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-school alta moda, and it's a reminder that alta moda is 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.
