment in Europe. Haute couture can always be adapted to demand.”Encouraged by experience, Valli stuck to his guns and dedicated this unusual season to the volumes close to his heart. “Sometimes I look at other couture houses and I see a lot of decoration. Couture is not about decoration. Couture is about volumes,” he asserted. “When you sketch ready-to-wear, you have to be a designer. When you create haute couture, you have to be a sculptor. It’s the difference between building a space and decorating it.” Employing the tools at hand—the bias cut, dégradé, miles of taffeta—he worked every one of them to achieve the formidable dimensions that embodied this collection.It created the internet-friendly tiered and layered candy-floss creations that fuel his haute couture business, even during lockdown. Some were shaped like swans, some looked like blown-up pleated ribbon; others were Grecian, harking back to the classic shapes of haute couture. He topped them off with hair volumes inspired by 1960s pictures of Benedetta Barzini and Marisa Berenson. They took Zoom looks to new highs. Of his process, Valli explained: “I try to follow what the fabric suggests. I follow it, and it gives me volumes.” But as the film he released alongside his look book demonstrated, his love of sculpture is more than just an analogy for his practice.Split-screened with models pacing a white room in their big gowns accompanied by a male ballet dancer pirouetting up a storm (the perfect image of Valli’s couture clients on any given evening at home) was footage of buildings from Seville that created conversations between spaces and clothes. It was Valli’s way of showing his clients what inspires his sense of volume, but it also conveyed a bigger message. “The moment we live in right now is about coming together between cultures. Seville is a place where the Spanish and Islamic cultures melt together and create a new third culture.
”Through that lens, you could easily see the codes of Sevillana and flamenco flouncing their way through Valli’s ruffled skirts—or the drama of the mantilla reflected in his high, translucent veils—but he was adamant that wasn’t the point. “If I added another piece to the collection, it would probably be a stripy djellaba in the middle,” he noted. “Marco Polo went to China and brought the noodle back to Italy. It’s about exchange. We all look up at the same moon and sun.” You could say a dress conceived in Seville, in the mind of a boy from Rome, created in an atelier in Paris, and worn in a ballroom in China reflects that notion rather nicely.
25 January 2021
Difficulties bring about opportunities; limitations can actually broaden horizons. Even if we’ve been forced into seclusion, the mind can keep traveling with dreams and thoughts and images—a motionless journey. This is what Giambattista Valli believes: “The pandemic has helped me to expand and better articulate my lexicon,” he said over a Zoom presentation of his pre-fall collection.Known for being the king of fabulous red carpet concoctions and a darling of the high-style party set, Valli has been thinking about how fashion can help women navigate these less “happy times” differently. “There’s more humanity, more privacy, a deeper way of looking at ourselves, more introspection,” he said. Yet because of that, the need for mental wellbeing is even stronger. “The feel of the collection is much more intimate and sentimental. It’s about gestures of self-expression and emotions. It’s about the soul,” he added.Although our present state of forced privacy is certainly conducive to “knowing thyself,” the outside world will sooner or later resume a more active pace; energy levels will be restored. When this moment finally manifests, Valli will have us covered. Little suits in chiné wool conveyed a nonchalant French allure; slim and short city coats and minidresses in wool bouclé looked as practical as they did racé; and cool camouflage prints were given an insouciant artsy spin. Mughal flowers printed on romantic crêpe de chine dresses conjured memories of travels past, as did the paisley and boteh motifs needle-and-thread embroidered on bohemian blouses. The youthful vibe running through the collection made for a joyful, seductive IRL rendition of Valli’s high-style narrative.“I have worked at this collection as if it were a sort of storyboard of feelings, emotions, and sentiments,” reflected Valli. “When it’s in stores in a few months, our situation will certainly be different. But how? We cannot predict. We’ll be ready to party and to resume the euphoria of an exciting social life, this much is sure. But this extraordinary moment, so difficult and challenging, has brought about such strong understanding and knowledge on so many social and cultural issues of our human condition on this planet. One thing is certain,” he concluded, “there is no going back from this awareness.”
21 January 2021
Emblazoned across tote bags and T-shirts and all things shoppable in Giambattista Valli’s collection was a new swirly logo interlocking hisGandVinitials. Inspired by 18th-century porcelain and the crests forged in the cast iron gates of grand Italian homes, its presence came through loud and clear. Sorry for the unchic question, but was this a post-lockdown push for business? “Of course it is. We’re here to do business. Now it’s chic to talk about business,” the designer said.Following a successful digital sale of his haute couture collection in July, Valli is more tuned in than ever to the wants and needs of his trusty clientele. He is in regular touch with them, encourages their honesty, and listens. “This,” he said, gesturing around his showroom, “is what they’re expecting right now.” After the confinement period, the women who buy his clothes—couture as well as ready-to-wear—have conveyed to Valli a new desire for intimacy and privacy.“People were obliged to be with themselves, to have this introspection, and to start a conversation with themselves. This has brought a new purity to life: taking care of one’s soul and psyche; one’s own skin,” he explained. “There are no more red carpets or big events, but there is more intimacy; more honesty.” Rather than going to Positano this summer—as he has done for the past 25—Valli went to Punta Rossa, a nature reserve located between Rome and Naples where forests grow into the sea and flowers bloom a little more vibrantly.There, he found the peace and quiet needed for a purified (and retail-savvy) new proposal. The video he presented in place of a runway show featured clips he filmed on his iPhone while on holiday, showcasing the distinct Mediterranean greenery of the area. Valli transferred those floral motifs to easy poplin dresses with touches of lace, embellished them over neat broderie anglaise shirts, and printed them on delicate blouses as if they’d been painted by hand.He filtered in just enough of that spark his customer would miss if it weren’t there—sexy sequined micro shorts, girly ruffle tops, sweet grosgrain bows, and a couple of cascading frill dresses—but was careful never to tip the succinct simplification that defined his new vision. That attitude meant business: Kicky denim trousers, industrial damier print twill sets and a range of T-shirts with gems and pearls encrusted along the necklines joined Valli’s swirly logo in its direct dialogue with the woman who keeps the wheels of Valli spinning.
5 October 2020
Giambattista Valli could not host a presentation this season due to the coronavirus pandemic. In these extenuating circumstances, Vogue Runway has made an exception to its policy and is writing about this collection via photos and remote interviews.“If they’re coming to me, they want the best of me.” That was Giambattista Valli earlier today on a Zoom call from Paris, hours before his fall 2020 haute couture collection would be unveiled via a video starring Joan Smalls. True to his word, the new collection is signature Giamba. There’s no COVID-time second-guessing of his instincts—no economizing on silk tulle or scaling back of faille and taffeta bows. If anything, the tulle tiers are frothier, the bows more voluminous. A face-covering mask could’ve been a nod to the pandemic, but in black chiffon it was more decorative than functional.Smalls models the collection’s 18 looks in the video, and in the split-screen next to her, scenes of Paris in winter are revealed. “With or without us, nature was going on,” Valli remarked of the months we spent under lockdown. “In the horror of what we’re passing through, there was beauty blooming at the same time.” On day one of this digital couture week, nature is a recurring motif, as is the human desire to get out into it. It may be irrational exuberance on our parts, but it is exuberance which is better than its opposite, and after months of restrictions, this kind of pleasure seeking is hardly a surprise. Even before the collection made its online debut, Valli had two virtual orders. “Happy times are never going to be démodé,” he said. He also has the advantage of a very young clientele; “they’re used to buying on the web,” he added.As his bride, Smalls wears a strapless dress of ruched ivory tulle decorated with a pair of black bows that match the one that accents her cathedral-length veil of polka-dot embroidered tulle. Valli was eager to highlight the couture techniques of each piece—from a sequin minidress and its many-layered point d’esprit cape to a white ballgown decorated neckline to hem in lipstick-red feathers—and he proudly announced he was able to retain all of his employees during the shutdown and the reopening that’s followed. Amidst this ongoing crisis, that really is cause for happy times.
6 July 2020
Giambattista Valli could not host a presentation this season due to the coronavirus pandemic. In these extenuating circumstances, Vogue Runway has made an exception to its policy and is writing about this collection via photos and remote interviews.Although the pandemic has been a massively destructive force on us humans, Mother Nature has actually thrived under lockdown. Call it a spectacular turning of the tables, for once. Glorious spring weather and the lack of pollution in Milan helped plants and flowers bloom peacefully and undisturbed here; just by looking out the window at the new foliage of a tree across the street, our moods were lifted, restored by a moment of hope in life’s rebirthing cycle. Giambattista Valli shared the sentiment: “I have always been passionate about gardens,” he said over the phone from Paris, where he spent the quarantine with his partner and their seven-year-old-son. “I am lucky enough to have spacious balconies in my apartment, which are filled with wild roses, lemon trees, jasmines, rosemary. Being surrounded by their beauty was a tremendous help in our confinement. The energy of nature is powerful, it’s oxygen for resilience and creativity.”Valli celebrated his love of gardens in his new resort collection, which was designed at home during the confinément. Delicate floral bouquets grace his signature feminine dresses, rendered in light-as-air fabrics including chiffon, georgette, and Chantilly lace. The color palette was also intended to convey a sense of freshness. “You can actually smell primroses, wisterias, flower fields,” he said. Too bad I couldn’t actually live the experience, but these are unfortunately the downsides of reviewing remotely.Valli sent clips from a video he made for the collection—fields of beautiful flowers bending gently, caressed by the breeze. “I love to keep memories from the gardens I’ve visited, like the terraced limonaie in Positano, or jardins sauvages, [which are] not too trimmed by human intervention,” he explained. “The most incredible one I have ever seen is the Suryagarh in Jaisalmer, which reminded me of a Mughal miniature, so exquisitely surprising as it grows in the middle of the Rajasthani desert in India.” The eye definitely has to travel, doesn’t it? “We have traveled extensively in our minds under lockdown. We’ve been apparently still, but so much has actually happened,” he said.
Like many of his fellow designers, Valli has reflected on his practice and on its future, emerging with a renewed focus and a vision more edited and clear. The languid occasion dresses he makes for his clients’ ’happy times’ were well represented here, but he also expanded his daywear options. Pragmatic while retaining his signature femme-fleur femininity, these included bell-bottom denims paired with small bouclé jackets, or billowy blouses worn with high-waisted pants.For all his love for the ethereal and for romance—“fashion must still make us dream,” he reflected—Valli doesn’t live in a bubble or a walled garden. The state of the world seems to deeply concern him. “So many radical things are happening on a social level right now,” he said. “It feels like we are in a huge reset mode. And young generations are so engaged in making true changes happen. This truly gives us hope for a better world.” And what about the ongoing conversation on the changes the fashion industry apparently needs? “Who knows?” he answered. “Let’s see if greed will prevail once again over utopia.”
3 July 2020
Although a resident in Paris for 22 years now, Giambattista Valli remains an outsider who relishes with his outsider’s eye the spectrum of French femininity that he sees on the streets near his digs by Canal Saint-Martin. Today Valli worked to transmit some of that spectrum’s rich variety into his collection, including elements he characterized as: “the idea ofgarçonnes, ofeffronté…to sometimes be couture and very straight…and sometimes, how can I say, to be bad characters in a good way.”Valli’s mélange was carefully whipped around several decorative flavors. Pearls and silver beads served as oversized buttons on an opening epauletted cape in rose macaron pink and bouclesahariennes, and also made for piping on richly flecked mademoiselle jackets and matching high-split skirts. Later, pearls were also wrapped in choker tiers not only around the models’ necks but around the shoulder and under the arm. A Meissen-inspired floral pattern was embroidered on prim overcoats and into sheer lace dresses in black-and-white as well as printed onto tiered and flouncy mid-height mousseline dresses. A Chinoiseries pattern, bastardized Louis XVIII style, was etched in sequin on soft suiting and a short kimono dress as well as embroidered in the full black tulle skirt of a strapless dress. Cutesy black bows garlanded headpieces, shoes, and the back of little black dresses. The closing pink dress (echoing the opening cape) was also bowed at the hip. Thegarçonnes-inspired tailoring, a rarely seen category on this runway, was composed of fluted skirt jackets and overcoats, often double-breasted and teamed with diligently-pressed black shorts. The white-strapped, stack-soled black boots worked particularly well with these looks and also added thateffrontéedge Valli had mentioned when teamed with flou pieces.Wilder touches included the veiled crystal headpieces and a little black dress whose neckline was guarded by a coiled crystal snake. An expertly processed snapshot of multiple Paris-girl paradigms, this was a collection delivered with great affection: an homage to Valli’s adopted home city and the women who walk its streets.
2 March 2020
What sheer delight to walk into the Jeu de Paume and discover that Giambattista Valli wasn’t staging an haute couture show, but had installed an exhibition of his spring collection that he’s throwing open to the public instead. “Sometimes the fashion world is too exclusive and sometimes it’s nice to be inclusive,” he said, remembering how as a fashion-mad kid he had had to use every trick in the book to sneak his way in for a glimpse of Alta Moda shows in Rome. “So I think it’s good to be able to open this to people in Paris, to be able to share what is my idea of Italian beauty, and where I’m from—especially in a time like this.”Smart move. The ephemeral format of the 20-minute fashion show all too often prevents any real audience appreciation of how clothes are made. When it’s haute couture on the level of Valli’s, the ability to walk around and linger over the skill and the exuberance, and the mastery of color and volumes, it makes the whole thing more amazing.The enthusiasm was pinging off Valli as he walked people around the private view. His influences were straight from his heart—the epic beauty of the gardens and houses of the Amalfi coast; photographs and memories of Marella Agnelli, Lee Radziwill, and Jackie Onassis; the impeccable clothes they wore with offhand ease in the ’60s and ’70s.The pictures you see here give a flavor of how Valli has extracted the essence of that bygone lifestyle, and is serving it up with a quirkily eccentric exaggeration for a new generation. The surreal fish-eye angles are his “homage to Avedon and Penn,” zooming in on feathered masks, extravagant fuchsia frills, swooshes of capes and drapes, yards of tulle trains, mad bubbles, balloons, and juicy bows.What difference did it make to liberate himself from a runway show? “Well, to decide to do an exhibition, you are editing, going straight to the point of what’s fabulous,” he said. No need, this time, to worry himself about padding out the collection to make sure it would fill a runway. Concentrating on filling the space with the best of the best of what he can achieve, saturating it all with the colors of bougainvillea, lemon gardens, roses, pinks, he’s produced something extraordinary—and all the more lovely for the fact that he’s decided to open up his world for all to see, if even for a few days.
