Every season before the Valentino couture show, Pierpaolo Piccioli receives reporters at a press conference that is essentially a mini-defilé; he talks about the highlights of the collection and is proud of the artistry of his Roman studio. It is a privilege to see up close the sublime details that give each piece a touch of the supernatural; at these levels of execution, couture is the noblest expression of fashion. Not all this week’s collections are the same: Valentino’s is definitely haute.
Piccioli synchronizes couture with time, while the ritual mystique remains intact. Steeped in fashion’s modern lexicon, the contemporary collection was staged in the gilded salons of Place Vendôme, the Maison’s Parisian address since 1998, and reproduced the intimate atmosphere of défilés past. While proximity enhanced the emotional temperature and sensory pleasure of getting close to each passage, “you don’t have to feel the weight of the technique and the handmade, because ultimately couture is about the illusion of effortlessness,” Piccioli said. “The technology must disappear in order not to lose the magic; a magician remains only a magician until he reveals his secrets.”
The collection contained no ridiculous stories or dark subtexts, but read as an extended experiment (Piccioli called it ‘an instinctive expression of the urge for creation’) with shapes, volumes, silhouettes and cutouts. Revised wardrobe staples such as blazers, masculine jackets, hoodies and parkas were translated into ‘couture objects’ through idiosyncratic, almost paradoxical combinations with traditional couture templates, which Piccioli called ‘traces of the couture past’.
A bouillonée mini dress in emerald green silk faille was worn under a structured, oversized blazer in mustard techno gabardine, while a poufy ball gown in turquoise taffeta was paired with a boxy hoodie in khaki green gabardine, trimmed with upturned feathers. Elsewhere, the appeal of an impeccably easy mohair coat in a soft rust shade contrasted with the haute pink of a sleek bustier dress made of almost elusive silk chiffon, cut so that it could be wrapped around the body in one fluid motion. single sensual gesture.
Piccioli believes that couture is the ultimate privileged space of authorship for a designer, a place where the obsessive search for perfection and the urge for experimentation can be given free rein. Yet, as a Roman sensorialist, his approach is far from the sharp, hard edges of modernism or conceptualism. Rather, it is imbued with the humanity and charm that imbues the atmosphere of his studio; his virtuoso talent for chromatic assonances channels a kind of vibrational energy that seems to provoke a response that is not just visual, but rather emotional. Ultimately, Piccioli’s fine sense of couture appeals to the senses; there is no more powerful story than that.
