Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri are remarkably democratic types for designers who work in the most rarefied strata of luxury fashion. They see heritage as a group effort. Their mood boards, one of the fashion industry's better backstage treats, celebrated that idea with images drawn from the heydays of the Ballets Russes in Paris and the Beat generation in San Francisco, both of them moments when poets, painters, and wild-eyed dreamers came together to create something new. Chiuri had a striking word for it: "contamination."
And the contamination today was real cause for celebration. Through the miracle of the Interweb, the designers had found a young Melbourne-based artist named Esther Stewart. Her geometric color-blocked paintings became the inspiration for some of the clothes and all of the carpets that lined the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, where the show was held. "Geometry is a new form of decoration," said Piccioli. It certainly contributed to the strongest looks in this collection.
But decoration in other forms has become one of the most distinctive features of Valentino. The Spring collection currently in stores is bedazzled with embroidered butterflies. Why give up on a good thing? For Fall, the butterflies became midnight moths, dark blue embroidered on a dark blue jacket. Other feats of embroidery were the map of the planets that swathed one blouson, and the owl whose wings spectacularly wrapped from back to front on another. There was something quite grand and wild about these conceits that sat slightly to one side of the neat, precise, tailored looks, all of them complemented by a white shirt and narrow black tie in a symphony of uptightness. The leathers and shearlings had the same precision, the sense of nature tamed. And yet they weren't a drag, because even though Piccioli and Chiuri are remarkable technicians, they also have soul. "In the '60s, people wanted to create a new language," Piccioli said. "If you can change aesthetic values, you can change the values of society." And that, my friends, is the very definition of a grand design.