20 January 2020
Giambattista Valli’s idea of daywear is tinged with his flair for a certain glamour; he surely appreciates practicality, yet his translation of the concept into everyday tropes has an unmistakably hyper-feminine flavor. Embroideries, embellishments, flirty silhouettes—chez Valli seduction is a 24/7 operation. “I think that for a woman being a feminist means not foregoing her femininity,” he stated with conviction.For pre-fall he played with what he described as the “duality of women’s nature;” the collection’s look book was shot accordingly in two different locations, each one reflecting a contrasting mood. A more introspective, intimate, black-and-white atmosphere was the background for daywear. Little tweed jackets, ’70s flared denims, and embroidered hoodies were combined in svelte silhouettes. Apiuminogot the Valli treatment, transformed quite luxuriously into a padded jacket in wool bouclé with a fake fur collar, and a tailored pantsuit was given a coquettish twist with a pussy-bow blouse in light chiffon. A sporty touch was perceived here and there, but, as the designer pointed out, “young girls today have sort of ‘digested’ sportswear, which has become a wardrobe basic. So now they’re looking for special, exciting pieces instead.” Obviously his collection provides this in spades.The second half of the story was shot in a fabulous apartment, lavished with lacquered chinoiserie screens—“a precious box,” as the designer described it. It was the perfect backdrop for the luxurious Valli universe, one that most of his clients actually inhabit. “I give them dresses to live happy times,” he said. These included ethereal bohemian dresses in layered floral chiffon, impactful ruched evening gowns in red organza, and sequined numbers in nude embroidered tulle.“Dressing for a woman should be an introspective pleasure, an expression of her refinement of spirit,” Valli summed up. “The right clothes give you a confident posture.” Right. Seductive working woman by day, aristocratic temptress by night. If only women’s dualities were that simple.
22 January 2020
Giambattista Valli’s passion for dressing women is second only to his love for beautiful flowers. This season he combined the two, imagining his dearest muses past and present in the natural intimacy of their own gardens. Backstage on his mood board, images of fabulous mid-century eccentrics such as Peggy Guggenheim shared real estate with sophisticates in Valli’s circle: Eugenie Niarchos, Sabine Getty, Giovanna Battaglia, and the like. Along the runway inside the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, where Valli presented his new collection, there were gorgeous bouquets of wildflowers. Some freshly cut orchids were even applied to the models’ faces, framing their eyes with soft yellow and white petals.No matter the theme, floral-print motifs are a given at Valli. They came in multiple varieties at his show today: Delphiniums were tucked into the pleats of a swingy LWD; sweet peas were embedded in a sequined pajama-style evening jacket—and that’s just for starters. To add a little grit to the glamour, Valli accessorized the looks with bucket hats made from Chantilly lace. The charming embellished ballet flats were a welcome grounding influence to the frothy, puff-sleeve minidresses. You can imagine a Hollywood ingenue like Sofia Carson, who was sitting pretty in pink marabou feathers in the front row, skipping down the red carpet in any number of the leggy pieces.The more structured dresses in the lineup owed their shape to trellises, the unsung heroes of the garden, so to speak. Wiped clean of any print or embellishment, the gently sculpted gowns in shades of pistachio and sunflower yellow presented a fresh offering. Paired with sumptuous red velvet flats, the off-the-shoulder white maxi dress was the pick of that bunch and would make a nice picture at an outdoor summer wedding.
30 September 2019
Giambattista Valli is having a busy year. In May, he announced his H&M designer collaboration at the amfAR gala in Cannes with Kendall Jenner by his side and racked up 600 million media impressions for his limited-edition see-now-buy-now capsule with the fast-fashion giant in the process. Come November, he’ll launch the rest of the project with another event the location and scope of which is still TBD. And over the weekend he dressed Charlotte Casiraghi, a granddaughter of Grace Kelly, in a one-of-a-kind dress for her and Dimitri Rassam’s second nuptials.It’s not surprising that Valli’s instinct for haute couture week was to create a “moment of peace.” His idea was to stage an exhibition rather than a show, but it’s not necessarily the easy way out that it sounds. “Everything has to be perfect,” he said of the installation. “You can’t get away with what you can get away with at a show.”Valli approached the exhibition as a reexamination of his successes. The presentation opened with a group of mannequins dressed in monogrammed white button-downs and big tulle skirts. Two large rooms followed, one dedicated to what he described as the art of the atelier—i.e., a bustier dress embellished neckline to hem in three-dimensional silk taffeta peony blooms and a micro-minidress of wool crepe and silk with tiny embroideries of orange blossoms and dahlia petals. The second room was filled with his “obsessions,” which more of less boil down to rose prints, ruffles, exuberant volumes, and, bien sûr, high-low numbers of the sort Jenner rocked in Cannes.If the dresses looked familiar, they were people pleasers all the same. Valli said that a photo of his two tulle confections in the Costume Institute’s “Camp: Notes on Fashion” exhibition was his most successful Instagram post ever. Naturally, in the exhibition’s final room he displayed reprises of his extravagant birds-of-paradise dresses in new colors, including pale mint, peachy orange, and light blue.Valli said those 600 million H&M collaboration impressions taught him that “the GBV dream is so big for so many people.” It will be interesting to see what he gleaned from the self-curation process when couture week comes around again in January.
2 July 2019
Giambattista Valli was on the other end of the phone framing his Resort collection in everyday terms. “I love the idea that I can dress a woman for picking up her kids at school,” he said. He was deep into preparations for his haute couture show in five days—“I’m between pins and embroidery!”—but wanted to offer context for the clothes in the showroom.Over the past few seasons, Valli has been testing his version of activewear without compromising the enchanting glamour for which he is best known. As befitting a Resort collection, the leisure-luxe swimsuits and caftans were back, now in even more ruffled, printed, and embroidered variations. A newer series of pajama-adjacent pieces—breezy ensembles, shirts, shorts, and even a dressing gown, all detailed with piping and a GBV monogram—were a clever extension of the category and will prove welcome for their off-duty ease.But because it would make sense (hopefully) that women who wear his frothy dresses also need work attire, he has further developed grisaille suit jackets that, in their own way, were the highlight of this collection. “I can see Amal Clooney going to court,” he quipped. In the iconic gray menswear fabric, the styles were sharp and shapely rather than boxy, with floral embroideries an uplifting antidote to any corporate setting.Indeed, flowers were just about everywhere in this lineup, even as metallic and beaded buds embroidered in the leather of the Flore bag. “Real women love flower dresses, garden party dresses,” he said. It’s funny to hear Valli referring to real women given how his clientele has historically been comprised of rare birds. Whether or not the H&M collaboration has something to do with it, the fairy-tale aspect remains intrinsic to his approach, and the couture show will reiterate as much. But here in this Resort realm, when you see a tiered tulle skirt, it is quite likely to be paired with a fancy sweatshirt.One last point: New bejeweled zodiac minaudières prompted the question of Valli’s sign.“Actually, it’s my birthday tomorrow,” he revealed.Joyeux anniversaire,GBV! And needless to say, he’s a Cancer.
27 June 2019
Buttoned-up, bourgeois values have been on the agenda this season, though there is a long-established faction of Parisian high society that is also deeply bohemian. Giambattista Valli had those free-spirited, forthright women on his mind this season. “It’s about living without restrictions and free from conventions,” explained Valli, “Betty Catroux called itle gout de louche.”The provocative images of Guy Bourdin, in which red painted lips and fingernails form a sensuous web, said it best. They were among several erotic references for the designer’s show in Paris this afternoon. Prettiness is a natural instinct for Valli and Monet’s idyllic gardens of Giverny satisfied his need for uncomplicated beauty. In that sense, the coquettish, micro floral-print dresses were the most straightforward rendering of his vision for Fall.There’s been a moody undercurrent to the collections in Europe overall, and often Valli’s most whimsical impulses were toughened up with an ’80s attitude. Think, fringed leather jackets, bombers, and oversize blazers. The marabou-covered strappy sandals that swished the floor like decadent feather dusters added a nice touch to the collection, as did bead-trimmed neck scarves.Valli is known for his sumptuous fabric choices and this season he seemed to be experimenting with alternatives to fur. There were neat shearling jackets in place of traditional mink, and the zebra-print velvet jacquard trench was the chicest answer to the idea of cruelty-free here—something ethically minded It girls all around the world will appreciate.
5 March 2019
Backstage at his couture show, Giamba Valli (nobody calls him by his full name, Giambattista) had only two big images hung on the walls: One was the famousLe Bain Turcby Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a painting infused with an elegant sense of erotic privacy. The other was a Helmut Newton picture taken in Yves Saint Laurent’s Avenue Marceau salon in 1977 during one of his haute couture fittings, in which models dressed in his fabulously exquisitetenues de soiréewere relaxing on gilded chaises, with an attitude of sophisticated abandon. “He captured the atmosphere of the French maisons de la haute couture I was dreaming about when I decided to move to Paris to become a couturier,” Valli explained. “That attitude only exists here in Paris, a sort of posture of the mind, a nervous silhouette, décomplexée.” This show seemed to celebrate Valli’s own haute couture vocabulary, absorbed and distilled in the intense 14 years of his maison’s life.It was a telling coincidence that Valli looked at YSL’s salon picture as inspiration. Not only because he’s one of haute couture’s unsurpassed grand masters; but also because his spirit actually hovers over this Paris Couture Week. Two fabulous wardrobes that he designed for two exceptional women will be auctioned in the coming days: One is Catherine Deneuve’s, his longtime muse and friend, and the other belongs to Mouna Ayoub, the Lebanese-born millionaire socialite of flamboyant taste. They both amassed treasure troves—testaments to YSL’s unerring flair for French chic, a bit of which found its way into Valli’s own haute couture collection today, one of his best so far.The designer has a knack for a young silhouette. Here it found an impactful sense of balance: elongated, sophisticated, luxurious, modern. Classic haute couture tropes were given a streamlined sensuality and an attitude of confidence and sumptuous ease that had a fresh appeal. It was particularly in evidence in the collection’s first part, where dresses were kept short and tight, embellishments and embroideries were lavished with a controlled hand, and volumes looked fabulous, as in a black silk faille pouf cape worn over a draped mousseline minidress. In a positive-negative effect, a black velvet shirt tunic had billowy pouf sleeves in white silk faille. It had allure in spades, also effortlessly exuded elsewhere in a series of tight cocktail dresses, densely embroidered with a night lily motif.
Valli played a game of opposites throughout the collection, alternating neat, compact, contoured silhouettes with imaginative flourishes, indulging his penchant for couture pyrotechnics in a series of tiered plissé tulle or flounced silk taffeta robes de bal with long asymmetrical trains—a bit modern Spanish Infanta, perhaps. They could’ve been edited down a notch to further sharpen the message. But Valli was definitely in top form here: His haute couture lexicon needs no translation.
21 January 2019
On Giambattista Valli’s nightstand is a much-read copy ofThe Pillow Book. Completed in 1002 by Sei Shonagon, a court lady to the Japanese Empress Consort Teishi, it is an intimate diary of a luxurious life. “The way she celebrated the sense of privilege of being a woman feels still so modern; it always inspires me,” he explained. “It’s about the feel of being at ease with your femininity, about an uninhibited,décontractéapproach to beauty. It’s an inner confident posture.”Valli’s clients certainly have confidence in spades. Yet what’s good about his clothes is that they give you a certain confidence even if you’re not a cover girl. He outfits powerful women in politics, finance, and business, whose dress codes wouldn’t be usually associated with his hyperfeminine aesthetic. “They don’t give up their privilege of being women because they’re in power,” he said. “They certainly don’t want to camouflage as men—and they don’t need to.”What Valli women have in common, regardless of age, is the appreciation of a youthful spirit and guilt-free luxe. Pre-Fall delivered on both, with plenty of options that will keep them all happy. Seductive little dresses came in fresh makeup colors, either short and draped in silk chiffon or crepe de Chine or floral-printed and wispy in point d’esprit or Chantilly lace. A delightful confection in pink lamé had a long twirling sunray-pleated skirt, a small bodice, and poet sleeves; a feminine multilayered silk chiffon number in a saffron hue decorated with rivulets of tiny ruffles looked perfectly party-ready.Activewear received the Valli treatment: Scuba tracksuits, sweatshirts, and joggers were lusciously embellished with tone-on-tone studs, faux fur intarsia, and crystal appliqués. A bomber jacket was elongated in black nylon that looked like precious silk faille, draped and zippered at the front then cinched at the waist with a velvet bow. In the same vein, a sturdy reversible shearling coat was overlaid in lace and embroidered with tiny floral motifs; it was as sporty as Valli gets.
25 January 2019
Fashion has been reluctant to drag itself away from its summer vacations, for far too many obvious existential reasons to mention. Giambattista Valli is one of those designers who is constitutionally made to lead his multigenerational customers to beautiful, escapist places, whether fantastical parties, aboard some yacht at Positano, or at any other point on the psycho-geographical map of gorgeous fashion destinations. He’s Roman, spiritually dedicated to creating happiness—one of thosealta moda–steeped designers born to make women feel great: just like his compatriot Pierpaolo Piccioli (the talk of Paris after his stellar Valentino collection), who came to support Giamba’s show today.Valli’s travels were reflected in his Spring collection. At first sight, the long, white tailored dress with patch pockets on the breast appeared to besaharien—or, a caftan, but perhaps not quite? It turned out, in fact, that the inspiration Valli was quoting was not Moroccan, but Indian, via a branch of the hippy path which Yoko Ono and John Lennon trod around the time of theirWedding Albumof 1969. They both wore white.Valli said he was listening to Yoko on a trip to India. A little detective work on Valli’s Instagram page shows that he was in Rajasthan in March at a party held by his Indian designer friend Saloni Lodha. A few pictures back, there he is in Marrakech, over New Year’s. That mix of holiday travel memories and their ’60s and ’70s fashion associations joins the dots towards how a part of his Spring collection turned out: white, the tunics, a velvet tiger-stripe pantsuit, the Mughal Tree of Life prints and embroideries later. A little way along, there was a short A-line tunic/caftan quite similar to Yoko’s wedding dress.The same mind-set that has been influencing so many designers this season, then. Still, Valli’s real focus is on who he dresses: There were plenty of the short-in-front, long-in-back-dresses which young girls like Zendaya love wearing. They’re his classics.
