It’s becoming clear that awareness of the peripheral influence of millennials is having an increasing influence on the center of luxury menswear houses and brands this season. Why? Are millennials everywhere an extraordinarily wealthy generation? Not in the West, anyway, where they’re more likely to be saddled with higher debt and lower wages than their parents ever were. But in the age of social media, when the likes of Gosha Rubchinskiy, Vetements, Supreme, and Palace have converted teens into fanatical collectors and traders in hot items, the main players are looking for a way into the action. At Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli is one of them.
Backstage before his show, he was pointing out the VLTN lettering printed on streamer-like scarves attached to white shirts, and daubed in white paint on a classic brown overcoat. “It’s one of the logos of the house from the '80s. I didn’t like it, because I knew it,” he shrugged, “but I have a lot of young guys on our team, and they loved it. I like to listen to them—you have to listen, to learn. So I tried to re-set my eyes. And I started to see it in a different way.”
Piccioli also said he’d been reading Jungian psychology and thinking about archetypes and human social consciousness—something just a little bit older than social media. It was hard to fathom the portent of that in a sweltering basement full of dressed-up teenagers, but as the show went out, it was clearer that Piccioli had been tweaking such ordinary standards as chinos (adding a pleat in back of the ankle) and adding handwork and embellishment to anoraks and tracksuits. The human touch he alluded to ranged glancingly through folk and tribal embroideries—beading, cross-stitch, and mirrored hand-work which might have been sourced from African, Central American, Eastern European, and Native American peoples.
Still, if logos and one-world signaling should fail to get through, there is one aspect of this collection which certainly will. Piccioli is a brilliant accessory designer by his original calling, and there was not one pair of eyes in the room which wasn’t instantly riveted by what was on the feet. Each pair of sneakers was its own individual collage of multicolored knitted textile and appliqué. There were zig-zags, flashes of metallics, totemic symbols, piped, striped bindings. Each pair amazing. Clearly, being so complex and so special, they will be very, very expensive and also very hard to get. In other words, packed with all the ingredients guaranteed to get an international fanboy base activated before the last model had left the room.
