When one’s atelier literally sits in the shadow of the Vatican, it isn’t so much a question of whether the church will inspire one’s designs, but when and to what effect. For Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino, the answers were now and with great success. It wasn’t the expected next move for this house. The Valentino Resort collection, shown last month in New York, was an all-out celebration of glamleisure—track suits with mink coats!—and that isn’t necessarily profane, but it’s damn secular. Not so for the haute couture, and this was the starting point for Piccioli: He wanted to draw a line between notions of the sacred and the ritualistic in the church and in the practice of haute couture. The parallels are convincing—all that initiation, craft, training, lore—and the aesthetic impulses not dissimilar. His starting references were the portraits of Zurbarán, those of cardinals and bishops, nuns and martyrs. There are hooded capes and silhouettes that resemble the robes of priests, and there are hammered metal bags with enamel mosaic details (a collaboration with Harumi Klossowska) in the shapes of animal heads meant to symbolize the seven deadly sins.
One could quibble with these gestures: Most women do not want to dress like extras from The Handmaid’s Tale no matter how relevant it (sadly) may be, and most couture clients would have more than a passing familiarity with some deadly sins and not want to be reminded of the source of their fortune by their handbag. But one would be missing the point, and missing the mystery and beauty of the handwork and artistry behind Piccioli’s extraordinary designs. A simple pleated skirt is made of strips of emerald feathers. There are brocades of cotton lace and cashmere, chiffon plissé with velvet intarsia, combinations of fabrics and textures and embroideries that dazzle without recourse to sparkle (except in a luminous column of tiny bugle-beaded fringe suspended from a velvet bodice). There is a modesty to Piccioli’s eveningwear that belies the 1000+ hours of craftsmanship required to create a single garment. It is an act of devotion to make such a piece, and, frankly, a mysterious and blessed endeavor at this point in our history . . . ergo the correctness of Piccioli’s original analogy.
It is easy to be distracted by the parade of exceptional evening offerings at Valentino—here a cranberry cloud of silk, there an appliquéd column hemmed in mink and embroidered with feathers. But the real accomplishment of this collection is the daywear, with its leggy yet comforting proportions, its modular assemblages (turtleneck with shirt with tunic with dickey with trouser with cape), its delicious yet slightly off palette (marshmallow, strawberry, banana, prune, chocolate, mint). Day clothes have been, bizarrely, the focus of this Couture Week. (Bizarre because who are those clients who aren’t living in jeans?) But where other creators have looked to a breed of chic that dates from another time, with its roots in the postwar era, Piccioli argued for chic of a very different order—and not a religious one. It’s about being modest yet grand, colorful yet demure, comfortable yet never sloppy. A look to worship.