1 October 2018
Couture is not all crinolines and corsets. It is also silk duchesse bandeau tops, high-waisted wool trousers, and the bare midriff that lies between them. “The idea of youth is important,” Giambattista Valli declared backstage tonight, stating the obvious, “because I have a very young customer. They give a new attitude to haute couture—or at least to my eyes.”This was an indeed a very youthful effort from Valli, leggy in the extreme when the accent wasn’t on the midriff. After that bandeau-top-and-pants combination he showed a group of minidresses, embroidered with a flurry of feathers to resemble, he said, the texture of a Francis Picabia painting, or featuring major, major sleeves. He fell hard for the short-in-front-long-in-back silhouette made famous by Stephanie Seymour in Guns N’ Roses’s “November Rain” video circa 1991. Versions came in silk chiffon, Chantilly lace, the tulle he so loves, and even faux fur. It’s a cheeky, playful silhouette, but with its long train it’s no more practical for a night of dancing than a full ball gown. That’s why our money is on the minidresses. Though there was something devilishly clever about the evening ensemble in coral silk faille that riffed on a sweat suit. The “sweatshirt” trailed behind the model like a parachute.Speaking of the young, 21-year-old Zendaya wore a draped goddess gown by Valli to the Academy Awards in March and made all the best dressed lists. So it’s no surprise there were variations on it here: one in black silk crepe against which three diamond necklaces by Chopard glimmered, and another in electric-pink silk chiffon.Flouis a category ripe for further exploration by Valli. Those two dresses had a sensual ease the appeal of which would be multigenerational.
2 July 2018
The legions of ladies who count on Giambattista Valli for party attire probably tend not to think of him for denim or beachwear, which is why the designer this season offered a few first options in those categories. Caftans and a mini-capsule of structured beachwear now join daywear like sequined suits designed to do double duty by day or night. The designer wants his Valligirls to know that, whatever’s happening, he’s got them covered.“It’s sort of like a story added onto sports,” the designer explained during a phone interview. “The summer at the beach, on a boat, by the pool . . . I wanted to complete that wardrobe. It’s a spontaneous desire. I wanted to do some pretty activewear that could go from the beach to cocktails, that she can wear however she wants.” A number of sheer shorts, however, would probably just do best in the privacy of home.It’s a perfectly logical train of thought for a collection inspired by travel and Valli’s signature vision of the fashion nomad. “These women are curious about the world, they embrace different cultures, they’re open-minded, balanced, and free-spirited,” he explained. “I wanted to push even further the idea that there are no rules—it’s effortless, seasonless, and it works. You can take a bus or a private jet with the same allure—that’s what real luxury is about today.”It’s easy to picture her throwing on one of this season’s many embroidered and embellished jackets, like a windbreaker with chrysanthemums and lace, or perhaps a white neoprene tracksuit striped with garlands of roses and trimmed with grosgrain, or an oversize white jacket herringboned with black lace. Pristine white poplin shirtdresses, haute bohemian peasant tops with lace trim, and floral maxi dresses could likewise go from beach to gala—perhaps accessorized with the diminutive “mot d’amour” case in crocodile, which is big enough to hold just a few credit cards (the phone, one presumes, remains in her hand constantly). The Mughal “Tree of Life” motif—on jackets, dresses, and tops—packed charm. Elsewhere, the designer indulged a magpie’s approach to embellishment, on activewear in particular. In an OTT moment, the designer also showed sandals cascading with so many ostrich feathers, the studio started calling them “cats.” Practical they’re not—but in Valli’s world, life is just too short to settle for basics.
26 June 2018
However popular—or populist—there are some fashions you really don’t want to subscribe to. As Giambattista Valli pointedly observed of his collection pre-show: “It’s the opposite of what is happening in Italy right now.”Valli’s creative wellspring this season was the peripatetic pioneers of the 1970s who traveled to allow the culture of other places to broaden their outlook and heighten their art. Alighiero Boetti in Afghanistan, Francesco Clemente and Alba Primiceri in Pondicherry, and—more lately—Gabriella Crespi in her Himalayan eyrie were some of the examples stitched into this gilded, globalized melting pot of a collection. Although not a political designer—the truth Valli pursues is emphatically romantic: beauty, Keats-style—even he could not avoid comparing those outward-looking compatriots with his country’s inward-facing election results this week.Valli’s core ruffled romantic was here in spades,certo, but this was a muse on the move. The opening denim dungarees (at Giambattista Valli!) worn over Mongolian flip-flops and printed pantyhose suggested the mix to come. A striped djellaba shirt under a cutely tailored British menswear check tailored suit; a skirt and top in that same stripe with an embroidered Rajasthani butterfly motif; some kaftan dresses and minis; plus a series of full-sleeved dresses featuring squared panels on the chest that Valli described as “tantric drawings” were more well-traveled assimilations. The brief aside of minidresses over thigh-highs was a flashback to Carnaby Street, and Valli wholeheartedly incorporated ’70s-touched Victoriana into his own practiced litany of prettiness. The fabrications were beautiful and inventive—if there’s any justice and they’re not just show shoes, the Mongolian sneaker should be a streetwear sensation—and the heavy emphasis on pants (even if often given the same multi-sequinned decorative density as his dresses) is an indication that Valli is broadening his own outlook.Mark Twain put it best: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness . . . . Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Our eyes traveled with Valli’s collection and were nourished by the journey.
5 March 2018
When the world is going to hell in a handcart, there comes a moment while you’re sitting at an haute couture show that you just have to surrender. Here you are, usually in some fabulously historic and impossibly gorgeous setting, watching clothes that have not only been created by a designer, but brought to life by a dedicated team of extremely talented craftspeople whose names will never be known, but who’ve lavished all their skills to create something beautiful. All of it will flash by you on the runway in an instant. Old-fashioned as hell it may be, but you know what? Right now, it’s a welcome moment of release from a reality that sadly—very sadly—doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. Bring on the pretty dresses, please—like, now—to provide a nanosecond of distraction.Which brings us to Giambattista Valli, who held his Spring couture show in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in the Petit Palais. His collection utilized everything from myriad sequins gradating in a way almost imperceptible to the naked eye, to velvetdécoupéon organza, to a collision of jeweled beading and layers of macramé (major technical displays: check, check, check). Valli based all this on the collision between the fecund yet untamed nature depicted in the bookThe Wild Garden, and the draped, noble garb worn by centuries worth of sculptural goddesses. Beauty was on Valli’s mind—but of a type that’s entirely instinctual and true to him, and not the versions that are currently getting chewed over elsewhere. “A lot of people in fashion right now are a little bit scared of beauty,” he said backstage moments before the show. “There’s a lot of research into intellectual beauty, alternative beauty, a more edgy beauty, to break the rules. But I’m the opposite. I love the idea of something harmonious, sensual, romantic.”Simple, then. Except not. If this was one of Valli’s more effortless-looking couture outings—that is, he managed to keep the supersize volumes down to the three finale dresses in pleated tulle, each one using a mere 350 meters of fabric—there was plenty of work behind even the most deceptively simple looks. The draping that echoed his sculptural inspiration looked terrific on a billowing chiffon dress dotted with delicate floral buds, bands of jeweling emphasizing the sighing softness of the fabric. But it was even better when it was worked in layers of brown and black chiffon, falling into undulating folds, sliding in controlled fashion off the shoulder.
Come Oscar night, that’s the kind of dress that could speak to the seriousness of the times we live in, yet still look impossibly elegant.
22 January 2018
Giamba’s girls are literally all over the map. For a designer, that’s an enviable position to be in because it opens up so many possibilities. It also presents certain challenges. This season, the designer answered those by taking it to the street and giving his fans a magpie’s feast of unexpected pairings, particularly in his newly launched activewear line.“I love everything that is a little eccentric, culturally,” the designer explained during a showroom visit. “Like my clients, I’m always picking up so many things from all over, so it’s about practicing personal interpretation rather than ‘billboard’ fashion.”For Fall, Valli is sticking with a metropolitan energy, offering his clients more denim, more puffer jackets and tracksuits, notably a white neoprene one with pale green macramé sprawling from shoulder to ankle. Speaking of macramé, ’70s-inspired pieces bring together a number of weaves, such as on a striped dress in burgundy and black. Valli’s girls will thrill to his black and white tweeds with sporty leanings or bouclé biker jackets. Elsewhere, floral embroidery gets play on a shearling coat, just one of a number of strong outerwear options.Valli is one designer who believes that while feminist times call for comfort, they still call for femininity. Think Amal Clooney, from courtroom to red carpet—but while one might easily picture her in a black dress sprinkled with white flowers, or a laser-embroidered vinyl evening coat, the jury is still out on the yeti runners.There’s a lot going on here, but Valli resists the term “maximalist.” “I’m not someone who seeks to create a shocking moment,” he said. “I’m not a code breaker. I want to create harmonies. When my woman walks into the room, you get to know her little by little.”
21 January 2018
Giambattista Valli typically favors opulent venues when presenting his collections, like the storied halls of the Grand Palais, for instance. He switched things up completely this season, showing in a raw space in the 17th Arrondissement. With its large industrial windows and unfinished concrete floors, the place recalled an artist’s loft. That milieu played into the bigger picture of his inspiration this season, which started with the passionate love story of Italian painter Mario Schifano and Nancy Ruspoli. “I always build it up around a love story; I love this feeling of butterflies in the stomach,” said Valli as he greeted well-wishers backstage after the show, including Bianca Brandolini d’Adda and Salma Hayek.His muses for Spring 2018 came from two very different worlds: Ruspoli was Roman royalty; Schifano had humble, working-class beginnings and rose to stardom in the radical postmodern art scene. That opposites-attract energy was palpable in the clothes. Cropped ’70s-style knit vests were layered over crisp striped shirting and flirty ruffled miniskirts, many of which were spliced with black lace that was tucked inside pleats or fluttering at the hem. Valli has toyed with the allure of lingerie dressing before, but this season the effect was more cool than coquette, with pretty little ribbon-trimmed bralettes worn under a floral suit or utilitarian barn jacket, then styled with chunky keepsake necklaces, sensible ballet flats, or furry thong sandals. It was a modern way to give tomboy tendencies a little sex appeal.As someone who moves in incredibly chic circles, the Roman designer has an innate understanding of high-society dress codes across generations—he counts both Lee Radziwill and Charlotte Casiraghi as fans. That said, he seemed to be freeing up his traditionally soigné sensibilities for a more free-spirited attitude. “Loosening things up and giving the women I know more options to choose from,” was how he put it. The modish, neatly tailored minidresses and slinky gowns of seasons past were replaced with a series of gorgeous, billowy looks that fell to the floor in translucent ruffles. Embroidered with tiny pink roses or a verdant vine-leaf motif, the dresses alluded to the skin without giving the game away entirely. In a season that has seen the #FreeTheNipple movement reach critical mass, it was refreshing to see an example of sheer dressing that could elegantly hold its own in the real world.
In fact, you could imagine the soon-to-be-royal Meghan Markle finding her feet in soulful, princess-worthy eveningwear like this.
2 October 2017
Okay, so here’s a question, and please think long and hard before you answer. Who would you rather read a review of Giambattista Valli’s haute couture by—me, or Celine Dion? Yeah, I totally agree; I’d rather read what Celine Dion had to say, too. Throughout Valli’s show—and directly after—she clearly and adorably signaled how much she was enjoying it. She did a few vogueing-style moves. She mirrored Rossy de Palma’s flamenco hand choreography. She got to her feet—as did quite a few others—and gave a standing ovation at the finale of Valli’s show. In short, her response was spirited and spontaneous; it demonstrated the raw emotion that haute couture, the sublime pinnacle of fashion, should hopefully, ideally instill in an audience witnessing clothes that take hundreds of hours and many experienced hands to bring into being. Dion was having fun. She was loving what she saw. And she wasn’t alone.The last couple of days, with their mix of ready-to-wear arrivistes, upstart experimentalists, and legendary couture houses, have still been about trying to locate the emotion that can be wrung out of the experience of watching the shows. At Valli it’s always authentic and believable because the audience is full of the women, the Euro-chic mothers and daughters and sisters—the Valli-tines, if you like—who adore him, love what he designs, and turn up in whatever he has created that they (I hate to bring up money) have bought and paid for. This isn’t about brand ambassadorship; it’s about the personal loyalty that lies between the designer making the clothes and those who wear them. It’s quite simple, really—though in today’s world, becoming rarer and rarer, at the couture level, at any rate.So what might have got them—including Dion—so worked up? Take your pick, really. Valli eschewed any pretense of day clothes and went straight to big-night dressing, even if sometimes the dresses themselves, especially the opening series of looks impeccably lavished with crystal and macramé embroideries, were super short. Valli worked his way through many of the tropes we’ve become accustomed to seeing at his couture, much of it accessorized this season with exquisite vintage jewels from Eleuteri: the balletic tulle gowns; the sinuous and slinkily sexy draped silk chiffon numbers; and the enormous Dovima-esque powder puff fantasias, this time rendered in various hues of pink.
This isn’t a criticism, by the way; it’s simply the assertion that Valli is in the business of making things for the world his women live in. Clearly, that fact wasn’t lost on the Kering-owning Pinault family, who’ve just invested in Valli via their Artemis wing. After all, these days, isn’t everyone looking for a sure bet?
3 July 2017
Giamba, as his fans call him, is fond of saying that his women live “everywhere and nowhere.” The ultimate luxury-lifestyle nomads, they are at home anywhere they go, from Los Angeles, London, and Paris to St.-Tropez, where the designer has opened his most recent store. Just this week, news dropped that Valli now has minority backing in Kering. So you could say that his horizons are looking brighter than ever.The designer is also fond of saying that each new collection is like a fresh chapter in the same book. For Pre-Spring, he’s turned the page to “nomadic eclecticism.” There’s a kaleidoscope of things happening here: With “dandelion field,” “marigold ramage,” hydrangea, peony, and lily of the valley jacquards and prints in soft, flattering shades of pistachio, pink, and yellow, the designer riffs on cultures from India to Japan. Embroidery takes pride of place, with encrusted lace, flower streamers, and multicolored edging on bouclé, tulle, Chantilly lace, and netting.True to form, the designer explores variations in black and white, with macramé and tiers of lace and St. Gallen embroideries. Amid those looks, mainly in black, white, and red, a sleeveless “vertical patchwork” jacket in printed or plain mink, goat skin fur, and beaver makes an edgier statement, as does a sleeved chevron coat in white, black, red, and leopard print. Other statement pieces include lady-in-red occasion dresses, jacquard biker jackets, and a silk taffeta windbreaker—a new iteration of an idea that’s proven popular among Valli’s girls in the past few seasons.Another one of Valli’s quotables is that he only does 50 percent of the work—the woman who wears it does the rest, mixing his pieces as she sees fit. This season, the designer has made that job easy. The real trick will be walking in those ivory laser-cut St. Gallen lace-up boots.
3 July 2017
There’s no denying the beauty of Paris, even in the pouring rain—and there’s been plenty of miserable weather to go around these past few days. Giambattista Valli appreciates the melancholic allure of the city, and more importantly, the women who inhabit it. His latest collection was, in essence, a love letter to French girl style of the most romantic and soigné kind.La petite robe noire, or the little black dress in English, has been a linchpin of a Parisian wardrobe for more than half a century, and it’s one that’s close to Valli’s heart. He reimagined that look with his trademark, ultra-feminine flair and most of the dresses came with buoyant, peplum ruffles that either swished at the knee or swept the floor. There was a slightly perverse twist in silhouette in the form of waist-cinching corsets, a kinky fetish trend that’s been bubbling up on the runway as well as the street, thanks to supermodels like Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner. The results were sophisticated and sexy all at the same time and fit right into Valli’s sensual vision.There were unexpected explorations of the LBD in the mix too, including billowing black peasant blouses that were paired with Nike leggings and open-toed lace-up boots. The myth ofLa Femme Parisiennegenerally revolves around café culture—think: cigarettes and lipstick-stained cups of black coffee—and yet these days even the French aren't immune to the idea of wellness and working out. Valli’s reimagining of athleisure was anything but sloppy; in fact, he seemed to be underlining the fact that the conventional lines in our wardrobe seem to be dissolving altogether. Where wearing running tights or yoga pants to brunch used to be taboo, it’s now totally acceptable. So who’s to say they can’t be reworked for cocktail hour?Valli front row star Charlotte Casiraghi understands the changing nature of occasion-dressing more than most. She arrived at the show today wearing a lace bomber jacket with simple black pants; delicate and elegant, yes, but hardly what you’d think of as princess-worthy. As someone who balances royal duties with real-world ones—she is the editor-at-large ofAbove, a sustainable lifestyle magazine—Casiraghi is expected to wear many hats in any one day, like many women in Valli’s fabulous circle of friends.
And while the collection offered unexpected examples of evening, starting with those athletic looks, the unabashed prettiness that Valli is known for was still a proposition that was hard to beat, and included boudoir-inspired French polka-dot gowns and an ethereal white lace dress peppered with charming sequined cherries; carte blanche for women all over the world to indulge their most decadent fashion fantasies.
6 March 2017
Never was the remove of the fantasy of haute couture from the reality of life demonstrated more than by one of the inspirations for Giambattista Valli’s collection. Gesturing backstage to the first few looks of the show, crystal- and feather-embroidered duchesse satin short dresses and tunics with pants gridded with fold lines, Valli explained that the idea was of a traveler (clearly a very rich, very fabulous one) who packed one of her copious trunks with said looks and pulled them out to find them creased from being stored. Frankly, here’s where couture and life diverge; it’s clear that any maid, lady-in-waiting, valet, etc., worth her or his salt would have known how to pack, and unpack, them properly. I mean, did you ever see the like onDownton Abbey? You did not. Plus, as anyone else (i.e., almost everyone) not in the couture stratosphere would know, those creases are nothing that turning on the shower full blast couldn’t sort out. Still, joking apart, reality shouldn’t, I guess, ever get in the way of a fashion narrative.It’s not the first time that creasing-as-decoration has seen the light of day—Martin Margiela,Miuccia Prada, and more recentlyAlessandro MicheleatGuccihave all tried their hand at creating the notion that their clothes have had a life before they’ve made it onto the runway. This has to be one of the first times it has been explored at couture level, though, and it was a more human-scaled counterpoint to Valli’s general modus operandi when he’s working on these collections, where he’s a firm believer in making big, as in really, really big, gestures. Even when he’s whipping up the tiniest confections, he will oftentimes, just to amp up the drama, playfully have a train trailing in the wake of a short dress, such as this season’s pink silk faille version cascading with ruffles.For the most part, though, it was ball gowns galore for Spring. Some were constructed out of countless yards of tulle and mousseline, a Valli standard, while others were traced in graphic formations with crystals, so they conspired to somehow look both extravagant and minimalistic at the same time. If one can talk about trends at couture, then it’s this: The Ball Gown Is Back. How this rates in a world where so many women are currently engaged with activism and empowerment, who can say? But after all, this is the haute couture, so why not go all out? No one came here looking for a hoodie, after all.
23 January 2017
Giambattista Valli is a designer synonymous with dresses, mostly of the exquisite, couture kind. Lately though, he’s been thinking beyond the rarefied world of evening, exploring more practical terrain in a woman’s wardrobe—or as he put it, clothes for the school run, the office, and not just cocktail hour. It’s perhaps why Valli has been so obsessed with perfecting the fit and cut of his pant for the past few seasons, with a signature silhouette that tends toward long, lean, and slightly flared.There were certainly plenty of tailoring options besides for Pre-Fall, including Valli’s latest take on the classic Wall Street suit—a gray sleeveless blazer paired with ankle-nipping pants—a look that would surely pass even the strictest of corporate dress codes with the addition of, say, a crisp button-down shirt.Amal Clooney, a Valli fan known for navigating a decidedly conservative working milieu, could certainly attest to that. Still, it was hard to turn your eye away from the pretty, little things in the collection—a powder pink mink coat cut with macramé lace, a tea-length lilac dress tied up with bows, and all the eye-catching floral handwork, for example. And of course those pieces spoke directly to the soft femininity Valli has been nurturing since the beginning.That said, Valli managed to strike a happy medium at several points in the collection. The abstracted prints he’s been experimenting with worked particularly well on a pair of black cigarette pants that were shown with a matching ruffled white blouse—a nice reimagining of the classic tuxedo. And his expert couture hands were put to great use on a sporty shearling jacket that had a sleek patent leather finish, and was laser-cut with petals. After all, chic high-powered women like Amal Clooney need something fun to throw over their two-piece suit at the end of the day.
11 January 2017
Giambattista Vallilikes to make feminine fashion with a capital F, and his idea of beauty is rooted in classic romanticism. Like many designers this season, Valli has been pondering the clothes that are closest to a woman’s heart quite literally, meaning lingerie. The underwear-as-outerwear look has been propelled forward on the street thanks to the likes ofGigi HadidandKendall Jenner, who are regularly photographed shuttling between the gym and brunch in ab-baring crop tops and bralettes. In Valli’s hands, that look gained a flirty sophistication; when Hadid appeared on his runway today, she wore her satin bra and high-waisted undies with a delicate pleated lace skirt, and a taffeta jacket with puffed sleeves.The idea of underpinnings was worked into buoyant, ballerina-style minidresses, too, the prettiest of which had lace ruffles snaking up the bustline and down the waist. Valli has a real thing for floral motifs, and this season the flower handiwork was articulated to give a sense of movement—one striking empire-line look fluttered with lace that appeared like hanging vines rustling in the wind. For women who prefer to leave a little more to the imagination, there was enough drama to go around with the statement-sleeve blouses, and off-the-shoulder gowns that were embroidered with the Roman-born designer’s monogram, perhaps the most rarefied take on the logo trend that’s come through for Spring 2017.Valli’s inner circle of glamorous friends—Bianca Brandolini D'Adda,Lauren Santo Domingo, Eugenie Niarchos—were joined by a few unexpected faces on the front row, including French singer and actress Soko. In her long lace white dress and pretty pink heels, she had an air of elegance about her that was quite different from the grungy looks we’ve seen her wear in the past. If Soko is ready to ditch her high-fashion hoodies for straight-up ladylike chic like this, then the rest of the world might not be too far behind.
3 October 2016
What would happen if Empress Joséphine met Kirsten Owen? That could’ve been the setup atGiambattista Vallithis evening. To be sure, the collection was far more empire than it was grunge, what with the pouf sleeves, the sweet flower-bud prints, and, yes, the empire waistlines. But we’re fairly sure Mrs. Napoleon never revealed her midriff in public, as a couple of cropped blouses and tapered pants looks did here. Nor did her skirts rise quite so high on the thigh.One reason Valli’s front row is so well stocked with pretty young things—who were this season joined by an emotive Céline Dion, clapping enthusiastically and shouting “Bravo!” at the end—is that he’s tapped into what the party set likes to wear. As a rule, it’s ornate and it’s body-confident. That meant that the micro lengths were balanced by outsized sleeves, exaggerated ruffled shoulders, even the occasional neck ruff. A few minis were accessorized with floor-scraping tulle trains—one part regal, and the other part Stephanie Seymour in Guns N' Roses’ “November Rain.” When dresses reached the floor, they tended to be diaphanous and pleated, draped goddess style from an asymmetric neckline or sweeping from both shoulders like a cape.Valli concluded, like he usually does, with a trio of tiered and flounced tulle confections so grand that they might’ve intimidated Joséphine. What was new were the fine jewels—drop earrings, pendant necklaces, and sautoirs—all by Buccellati. A sheared white lamb A-line coat was finished with a row of diamond brooch buttons, and the bodices of a pair of dresses were double-wrapped with a long rope of diamonds. It was a synergistic coupling, the kind of thing that should happen more often at couture.
4 July 2016
Climbing ramage, camellias, gardenias, anemones, peonies, lilies of the valley; the list of floral motifs inGiambattista Valli’s new collection is exhaustive enough to intimidate even the most seasoned of gardeners, especially given that his designs often come with 3-D petal embellishments that are not far removed from the real thing. Flowers have always been in the Roman-born designer’s wheelhouse, and that straightforward sense of pretty is very much at the roots of his brand, too. The pick of the bunch this time around included a long micro daisy-sprigged lace dress—a nice update on the LWDs that have dominated lately—and a floor-sweeping empire line number printed with roses and finished with a Victorian-style lacy high collar, a flattering red carpet–appropriate silhouette that is rapidly becoming a signature.There were plenty of other classic Valli-isms to be found: statement fur vests and jackets spliced with lace in sugary shades of pink and lilac and ruffled cocktail minidresses and silk chiffon blouses galore. There were several iterations of his popular grommet-studded gladiator sandals, and the knee-high versions, which came in shades of mint green and gold, worked well with the shorter hemlines in the collection. They’re bound to be a repeat hit with women inside his glamorous social circle—the Brandolinis and Santo Domingos of the world—and statement shoe fanatics across the globe alike. Nothing earth-shatteringly new to be sure, but more a continuation of the refined romantic message the designer has been honing for the past few seasons.
22 June 2016
Giambattista Vallihas experience dressing an impressive roster of high-profile women, frequently providingAmal Clooney—arguably the world’s most stylish human rights lawyer—with an elegant working wardrobe, and giving superstars such asRihannaandJ.Lotheir fairy-tale moments on the red carpet, too. The Roman-born designer’s inner circle of sophisticated fans were all in attendance today at his Fall show, including Lee Radziwill,Bianca Brandolini D’Adda, andLauren Santo Domingo.The collection was anchored by what is often the most pivotal item in a high-society wardrobe: the cocktail dress. The Swinging ’60s hemline of seasons past was lowered to hit demurely above the knee, and the silhouette had a classic, Parisian chic about it. Fluttering plissé chiffon frocks were nipped at the waist with neatly tied black bows or bands of floral guipure lace. Aside from one boxy slate gray jacket, even the masculine-inspired pieces came with those feminine finishings, the most convincing of which was a shaggy mohair duffle coat that had dainty bowlike fastenings instead of chunky toggles.Valli is known to finish his ready-to-wear with couturier-like flourishes, and one lace coatdress was expertly spliced with mink stripes. This sense of airiness marked the standout items in the collection, including a diaphanous floral dress with a Neo-Edwardian collar and long sleeves. That romantic, covered-up look made its way into the more dramatic eveningwear as well, andGigi Hadidclosed the show in a sheer high-collared gown with cherry blossom–like embroidery. New and aspiring stars looking to turn heads on the red carpet wouldn’t go wrong with the subtle reveal of these pieces.
7 March 2016
There are as many responses to the November attacks as there are designers in Paris. It’s all but inevitable the subject would come up this week; designers were working on their haute couture collections when the events occurred.Giambattista Valli’s idea was to look at the city’s famous gardens. “It’s kind of a thank-you to Paris,” he said backstage. “You know that flowers are my obsession. This time they come from the Parc de Bagatelle, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Palais-Royal, and the Jardin des Tuileries.”The other ground-shifting event in Paris near that time, on a much smaller, less world consequential scale, of course, wasRaf Simons’s abrupt departure from Dior. In fact, with the intense focus on flowers here, some saw a bid by Valli for the open creative director job at the LVMH house, flowers having been a preoccupation of Monsieur Dior’s, as well. Be that as it may, this was a signature Valli collection. Cue the short lengths, tailor-made for the leggy young ladies who decorated his front row. Cue the exaggerated volumes, this time focused on bishop sleeves, Watteau backs, and a handful of empire-waist gowns. (An exhibition of paintings featuring Napoleon’s sisters, Elisa, Pauline, and Caroline, proved inspirational.) And cue the by now trademark parade of tulle plissé grand finale gowns, the boldest and best in a pulsating shade of red poppy.Sparkle and sequin were downplayed here in favor of colorful embroideries and appliqués; when Valli did employ crystals, it was in grid-like patterns as precise as his flowers were flamboyant. As a rule, the fleurs were more persuasive. They came in many forms: picked out in paillettes on an organza empire-waist dress; as swirling garlands on short-in-front/long-in-back gowns of lace macramé; and, quite prettily, intarsia-ed in a rosebush motif on a short coat in white mink.Valli recently dressed first-timeOscarnominee Brie Larson. He was mum on the subject of the upcoming Academy Awards, but should her stylist be shopping, our vote goes to something in that red poppy hue.
25 January 2016
As an expert in eveningwear,Giambattista Valliknows exactly what it takes to make a splashy red carpet moment go viral: Walk into his showroom up in Chelsea today and the first thing to greet you at the door is a mannequin in the couture dress thatJ.Lo wore to the Globesthis past weekend (one that, incidentally, now hasits own meme). This season the Italian designer decided to venture outside that glamorous comfort zone and ponder a more 9-to-5 existence. “The focus was really on daywear forPre-Fall,” said the designer, speaking via phone, from his atelier in Paris. “The mood was easygoing and eclectic.”For Valli that meant wrapping his mind around a wardrobe of pants. Building on the retro romantic vibe of hisSpring collection, the trouser silhouettes swung between the late ’60s and early ’70s, and sharply tailored brocade and wool crepe flare pants were cut either to the floor or the ankle. Though the whimsical long chiffon dresses and pretty mini frocks in the collection were certainly appealing, it was nice to see hardworking office tropes, such as the traditional tweed suit, take the spotlight, and a groovy, magic mushroom–print suit was one of the best looks in the bunch. Of course, Valli’s circle of stylish front row friends will still have their fill of straightforward glamour: The colorful intarsia fur vests and coats are reliable and chic catnip for street style photographers and paparazzi alike.
13 January 2016
Giambattista Vallihas been tending toward a more sixties silhouette in the past few seasons, and his familiar full-skirted looks made way for a sharper, Youthquake–inspired line today. The Italian designer likes to surround himself with a circle of stylish women that spans generations, and two of his favorites sat in the front row today—Lee Radziwill andBianca Brandolini D’Adda.There was an air of romance about the collection that is likely to appeal to both those women, starting with the pretty Art Nouveau–inspired florals that were present on everything from balloon-sleeved chiffon blouses to neat, cropped trouser suits. Beyond a penchant for floral prints, intricate embellishments are a Valli sweet spot, and shimmering 3-D petals found their way onto the thigh-grazing miniskirts and mixed-media A-line coats.Naturally, Valli designs with a glamorous social calendar in mind, and finding new ways to invigorate a black-tie dress code is always on his agenda. The silk scarves that topped the bohemian floor-sweeping dresses made for an unexpected alternative to the traditional statement collar. With their eye-catching, glittering soles, the gladiators were a charming and modern re-envisioning of the evening sandal, one that’s sure to have legs on the red carpet come spring.
5 October 2015
It was one of those peculiar fashion synchronicities that mere hours after Raf Simons was talking about the psychedelic subtext of his fantastical Dior set, Giambattista Valli was extolling the chemically enhanced vision of his latest muses, Talitha Pol and Syd Barrett. (The Pink Floyd provocateur also featured on the Dior soundtrack with "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.") Incongruous intrusions of acidic color—aqua or cyclamen peeking out from under embroidered white lace—seemed to back up what he was talking about. And a finale, which brought us models valiantly slogging down the runway in a tonnage of tulle, also brought us a billowing galleon's worth of fluoro orange, a trip that was clearly quite taxing for the woman wearing the dress.You could never say that Valli doesn't like a risk. He starts a collection with an imagined "extraordinary conversation." The talkers this time were Pol and Peggy Guggenheim. "Genuine eccentricity, in the DNA," he clarified. And, fittingly, his clothes pulsed with peculiarity, from the very first look, with a tutu of tulle slung low on a crepe sheath over slim pants. The same slim pants reappeared with a mohawk of ostrich feathers, creating a novel silhouette. Volume—high, low, wide, narrow—where you least expected it appeared to be a feature of the collection, the way, for instance, pants in a silvery metallic raffia were paired with a big ball of ostrich feathers, or a cloud of organza exploded outward from a trim little body. But that is a signature of old-schoolalta moda, and it's a reminder thatalta modais in Valli's blood. Those inverted Capucci-style volumes aside, there were pieces here that evoked another time, another place, like the skirt sculpted over a lacquered macramé jumpsuit, or the slim-line embroidered tunic and pants.
6 July 2015
Giambattista Valli is coming up on his 10th anniversary. He's planning to celebrate with a Paris blowout next month after his haute couture show, and the milestone has put him in a reflective state of mind. "It's just very much me," Valli said, describing the Resort collection he showed in New York this week. "Not many designers do flowers, not many do colors," he continued, acknowledging without saying so explicitly that such things aren't considered cool by the fashion industry. It's a state of affairs that has helped Valli, one of Paris' rare independent designers, make it as far as the decade marker. Fashion's distaste for them notwithstanding, women like flowers and they really like color, and they appreciate the way Valli does them.That said, only his boldest clients will go for the head-to-toe chevron lamé separates in tomato red and bright yellow (bordering on chartreuse) that he showed here. The collection's guaranteed people pleasers mostly fell on the romantic side of its graphic/romantic divide. An empire-waist, floor-grazing dress in a delicate floral print appliquéd here and there with blooms was unapologetically pretty, as was a shift in baby pink silk trimmed in white macramé. Sleeveless, almost scandalously short minidresses had a bit more of an edge to them. The over-35 set can wear them with Valli's cropped flares.
12 June 2015
We already know Giambattista Valli can give good mood board, but today there was simply a serene set of tantric images on his wall, matching the design in the thick pile that carpeted his show space. It might have been an index of his state of mind rather than the state of his collection, because it was less serenity than solidity that impressed with his clothes. There was something veryupholstery-like about his graphic prints, patterns, and textures. You could picture a world of contemporary Roman interiors circa 1966, the city and year of his birth. And the ruffles and puffed shoulders and bands of sheen might have been the sort of details that would have spiced up the wardrobes of women in that era.In fact, one such style icon was sitting right across the catwalk. Lee Radziwill is a longtime Valli girl, and it didn't take much to picture her in a black tunic, its neckline traced in sequins, like faux necklaces, with matching flared trousers. "Lee…or Bianca," said Valli backstage, mentioning the other woman in his life, the spectacular Miss Brandolini.The lean tunic silhouette over narrow, flaring pants has taken over from the short, full dresses that Valli used to favor. It's a more serious,adultlook, which worked best in its simplest renditions—that black outfit, for instance, or the black-sleeved beige over striped pants. But Valli's fabrications, echoes of upholstery aside, introduced an element of eccentricity. He's very keen on odd florals, in an equallyoffpalette. And why would a little white lace dress be lumbered with a sequined checkerboard bodice? Keeping us on our tantric toes, perhaps.
9 March 2015
Impossible Conversations, the Metropolitan Museum's "dialogue" between Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada, inspired Giambattista Valli to create an impossible conversation of his own between Coco Chanel and Janis Joplin. The fact that neither woman was particularly happy was less relevant to Valli than the free-spirited independence they expressed in their personal style: Coco with her little jackets influenced by menswear, Janis with her iconoclastic layering of cocktail dresses over pants. From such glimmers was the acid-pastel fantasia of Valli's collection born.A thick, floral-patterned carpet was intended to suggest an Italian garden, while overhead, mirrors floated like silvery clouds. The abstract modernity of this environment pointed to the side of Valli's design personality that favors edgy elegance: a silk faille top and pants, say, or the Infanta-silhouetted caped top, also in faille, with its scattering of floral embroidery and matching pants. An embroidered silk tunic and pants embodied the Janis side of the Impossible Conversation. He swathed them in an ocean of foaming tulle, an effervescent touch that made it easy to imagine the young loyalists who pack his front row gravitating toward such looks.But Valli also swung to the other extreme: ruffled shoulders, voluminous silk cloqué skirts, and fur capes colored him as a bastion of couture conservatism. That part of Valli's Impossible Conversation didn't have the same effervescence.
26 January 2015
More proof that the late-'60s/early-'70s look has legs came from Giambattista Valli today. Valli is a dyed-in-the-wool dress man, but he got into flares in a big way for Pre-Fall. Floral velvets, patchwork chevrons, even a wide-wale corduroy turned up here, and though trousers are still relatively new for the designer, he made a persuasive case for them—they looked sleek and aerodynamic. He cited Mariana Schiano, Loulou de la Falaise, and other "rule-less women" as muses.Otherwise, the collection had an uptown bohemian vibe—hippie and trippy (see the kaleidoscopic floral print) but still polished in the GV way. Like many pieces in the offering, Valli's knee-high boots were covered in a floral motif of one sort or another. In materials other than leather, they're the kind of thing a woman could conceivably buy before summer starts (when these clothes and accessories arrive in stores) and wear straight through until the first snowfall. The lineup's big surprise was fur: Mixed in amid a fox chubby and a sheared, patchwork mink was a generously proportioned floor-scraper—100 percent gloriously faux.
20 January 2015
Mrs. George Clooney has done a brilliant job of familiarizing the world with Giambattista Valli's oeuvre this weekend. It was perfect providence that the dress she wore the day after the wedding, from Valli's last couture collection, also previewed the ready-to-wear collection he showed today, with branches of blossom sprayed across the simplest shift shape.Valli says he's reached a point of clarity in his career: His couture is an expression of the art of his atelier; his ready-to-wear is industrial craft, as mass as the production of these clothes is ever likely to get. This season he was fascinated by Japan's postwar Metabolist movement, which balanced industrial and artisanal design, the machine and the hand. Valli was insistent that his new collection expressed that balance. "The silhouette is extremely designed," he said, "but the materials are industrial." That wasn't immediately obvious, given that the fabrics had such a crafted feel, like the dress cut from a macramé lace—it looked like a print from far away—or the floral-printed leather. The cutouts and patchwork also felt very hand-y.Whatever the breakdown of man and machine, the collection still stood as Valli's most accomplished to date. The crispness of the silhouettes, the accuracy of the proportions (that sounds like such an odd point to make, but it's something Valli has been a little loosey-goosey with in the past), and the sophisticated textures of the fabrics made for something quite complete. Luigi Scialanga's big silver-disc jewelry was the finishing flourish. Valli imagined his woman working in the art world, traveling all the time, with a hypnotherapist in every city she could call on. There's a movie in there somewhere. Too bad Michelangelo Antonioni is dead.
29 September 2014
Nothing said "new Couture customer" like Giambattista Valli's collection tonight. Imagine the Alhambra Gardens. A girl wakes, maybe she's still dressed from the night before, maybe she swathes herself in a striped sheet or slips into her beau's pj's. It's bright so she puts on sunglasses. Her head hurts. She wraps it in a napkin from the champagne bucket. And she goes for a walk in the garden. There's a dry, warm wind, blossoms are blowing, they cloud her…A pretty picture, and Valli did it justice on his catwalk. He visited the gardens years ago and filed the memory away for access at the right moment. It was the eclecticism of the Alhambra that appealed to him, the mix of Moorish and Spanish. That mix was entirely sublimated here, but there was still a feeling for the heat of the gardens, for the richness of the flowers, and even, at the end, a monochrome catholic strictness as a kind of cleanser before a finale of skirts fluffed into an extravaganza of feathery tulle. "They'll be the best-seller," Valli announced confidently, because they would lend themselves so well to weddings."The secret of my girls is that they're always eccentric," he said before his show. "They don'tplayit. Theyare." So you could say that there was eccentricity in a skirt in pink fluoro lace laid over a striped body. But the strength of this lineup was that Valli didn't, for once, actually cater to that waywardness. Skirts were pencil thin and below the knee, and right away that gave the collection a long, elegant, grown-up line. They were paired with crop tops, tanks, or a capelet situation that Valli liked. In the case of the full-skirted frenzy of the finale, he used tiny piped pajama tops as a counterpoint.There was something old Hollywood about such a look, an impression Valli effortlessly compounded with dresses in a wisteria-printed mousseline that begged for Norma Shearer. Hardly the apogee of a "new" Couture customer, but entirely emblematic of an aspirational age of elegance.
6 July 2014
"Very trippy. It's GBV, but in a psychedelic, kaleidoscopic way, with so many flowers you can almost smell them." Giambattista Valli's new Resort collection, as he put it himself, is potent stuff. Bright pink and Parma red flowers blur together on a silk peasant blouse and high-waisted flares; embroidered red lips lifted from Man Ray encircle the waist of an ivory cocktail number; and three-dimensional plastic rosettes bloom from the sides of a party dress. Much of it will prove fairly irresistible to his jet-set customer, especially after a Fall collection that found Valli exploring somewhat challenging bell-shaped pannier silhouettes and, at times, strange shaggy fabrics. The collection was notable for its diversity—the designer embraced short and long, covered-up and bare, soigné and sporty. Holding it all together were familiar Valli-isms, like grosgrain ribbons trimming the waistline of dresses and geometric patchworks of mismatched prints. Best in show were the pieces that keyed into Resort's emerging 1970s trend: for day, a pair of those leg-elongating flares worn with a cardigan jacket in mismatched lace, and for evening, a bohemian beauty of a long dress in printed chiffon with a built-in capelet. Flower power, indeed.
11 June 2014
There has been a big, bad masculine thread running through womenswear this season, and Giambattista Valli has had enough of it. "I wanted to design for a woman who was confident to dress inwomen'sclothes," he said after his show today. For the designer, that meant short skirts, exaggerated florals, and extended sleeves. "Like the hug of a man around her," he explained. Valli was feeling a moment of introspection, a tender moment, in fact, conveyed by jacquards and wools brushed into a soft pile. Fabrics you wanted to touch, in other words, in a palette of gentle pinks and reds.Valli made his point by limiting his options—either a fitted top, neat little waist, and flaring skirt, or a pannier silhouette for extra volume. Both emphasized the leg, emphatically bare because, as Valli astutely noted, the sun is always shining somewhere. But even as he defined his collection as an antidote to the ambiguity of others that draw on menswear, he still incorporated an impression of duality in dresses that featured, for instance, tufty in front versus flat in back, or wool in front and fur in back. In this, at least, he acknowledged that however confident his clients may be in their womanliness, they don't want to come across as an instantly readable open book.
2 March 2014
"They're bad characters. They've got morning-after hair, and they've thrown on their haute couture to run around in the next day." Giambattista Valli painted a vivid picture of his muse backstage before his show. When he landed on the couture schedule six seasons ago, he didn't so much set out to rewrite the rules as he did to inject the made-to-measure world's rarefied confines with a young energy, aided and abetted along the way by his photogenic front row of international jet-setters. Rarely, though, has Valli's magnificent obsession with youth been more apparent than it was tonight, with his emphasis on a short, supremely leggy silhouette and what he called a "spontaneous attitude."He built his party outfits on a fitted miniskirt base, sometimes swagging rolls of duchesse satin around the hips on top of that mini, and other times layering a short-in-front, long-in-back kicky pleated skirt with a splice up the middle over the top. Above that it could be a cropped top in a silk cloque with a grosgrain-ribbon hem, or a sleeveless silk shell embroidered in iridescent blue three-dimensional floral appliqués. Valli's fabrics and embellishments tended toward the dense and heavy, the polar opposite of Raf Simons' work at Dior today. By the same token, the color palette (especially that vivid blue and pink on black) and the voluminous, peplumed shapes owed a noticeable debt to Simons' debut at Dior circa July 2012.Simons is leading the fashion conversation at the moment; it's probably all too easy to get swept up in it. But Valli is a runway veteran, with plenty of his own things to say about layering print and texture. They resonated most clearly in Joan Smalls' appliquéd floral-print dress with a matching crop top worn over it, and again on an Yves Klein blue thigh-slit ball gown topped by an abbreviated black bugle-bead embroidered tank. That look was youthful in a way that was entirely Valli's own.
19 January 2014
The look of Giambattista Valli's clothes has been ladylike from the beginning, but lately he's been pursuing a more laid-back effect. There were the Birkenstock-style sandals for Resort, and now he's liking the look of a soft-soled loafer. He showed it with everything from a leopard jacquard coat, shirt, and cropped trousers set to a little sequined cocktail dress, and even a long charcoal gray flannel gown. Valli's new attitude dovetails with what's happening in other collections this season. Ease is an important message for Pre-Fall. He got his point across with sweatshirts in duchesse silk and leather leggings with oversize zips at the ankles. The swingy circle skirts, in particular, were a nice merging of Valli past and future. His lookbook models did have dyed-pink hair, but in the end he didn't veer all that far from his original MO. The collection was also chock-full of über-luxe furs.
13 January 2014
Extreme contrast is the Giambattista Valli essence: short/long, masculine/feminine. It was more intriguing than usual with his latest collection. Valli's clothes and clientele define an indolent, brittle beauty, but here, the designer was influenced by filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and Arte Povera master Alighiero Boetti—right away, that injected something rough-edged, real-ish. As left-field as such a notion sounded, the couture slant of Positano-ready opening outfits that featured bared midriffs and shorts pleated into aerodynamic Capucci folds was soon followed by dresses jacquarded with Boetti's word pieces (earlier this season, Jil Sander went there, too). Other outfits were inspired by the burlap sacking in which coffee beans are transported.Valli kept up the contrasts, counterpointing the rough-and-readiness of burlap with flurries of floral appliqué or gilded sheaves of wheat. But the overwhelming impression of this collection was one of heartfelt simplicity: pared-down silhouettes, hand-painted stripes, waists cinched by cords of gold. Sheerness has many implications in fashion. One of the most obvious is the notion of nothing to hide. You could apply that to this collection and run with it. Valli was offering his own take on authenticity. And if you could find a neorealist, Pasolini-esque gem in the heart of the clothing on display, then his work here was done.
29 September 2013
"Flowers and colors are what women want from me," Giambattista Valli said before his couture show—his fifth, the program notes reminded us. "That's what I give them, but every time I get inspired by something different." The something different tonight was porcelain. A photograph of Valli's own Meissen porcelain decorated the back of his invitation; on the runway, he divided the collection into neat sections, each influenced by a different country's china. To start, a series of eight looks in Capodimonte white, their tone-on-tone embroideries setting a sweet, if not quite virginal note that for the most part continued through the other groupings. With its leggy, vertical silhouette—even the floor-grazing trumpet skirts were sheer—this collection seemed to skew more toward Valli's twenty-something acolytes than to octogenarian fan Lee Radziwill.After Capodimonte was Wedgwood. The Valentino designers riffed on Delft pottery in March, so a blue and white embroidered evening coat, while vivid, felt a bit familiar. France's sanguine red Sèvres came next. A strapless dress in draped mousseline with three-dimensional poppy florettes on the bodice was more hot-blooded.The multicolor Meissen-influenced embroideries were last, and they were the best. Red-tipped pink silk flowers cascading down one side of a tulle column were so lush they could've been real, and sprays of nearly-neon pink and yellow blooms on downy white gowns made you look twice. Luigi Scialanga's sculpted gunmetal belts, like twists of ribbon, accessorized many of the dresses. In this section they were gold-dipped, which reinforced Valli's theme beautifully.
30 June 2013
Grey Gardens' Little Edie was Giambattista Valli's muse for Resort. "I love her eccentricity, her extreme point of view," he said by phone from Paris, where he's preparing his Couture show. Albert Maysles' dotty heroine is a far cry from the European jet-setters who favor Valli's clothes, but if she was an unlikely influence, she was also an inspired one. The collection had a lot of verve, with airy floral prints, one of which came complete with bumblebees, a Jackson Pollock scribble (the artist was an East Ender, too), fluoro-brights, and plenty of Valli's favorite color, red.Little Edie came through in the scarves tied over the models' scraped-back hair, the dresses over pants ("I don't like women in skirts," she famously said), and dresses and blouses with fluttery capelets built in. The animal-print Birks (the season's hottest shoe) aren't an Edie-ism, but she might've appreciated their irreverence. "Things are more ruleless for Resort," Valli said. He's always been known for his flourishes, but the more he embraces ease, the better his collections get. A T-shirt-and-long-bohemian-skirt combo, worn with those flat garden shoes, was probably the strongest look here. But to be sure, there was a lot of polish in the collection, too. One floral was printed on embroidered organza, and the lace dresses were lined with tulle underskirts. They created extravagant volumes evocative of what he does for Couture.
11 June 2013
After his show today, Giambattista Valli admitted he's finally got his two worlds sorted: Prêt-à-porter is inspired by his personal experiences; haute couture is his fantasy. Where once they were borderline, now there is no dialogue between the two. So his latest collection flowed on organically from Spring, particularly in the casual interplay of masculine and feminine elements.It may have been Valli's most accomplished ready-to-wear offering to date. It was certainly his easiest. It opened with a parka and closed with a car coat, both accompanying casual pieces in pristine white. Valli felt the greatest testament to his success was that he could imagine his favorite customers Lee Radziwill and Bianca Brandolini d'Adda, separated by half a century, both looking good in either of those outfits.He could also picture any of the women who lined his front row throwing on her husband's or boyfriend's old sweater, suitably customized by moths, or wrapping up in his jacket or coat. Valli gave them all those options. His coup de grâce was the flat shoe—furry loafers or his version of Vans—which dressed down the formality of a brocaded suit or a classically draped cocktail dress. The result was a night-for-day glamour that justified, for once, the overused adjective "effortless."Then Valli went in the opposite direction: dressingupcasual sportswear looks like a tracksuit in a Swarovski-edeau de nil, or the zipped blouson and matching pants under a coat of red astrakhan. Zips stood out all over the place because they were paired with some subtly impressive fabric treatments: glazing, lacquering, brocading. It was, Valli said, his way of conveying the alchemy that takes place in an urban environment, where clothes acquire an appealing patina from their environment (moths chewing their way through knitwear being perhaps the most aggressive example).
3 March 2013
Giambattista Valli has a distinctive advantage as a couturier: He is utterly intimate with his clientele. Age-group 28 to 38, spring chickens in the couture sorority, and innocent of the traditional iconography ofalta moda.Which means Valli is able to toy with tradition in a way that seems entirely fresh to his women. In the past, that has meant a soupçon of déjà vu for everyone else, but by some fortunate alchemy, the collection he presented tonight took those antique Roman codes, twirled them around, and deposited something old-but-new on the catwalk. Maybe all it took was basic black and white. Valli opened with a coat-dress in big-cat spots, followed through with a jacket and skirt ensemble traced in black, and consummated the monochrome with a tulle-shrouded black shift clasped at the waist with Luigi Scialanga's twist of metallic feathers. That statement of intent resonated through the first half of the collection, producing outfits as striking as a croc-collared black shift with an inky squelch of sheen trailing down its front, and an ocelot-spot jumpsuit with an overlay of mousseline that trailed away dramatically.But then Valli surrendered to the translucence of porcelain under light, and the couture-friendliness of flowers, and the show got terribly diffuse. It was still fine, however, because the designer's fixation on silhouette guaranteed rigor and movement. His baby infanta dresses (the volume swollen in the front) were all about forward momentum. You'd scarcely expect a collection like this to communicate a spirit of urgency, but there is something about Valli and his girls that says "live for today." And the thought of them doing that living in these dresses is weirdly appealing.
20 January 2013
Paris girl meets Manhattan boy. It sounds like a movie. In fact, it was the starting point for Giambattista Valli's pre-fall collection. French femininity is Valli's stock in trade, but in keeping with the new direction he established on his Spring runway, he's pushing into more masculine territory. The world just keeps getting more casual. Valli could try to fight it, but what would be the point of that? Embracing it is the way forward, so the lineup on view today included classics like peacoats and Wall Street gray flannels, as well as dressed-up jogging pants and fancy T-shirts with long tails. Valli proved particularly adept at outerwear; everything from a cropped parka lined in fur to a collarless cardigan coat was reversible, which means his customers' dollars go further. (In addition to becoming more casual, it would seem, women are also becoming savvier shoppers.) For all the attention he lavished on daywear this season, there were still a few after-dark stunners. A sleeveless column with poppies and ranunculus blossoming all over it struck the dressed-up yet not-too-serious note of the SAG Awards at the end of the month.
14 January 2013
At his summer retreat, Giambattista Valli saw not a second of the Olympics, but his collection today had a timely, trim athleticism. It was hugely advantageous for the designer, because it gave his show a momentum that is occasionally lost in the frills and furbelows that have shaped his work in the past. Here, the dressy but sporty proportion of a trim tank and pencil skirt, or the graphic quality of a black body paired with high-waisted white culottes brought new energy.Also reenergized: the designer's girl/boy thing. The show opened with a call and response between male and female—a sleeveless, double-breasted gray suit followed by a sheer white dress with a lacy tracery of leaves, a white leather blouson followed by a sheer tank. In Valli's world, his women borrow clothes from their men—a suit jacket, track pants. The designer also obliged them with a striking hybrid, a white cotton shirt elongated into a jumpsuit. And the sheer shirttails that fell below the hems of skirts also fused masculine and feminine.In the past, Valli'salta modaleanings have steered him into airless cul-de-sacs. His new collection featured a crystallized tunic top and skinny pants that could have stepped straight off the Via Veneto in the early sixties, but it looked so good for right now that period quibbles were irrelevant. What changed? The literally sheer sleekness of the clothes Valli showed. Even his bourg-iest mamma look— a red lace suit with prim bows at the throat and waist—had a revealing swatch of organza heading earthward. The signora's slip might have been showing, but she didn't give a good goddamn.
30 September 2012
Giambattista Valli spun a bucolic backstory for his Couture collection: nymphs, fairies, silvery reflections in woodland ponds. And the Master's Margarita, witchy and wanton in her dealings with the devil. Ain't couture grand! Remarkably, these pagan sentiments almost managed to infiltrate the clothes. They certainly shaped the prints.Valli was thinking that the couture dream is so far away from what constitutes "fashion" in most people's minds that he could follow his fantasy into some timeless realm, a place where the transience of beauty was arrested, kind of like the dreamy fairyland in Ridley Scott'sLegend. It was a lovely idea, embodied by models whose veiled heads were studded with butterflies. But the clothes didn't match the concept.That was partly a function of Valli's solid grounding in Romanalta moda. If the prints brought themoda, the silhouettes looked merelyalta, ruffled to discomfort, extended into traditional volumes that looked… er…stuffy.There were moments when the concept crossed over into glamorous conviction. A coat designed to look like the grass of a woodland glade had a shaggy splendor. A sequin underskirt shimmered like sunlight on water. The final outfit, an orgy of ruffles, had a tenebrous sensuality. Otherwise, Valli's party-girl froth went off the fizz with this collection.
1 July 2012
"I'm a label that wants to sell. I believe in clothes," Giambattista Valli said on the phone from Paris today. It sounds obvious, but some designers lose the plot. Not Giamba; for him, the customer has always come first, and his Resort collection is no exception. He called it Urban Jungle, focusing on tropical and animal prints and keeping his silhouettes uncomplicated. The magic, as usual, was in the mix of patterns and textures. A simple halter dress combined a palm frond print with a micro leopard, a gold-flecked ivory jacquard, and black grosgrain ribbon trim; on another sleeveless shift, a wine red ribbon bisected a palm-print bodice and a paisley skirt.If there was a shade too much attention paid to shorts, his pants had a flatteringly high-waisted, full-through-the-thigh cut, and jackets had an on-trend belted and peplumed shape. Valli, as anybody who clocked Diane Kruger's gown at Cannes'Moonrise Kingdompremiere knows, is a master of after-dark drama. Here, he mostly reined it in, preferring evening separates to full-on gowns. A bordeaux chiffon poet-sleeve blouse and matching floor-length skirt finished with a gold bow belt was long on charm.
12 June 2012
Scene of the fashion crime: the Sound Factory, legendary New York nightspot. Exhibit one: Orlando Pita's hair, a swirl intended to duplicate the tonsure of a boy sweat-soaked from dancing, warped with the long, straight tresses of the girl he was with. Exhibit two: Val Garland's makeup—icy swooshes, conveying a don't-care urgency.That's how you create a fashion mood, kids. Or at least, that's how you make the casual New York mood that Giambattista Valli wanted. Just as he (and Orlando and Val) used to go dancing at the Sound Factory 20-something years ago, the Valli girls went way downtown with this show.Now that he has a couture collection in which to indulge his most exquisite impulses, Giamba felt free to sharpen his edge. The first look—an oversize marled-wool sweater over cropped black pants—immediately established a more aggressive mood than we're used to from this designer.A black-and-white graphic dominated the collection, interrupted only by hits of red and croc-stamped gold. Valli is so tuned in to the desires of his clients that one has to assume he was responding to their suggestions when he offered that big, chunky sweater. But it could only be his idea to later pair it with a chevron-patterned fur skirt.Did it work? Valli is a client-driven designer, and his ever-faithful girls were perfectly happy that he'd given them something cool. The sequin sheaths that lurked underneath the chiffon veils of the evening finale? Well, that was one way to suggest the sparkly soul of the wearer. Still, the feeling nagged that Valli had shed his uptown skin without fully completing his downtown transition.
4 March 2012
Backstage, he was insisting he wanted haute couture ateliers declared UNESCO heritage sites, but, in lieu of that unlikely prospect, Giambattista Valli decided to offer his own personal ABC of couture, everything he'd ever learned in an atelier on one catwalk. It was intended as a reminder of what an invaluably inspirational resource those institutions are. And Valli has a trainee track record in couture, starting with the Roman legend Roberto Capucci, whose austere opulence was echoed in the first outfit, a white crepe cape with flowers trailing over its shoulders.If that was A, B might be a strapless polka-dotted dress draped to one side and exploding into a puff of fabric at the shoulder (that would represent the Ungaro atelier where Valli once labored). After that, everything was coming up Valli. C might have stood for the hints of Chaos that nibbled at the collection. If you give perfection a bit of a shake, you make it memorable. Like the sheer polka-dotted dress whose embroidered flowers clustered around the shoulders and fell to a random scatter on the skirt. Or the linear black sequined gown that was clasped at the throat by a crumpled sheet of silver. (Luigi Scialanga's jewelry has always been an exquisite complement to Valli's clothes.) A sleeveless crocodile top had a waist that was cinched into a peplum flare over a white lace pencil skirt. The visible underwear was black. There was something Roman bourgeois but memorably twisted about such an idea.Valli mentioned Ava Gardner to one guest who detected a hint of old Hollywood glamour in his eveningwear. The spitfire actress could undoubtedly have animated his strapless, wide-skirted billow of floral mousseline, but the columns of silk with draped shoulders were more evocative of the elegance of Adrian. At the same time, they pointed to Valli's own mastery of couture's ABCs.
22 January 2012
Giambattista Valli presented pre-fall in his new West 27th Street showroom. The massive top-floor space with floor-to-ceiling views on three sides would seem to indicate that business is going very well chez Valli. He certainly didn't skimp on materials for this latest outing. Indeed, he may have come up with an entirely new category: the fur dress. Presumably, his rich clients in South America and the Middle East—the kind who rang him up after his first-ever Couture show in July to order five-figure gowns directly from online pictures—have enough fur coats. The mink and fox frocks he showed today follow the general description of the silhouette he's known for: sleeveless, slightly A-line, and above the knee.There were plenty of his signature patchwork creations, but where Spring was sweet, this season's offerings have a darker, richer feel, exemplified by a coat-dress that married nubby black wool, a gold brocade, and a diamond-pattern jacquard that Valli said reminded him of furniture fabric. There wasn't a sequin or bead in sight. The most striking look, in fact, was a cropped top with three-quarter-length sleeves in a brick red wool and its matching high-waisted, flared trousers. Signs of a more streamlined Valli to come? Those aforementioned clients may take issue, but diversifying, remember, is key to growing a business.
10 January 2012
Giambattista Valli said his new collection was inspired by memories—the mental souvenirs of his globe-trotting clientele as they pond-skimmed from place to ever-more-fabulous place. So there was an echo of Hydra in a white dress with silver-dipped pleats. There were also the gilded sheen of Rajasthan, some safari-influenced animal print, the florals of an English country house, a Greek flokati rug reconfigured as a fluffy sheepskin waistcoat, snake bracelets, and python heels. All of it was layered like memories and distilled by Valli'salta modasensibility into one harmonious whole. He claimed he'd approached the actual design part with as much deliberation as if he was designing a piece of furniture. Which meant the boxy structure came first. OK, you could see that in the silhouette, but the immediate impression given by the clothes was nothing so serious. Instead, it was Valli's kooky couture zest that was communicated by a marabou-trimmed cage of daisy cutouts, a sheer white tunic trimmed in lamé, and the shift that traveled from sequined yoke to zebra-print midriff to a skirt of silk fringe, also in zebra print.The Valli girls are famously mobile, and they don't really want to be lugging trunks of stuff around with them, so Giamba's specialty is high-octane one-offs. You could imagine a sleeveless brocade jumpsuit going anywhere in his world. Or a waistcoat of tribal-printed silk fringe adding that extra something to a T-shirt and jeans. Valli said he was trying to make clothes men would want to eat. (It's the Roman in him that is utterly unrepentant about animal attraction.) The sugar rush from these outfits would be more than a man could bear. But you could certainly picture him dying trying.
2 October 2011
On the day when he was finally able to realize his long-nursed couture dreams, Giambattista Valli rose to the challenge of tradition with a collection that threw down the gauntlet to anyone who would insist that this rarified métier is on its last legs. Valli celebrated the past when he used the white poplin shirtdress—theblouse de cabine—of the atelier worker as a building block. The most obvious example: the way he layered a black lamé tweed skirt over the "blouse." But if that combination of casual and couture felt like essential Valli, there were many more examples of the designer's ability to meld formality and—for want of a better word—fun. Try a cocktail dress that proceeded downward from a pink coral yoke to a crystal-ed black body to a hem of ostrich feathers. Or the coat-dress in oh-so-serious gazar that dissolved from a coral bodice to a skirt in lacquered lemon blossom.Amid such sensual pleasures, Valli anchored the floaty and the flyaway, conveying the essential rigor of couture design with his animal-printed mousselines and monochrome florals. He even paraded a penitent, a woman in an ostrich-feather sheath swathed in a black lace veil. But, more to the Vatican-friendly point, Valli also proposed a shot of red, like Valentino before him. Perhaps it's no wonder couture-inclined designers from Rome love red. You could almost say it's by papal decree.
3 July 2011
"There are no real rules anymore, and I wanted to express that in my collection," said Giambattista Valli on the phone from Paris, where he's busy with fittings for his first-ever haute couture show. His winning Resort lineup, even more than his Fall outing, is about mixing patterns, mixing colors (the richer and more saturated the better), and mixing cultures. That means an outfit could consist of a mint green tweed jacket, a poppy-print peasant blouse, leopard-print pants, and jeweled chain-link flats, and that a single cropped-at-the-waist jacket combined a tribal tweed, leopard print, crystal beads, and feathers. On the other hand, one of the most charming looks was a simple sleeveless shift in a macramé photo print. Resort is also about mixing up the clock for Valli. He pictures his girl in a floor-scraping, flowy skirt and matching nylon jacket for day, and a three-piece pantsuit for night.Evening here was a shade or two less grand that what we've come to expect on Valli's runways, but there was still plenty of pop in an ocher one-shoulder number with a violet grosgrain belt, worn with an electric orange jacket tossed over the shoulder. And it's too bad that A-listers, for the most part, are afraid of prints on the red carpet, because there was a fun watercolor floral in geranium red and grape. But back to grand. We expect we'll be seeing some of that at Valli's July 4 made-to-measure presentation. "There's a big space for haute couture in the market now," said the designer. (With pals like Eugenie Niarchos, Bianca Brandolini d'Adda, and Dasha Zhukova, he would know.) "You'll see my knowledge, and the rituals of doing couture from the past, melted together with something new."
13 June 2011
Duality is fundamental to a Giambattista Valli collection. In today's show, it was as elementary as the black-white dichotomy of the cape and dress, and as complex as the boy-girl thing that shaped the opening sequence of gamine looks (see the patent oxfords where the Valli girl is more usually elevated in heels). The connection between the two might be the quality that Valli calls "contemporaneity." He wants everything to be immediate, or, as he said after his show, "I want to arrive three minutes before a woman is thinking about getting dressed."That being the case, his show today was probably his most successful, in that it was his most urgent. There was precious little room for the froufrou that used to make Valli's presentations such an infectious delight. In fact, when it got down to basics, the show was one more testament to the power of this designer's personality. How else to explain that coterie of gorgeous young female fans, because his clothes were actually rather chaste, not at all the brazen billboards of va-va-voom you might expect from someone with his party-hearty rep. Necklines were high, silhouettes were schoolgirl-simple, the palette was primarily monochrome black and white, bar rare injections of pink, red, and acid yellow. Valli's sole visual was a tulip print he'd lifted from a Flemish painting. It was striking in a sheath that was diagonally intersected by a drape of black crepe. The same idea was beautifully, simply expressed in a shell top in black and white, again divided diagonally.Valli used the goat fur that has been Fall's default position for girls gone wild, but the overwhelming impression of his collection was restraint—it was streamlined and locked up tight. Maybe that makes sense, given that he's just closed the books on his first five years in business. But you can't help craving a Giamba breakout.
6 March 2011
Giambattista Valliis the king of the party dress, keeping the young Euro social set outfitted in leopard spots and ostrich feathers. For pre-fall, though, he put a new emphasis on tailoring, showing 12 pantsuits and tuxes in velvet, wool, pinstripes, and even denim. They'll run about as much as a Tom Ford suit for your better half would, and they have a similar sort of swagger. In his notes on the collection—Valli didn't make the trip across the pond with his clothes, as other European designers have this week—the designer cited Helmut Newton's photographs of Paris by night as a reference. Sexy? You bet.Balancing out the tailleurs, of course, were his signature dresses, and these ran the gamut from a poppy-print A-line shift to draped jerseys to floaty chiffons. There were also new takes on the color-blocked numbers Valli showed in multiples on his Spring runway; here he mixed python photo print with black silk and red grosgrain. The hands-down winner was a black column gown with an asymmetric neckline and one cap sleeve. No surprise to hear that his press office has two requests and counting for this particular number for the Golden Globes on Sunday night.
10 January 2011
There's something about Giambattista Valli's clothes that is so fundamentally optimistic, they've got you at hello. Maybe it's the va-va-voom echoes of Rome in the sixties, a quintessential dolce vita moment that resounds through the decades. With today's show, it wasn't like the outfits themselves were retro, but there was a kicky energy that felt like it might have come from bright young things getting dressed up and following Valli, their pied piper, through noble streets to a hole in the wall where they'd have a hell of a time. Two words: "short" and "flat." As in dresses and shoes. We should probably add "sheer" to that list, because a Valli girl is shameless in her pursuit of pleasure.As for Valli himself, his mind was on higher things—sort of. Remember the three R's from the school days of old: readin', 'ritin', 'rithmetic? Valli has four new ones all his own: romantic, rebel, rock, royal. He'd been to the Petit Trianon, where Marie Antoinette went to feed chickens when she felt like some downtime, and he got caught up in the notion of a privileged wild child stretching her wings. Picture a hybrid of front-row fixture Bianca Brandolini d'Adda and Debbie Harry, high and low. That's how Valli could whip an eveningwear bubble from petals of organza and poplin and pair it with a white shirt (its silver pocket an artful stand-in for jewelry) and a pair of sandals. Or collage leopard, lamé, and hot orange into a chic mini-shift.The Petit Trianon gave him the idea for the Baroque stucco prints he used, and the marbled floors at Versailles inspired the Vichy check, but it was ultimately Valli's own roots in thealta modaof Rome that sent him into the citron stratosphere that helped the show to its close. Ball gowns at breakfast? Valli's your man.
3 October 2010
Iman is Giambattista Valli's latest red-carpet coup. Accepting her Fashion Icon Award at the CFDAs last week, she was the definition of va-va-voom in a strapless version of one of Valli's frothy black confections from the Fall runway. For Resort, the Paris-based designer is playing it more low-key. The collection is still utterly feminine, of course, and hardly subdued (animal prints abound), but the emphasis is on daywear and cocktail attire, not full-on gala. The key silhouette is mid-thigh, and as for fabrics, it's all about the mix. The opening shift dress combines sheer chiffon, black eyelet, white grosgrain ribbon, and a giraffe print. A coat-dress, from top to bottom, is tiger print, vermilion ribbon, and black-and-white tweed. The net result? This Valli outing was eclectic and elegant in equal measure.
14 June 2010
Question: If all the camel coats in all the Fall collections were laid end to end, how many people would be able to tell them apart? Giambattista Valli added one of his own to the long line of beige show-openers: a cocoon-ish shape balanced on kitten-heel slingbacks. The shoes were a key to the slightly sixties theme he was working. It's another trend of the season, of course, but it's also a decade this designer frequently uses as a starting point for his unashamedly feminine, slightly frothy approach—which was soon to break out in tufted 3-D ribbon embroideries, variously deployed on shifts and gowns.Whatever Valli does—cute day suits, short cocktail, or over-the-top statement gowns—it has the knack of charming the wealthy, social customers who are his loyal friends. The Valli girls, including Brooke Shields, Coco Brandolini, Dr. Lisa Airan, and Andrea Dellal's shoe-designer daughter, Charlotte, were there in force this time to show solidarity with the designer, as well as to shop. Like several other Italian labels recently, Valli's has caught the fallout from the financial catastrophes that have been sinking fashion conglomerates in his home country. Mariella Burani Fashion Group, which manufactures his collections, went bankrupt last month and is being liquidated. An announcement released just before the show stated he is taking production into his own hands.Valli's fans will find a lot to like among his Fall offerings, which eschewed plainness and sobriety for mostly short, swingy dresses with elaborate surfaces and sheer panels (perhaps the through-views to the panties will somehow be obscured in reality). Some of the tuxedo looks over wisps of chiffon—an homage to the Saint Laurent retrospective about to open in Paris—might well (again, with the underwear issues sorted out) appeal to the brigade of chic mothers Valli also serves. Considering the crisis conditions under which this collection was designed, it was a respectable show from one of fashion's more resolutely optimistic survivors. Could the fact that there was an oligarch in the front row be a sign of hope? Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB agent who is a British newspaper proprietor, was scanning the show with his son Evgeny, a sponsor of the CFDA/VogueFashion Fund.
7 March 2010
Giambattista Valli's penchant for ball skirts and the party-girl types who love them is well documented, but for pre-fall, the designer is courting a different demographic: the working woman. Tweed in rich hues of forest green and crimson dominated the offerings, which included wearable wool pencil skirts, jackets, and shift dresses, along with printed silk blouses in digitalized versions of the fabric. In keeping with the collection's hourglass shapes, he slimmed down his signature cocoon coat with origami-like pleating at the waist.That's not to say the PYTs who sit front-row when Valli shows in Paris were left without options. His draped jersey-crepe cocktail frocks will stand out late-night at the clubs, especially when paired with the designer's ultra-luxe sheared mink toppers. As for the animal prints favored by the label's jet-set clientele, pre-fall's updates include a leopard velvet-burnout skirt and a printed silk frock with a grosgrain drawstring waist. It's not easy pleasing everyone, but Valli's latest effort comes very close.
11 January 2010
From the negotiations for clothes fresh off the runway that were going on backstage after Giambattista Valli's show, this much was clearer than ever: The designer has struck upon a look that suits the twentysomething jet-setters and actress types in his front row exceedingly well. After Fall's long, almost clerical lengths and the fifties ball skirts of the season before, he went short and leggy for Spring. The recurring silhouette was a drop-waist frothy minidress reminiscent of the twenties. Smothered in dense fringe or feathers (both real and represented in trompe l'oeil prints) or swirls of jeweled embroideries, these jazzy numbers were interspersed with the egg-shaped dresses and cocoon coats that have become a signature of Valli's nearly five-year-old collection. This season, those came in graphic color-blocking or overscale prints and embroideries inspired by antique carpets. Bold leopard-stamped ponyskin was also in the mix; a short-sleeved jacket and shorts suit in the stuff seemed to attract particularly strong interest from his socialite fan club.Backstage, Valli name-checked early-twentieth-century artists like Brancusi, Picasso, and Man Ray, explaining that he was also thinking about ethnic art and tribalism while designing. If the origins of this newly youthful yet still sophisticated collection went straight over the heads of the bright young things it seems so perfect for, who really cares? Thezhoozhfactor is what counts, and this season Valli's got it.
4 October 2009
A Giambattista Valli runway show can make a girl feel inadequate. Why don't I have a full calendar of gala events at which to wear such extravagantly dressed-up clothes?—so goes the lament from some sections of the front row. Well, perhaps Valli has been listening, because as synonymous as his name has become with grand proportions and luxe handwork, his latest Resort collection proves he's equally comfortable designing a multitasking slim sheath. The latter came in bold fuchsia, a pink-on-white geranium print, and, most interestingly, a combination of gray knit jersey and tweed. If an abstract python-print A-line coat and matching cropped trousers evoked the fifties, the designer's trio of office-plausible black suits didn't obviously channel any era, except this one. As for a girl's off-hours, casual will probably never really be Valli's thing, but a belted polka-dot tank and black and white check pants did appear to have serious weekend potential.
14 June 2009
Giambattista Valli presented a very individual picture of dignified modern elegance on his runway. It was, he said, inspired "by Yves Saint Laurent—but more his lifestyle than his fashion." Pared down and graceful, it was drawn around simple silhouettes that struck a quiet balance between sobriety and luxe, a palate-cleanser of a show that stepped away from Valli's previous seasons of dressy extravagance.The first point of difference was in the length. Though it opened with a short orange swing coat, the distinctive mark of the collection emerged via the ankle-grazing, almost monastic proportions that followed. In a season when there's been too much ultra-short on the runways, it was a brave yet wholly refreshing move, providing a plethora of gorgeous double-faced coats and neat cropped jackets with exaggerated sleeves, paired with narrow skirts that had a gentle volume gathered into the waist.Saint Laurent's influence was certainly there, though deployed in ways that never strayed into heavy-handed homage. There were hints of the Russian collection in the plaited and tasseled silk belts and the glowing metallic brocades, but the strongest looks were those where the designer removed all decoration and downplayed color to allow the skill of his cutting to speak for itself. Spare, draped dresses in matte navy, teal, or maroon looked truly sophisticated, carrying the hallmarks of Valli's appeal to women who move in the upper echelons of international aristocracy (one gown came wrapped in a mohair djellaba cloak that could have been designed with his most high-profile client, Queen Rania of Jordan, in mind). These days, even the wealthy are eschewing the flashy and unnecessary in fashion, a change in mood Valli has clearly comprehended. This collection brought out his underlying strengths as a designer who understands how soft architecture and social tact can work beautifully together.
8 March 2009
The enduring enigma of Giambattista Valli's career is why such a vibe-y young man is so attached to such an old-world aesthetic. The mystery is further compounded by the ardent coterie of equally vibe-tastic hotties who so willingly follow him to another time, another place. On Thursday night, they convened at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, where Valli was showing his pre-fall collection as the special guest of Pitti Immagine. Given the jaw-dropping magnificence of the surroundings, it was no wonder the designer felt compelled to revisit a slew of the haute couture references that define his work. The cape, the sack, the tulip, the peplumed-suit, the three-quarter sleeve, the gloves…the overwhelmingcocktail-nessof it all felt like an Irving Penn parade from the fifties. Following on from Spring, the specter of Cristobal Balenciaga loomed over the collection, hanging heaviest with a dress whose hunchback of coin-dotted tulle gave its wearer the blighted demeanor of Quasimodette. Balenciaga black was also the dominant shade, which is a shame because Valli has been a bold colorist in the past. (Here, a flash of burnt orange and some absinthe-toned duchesse acted as reminders.) Given the haute society feel, it seemed appropriate that Valli's strongest pieces were his furs, particularly a belted coat in Mongolian lamb whose shagginess offered a welcome respite from the polite precision of everything around it.
14 January 2009
It began with an austere high-waisted black tunic and shorts, and ended with the all-out extravagance of a thousand meters of multi-tufted tulle gown sweeping the runway. In Giambattista Valli's words, "It's about a metamorphosis. There's a big change going on in these times." He can say that again. Still, for the lineup of pretty young friends cozied up together center-front (Natalie Portman, Emma Watson, Lapo Elkann and his girlfriend Bianca Brandolini d'Adda, Leigh Lezark, Caroline Sieber, and assorted socials), this was a collection that outlined the go-to certainties of Valli's appeal: couturelike volumes and polished formality, underpinned by an irrepressible love of the frothy, feminine, partygoing dress.Granted, this season the volumes were less overblown than usual, tempered (at least to begin with) by the influence of Cristobal Balenciaga in raised-waist sack dresses, ovi-form tops, and molded capes. More persistent, though, and shown in many fabric options—from faded and flaking wallpaper prints to guipure lace and hopsack—were fifties-style dance dresses, neat to the waist and flaring out into teacup circle skirts held up by stiff layers of petticoat. Valli attributed that to wanting to make his silhouettes correspond faithfully to his sketches. "But in reality," he noted, "you can take off the petticoat, and it's just a nice godet skirt." Perhaps if he'd shown some that way, it might have injected the sense of modernity the collection ultimately lacked.
1 October 2008
Incurable romantic that he is, Giambattista Valli showed a sophisticated Resort full of flowers and bows that evoked Paris in the springtime. The extensive collection, which accounts for a healthy share of Valli's business, was strong on eveningwear, with short flower-printed dresses for cocktails and strapless gowns for galas. Both came with gently poufed proportions to suit latter-day Marie Antoinettes—or the very au courant Madame Sarkozy.
24 June 2008
The references were spelled out on a board backstage: Ingmar Bergman'sCries and Whispers, the surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim, and "Little Red Riding Hood." You couldn't blame the busy Valli for needing to be reminded. His first collection for the outerwear company Moncler was scheduled to debut less than 24 hours after his signature show, and then there was also his just-launched fur line with Ciwifurs."It's the classic story of a bloodless woman that ends in the passion," Valli said, elaborating on his theme. That would explain the show's color palette, which slowly shifted from ivory to shocking pink to blood red, with a couple of prints along the way. The silhouette was a long exposé on volume, opening with a hobble skirt below one of his new fur shrugs, moving through the sway-back cocoon dresses that have become his signature, and finally exploding in a finale of ball gowns with fitted, strapless bodices atop enormous ballooning skirts. Embellishments ranged from pretty ruffles and fabric worked into rosettes to grandiloquent puckered-crepe necklines and lumps and bumps à la Rei Kawakubo.Even the Mary-Kate Olsens of the world (she sat front-row today) don't make enough red-carpet appearances for all of the statement-making clothes Valli showed. Mundanities like sweaters, pants, trenchcoats, and other building blocks of a Fall wardrobe are certainly part of his oeuvre, but he neglected to put them on the runway. So while the story he told was engaging, if only for its sheer audacity, it wasn't the full picture. He's capable of doing more with less.
27 February 2008
Giambattista Valli always has a particular woman in mind when he starts his collection. This season, it was Veruschka in her desert mode, which (partially) explained his opening caftan shape, caught in at the ankles as an all-in-one. Valli had also been inspired by a research trip to Jordan (it may be significant that Queen Rania is a known client of his), where he was stunned by the sights of ancient Petra and the brilliance of flowers blooming against the dusty noncolors of the landscape.Valli doesn't really come from high concept, though. His are couture-based skills, and from his close relationships with a refined crowd of international clients—a flock of whom crowded the backstage area to congratulate him—he has learned how to meld Parisian luxe into socially appropriate, climate-aware dressing for places where women want to look very special indeed. What that means is: He's worked out how to deal lightly with volume, surface embellishment, and color that looks good in the sun. All those qualities came through in his use of pretty white organza and chiffon, minutely pleated into short, full-skirted dresses; shots of neon lime and fuchsia, occasionally backlit with streaks of gold; and crunchy patches of stone embroideries. If his desert Veruschka theme didn't really hold throughout the collection, well, never mind. The customers he's talking to hardly need concept to validate a drifty, strapless georgette Valli gown. It is what it is: specifically targeted service, well done.
3 October 2007
The only nod to the seaside in Giambattista Valli's resort collection was an elegant coral-colored print that appeared on a strapless dress and on a top with an asymmetrical neckline. Aside from that, it was all about city sophistication—crisp shirtdresses and safari jacket suits cinched with feminine bows; a little black dress and a statement-making white one, both in an off-the-shoulder style; and an on-trend color palette of yellow, orange, and blush pink. Evening highlights included a pair of halter dresses with a frill of ruffles spilling down the front, but the best after-dark look was a great-looking slim white Le Smoking with black satin details.
9 July 2007
What do you get when you mix Rembrandt, Le Corbusier, and the Mexican film star María Félix? The new Fall collection by Giambattista Valli. From the painter (and perhaps from classic YSL, too) came the black suits—longer through the jacket, fuller through the leg, and more office-ready than anything the designer has shown before. The bold shots of yellow and red, geometric prints, and the new stiffer architecture found in Valli's favorite trapeze and bell shapes were derived from the great architect. And from La Doña, as she was called, he took the flourishes.Valli's first love is a party dress. So Swarovski crystals studded the funnel necks of short frocks. Black-tipped white feathers were stitched together to create a showstopping weightless cape. And last season's masses of soft floral rosettes have become ribbon-candy ruffles—on one shift dress, they were horizontally arrayed to decorate the neckline; on another, they zipped up and down from neck to knee-length hem. From his new jewelry line, Valli showed large heart-shaped pendants emblazoned with skulls.All of this gave Jessica Biel and the Euro socialite cohort in the front row plenty to ooh and aah over. What jazzes up the fashion types on the opposite side of the runway—aside from the obvious luxe of the fabrics and the fine construction—is how the cut-away-from-the-body silhouette seems both right for the season and completely of a piece with the exciting body of sophisticated work Valli is continuing to build.
1 March 2007
When shopping for a trapeze dress next season, you could do worse than seek out Giambattista Valli. Of the many designers who latched onto this new-again shape, he did it with the most finesse. To his critics, there's an old-fashioned lack of serious daywear—the kind that a well-remunerated woman might sport to a board meeting—in Valli's runway shows. To his fans, however, the couturelike finish of his big-occasion clothes—which ranged from egg-shaped frocks to pannier dresses for spring—is beyond reproach.Take, they might argue, the lifelike roses that decorated one short black dress. Inspired by the abstract expressionist Alberto Burri, Valli burned their edges, so that they rustled like fallen leaves as they glided down the runway. "I wanted to portray an intellectual beauty," he said. And so, along those same lines, he requested permission from the Calder Foundation to reprint one of the artist's mobile paintings for an aptly airy bubble skirt that he paired with a collarless, belted jacket. And from art benefactress Peggy Guggenheim, he cribbed rococo sunglasses and pagoda hats.The results skewed more precious than intellectual, but there was no quibbling with the beauty of Valli's mille-feuille organza meringues. If they will need a few extra inches added to their hems to make them red-carpet safe for the likes of Katie Holmes and Victoria Beckham, his front-row guests, that's a minor complaint and one easily solved by this technically accomplished designer.
5 October 2006
The rest of fashion may be preoccupied with the cocoon and trapeze shapes he proposed in his breakout spring collection, but Giambattista Valli has moved on. Today he explored a cut he only touched upon last season: a mid-calf-length skirt of almost New Look proportions. Perhaps by way of contrast, he also introduced its diametric opposite, the hobble. In the former, models sashayed freely around a hall on the upper floor of the Musée de l'Homme, a venue boasting stunning views of the Eiffel Tower. In the latter, not the easiest style to strut a runway in, they had all the time in the world to admire the vista.If wearabilty wasn't always foremost in Valli's mind, artistry was. Take one radzimir sheath, the face-framing ruffles of which trailed along a neckline that dipped to the lower back, suggesting angel's wings. Feathers were a recurring motif. They trimmed the thigh-high hem of a showgirl's orange sequined minidress, and more subtly, were layered from waist to hem on a slim skirt worn with a slouchy V-neck sweater.Day-for-night dressing was another theme at play. What interests Valli, and what he excels at, is dressing a woman who never dresses down. After eight, it's gold bugle beads; before, it's a camel cashmere jacket with crystals the size of cell-phone screens glittering at her neck.
2 March 2006
Talk about a moment of truth: This was Giambattista Valli's all-important sophomore collection, after making a hasty fall debut when his contract at Ungaro was not renewed last year. His first time out, the audience was inclined to be generous, and the reviews came back mostly positive—not least of all because he took the first baby steps toward establishing his own identity, separate from that of his former employer. But would he be able to keep up the momentum in his second outing? That was the question hanging in the air this morning at the InterContinental hotel's Salon Imperial.The answer—from the first look to the last—is a delightedyes,as themes he introduced for fall reappeared with a greater sense of poise and focus. Mixed in with Jacquard tulip coats and chiffon shirtwaist dresses were Valli's favorite trim jackets, now with a more military flavor and paired with shorts or, less successfully, skinny pants casually rolled up below the knee. After dark, it was all about big volumes—bows, bustles, and balloon shapes. In ivory, lemon, and the palest of pinks, Valli's cocktail frocks and ball gowns hinted at Ungaro's teacher, the masterful Cristobal Balenciaga. Whether you catch the irony in that or not, it's a joy to see a designer who has taken his fair share of knocks bounce back and begin to find that rare thing: his own, strong voice.
6 October 2005
In the recent flurry of designer hirings, firings, and resignations, Giambattista Valli might have been marked down as last season's footnote: Out at Ungaro. But with remarkable speed and an extraordinary chorus of support (including Lee Radziwill and Diane Kruger in the front row, not to mention Dita Von Teese on the runway), Valli has regrouped and come back with his own signature collection in Paris.Goodwill and friendship notwithstanding, a huge question mark hung over his debut. As one of those backroom assistants who has thus far acted as a ventriloquist for another designer's voice, what, if anything, Valli had to say on his own behalf was uncertain. A statement about modernized glamour on the one hand, and poufy, crinolined evening on the other seemed to be the essence of it, though the presentation proved the designer has gathered sophistication as well as connections along his way.For day, he has a way with knits (balloon-sleeve cashmere sweaters) and coats that cut a sixties couture swagger in loose, minimalist camel or come belted with a swing back. His precisely fitted military jackets and officer's coats, with glamorous tab fastenings and Mongolian-lamb collars, have a close-to-the-body femininity that might please as exacting a client as Radziwill. These, several nifty tuxedos (one with a tailcoat jacket pieced in black bouclé tweed and satin), and gutsy handheld crocodile totes, gave an unexpectedly confident polish to the proceedings.Still, there's a heck of a conflict going on if you're hoping to dress both Radziwill and Von Teese. Valli's Dita-inspired dresses are corseted, bustled, poufed, and crinolined to the max. Aside from those, there were a few rather good tightly draped black jersey dresses sashed with bows or sprouting tulle at the bust that announced, thank you, Ungaro, and goodnight. Valli can hardly be blamed for getting them out of his system. He'll have to figure out a few issues before next season, but kudos are due to him for getting such a show on the road in record time.
3 March 2005