When the world is going to hell in a handcart, there comes a moment while you’re sitting at an haute couture show that you just have to surrender. Here you are, usually in some fabulously historic and impossibly gorgeous setting, watching clothes that have not only been created by a designer, but brought to life by a dedicated team of extremely talented craftspeople whose names will never be known, but who’ve lavished all their skills to create something beautiful. All of it will flash by you on the runway in an instant. Old-fashioned as hell it may be, but you know what? Right now, it’s a welcome moment of release from a reality that sadly—very sadly—doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. Bring on the pretty dresses, please—like, now—to provide a nanosecond of distraction.
Which brings us to Giambattista Valli, who held his Spring couture show in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in the Petit Palais. His collection utilized everything from myriad sequins gradating in a way almost imperceptible to the naked eye, to velvet découpé on organza, to a collision of jeweled beading and layers of macramé (major technical displays: check, check, check). Valli based all this on the collision between the fecund yet untamed nature depicted in the book The Wild Garden, and the draped, noble garb worn by centuries worth of sculptural goddesses. Beauty was on Valli’s mind—but of a type that’s entirely instinctual and true to him, and not the versions that are currently getting chewed over elsewhere. “A lot of people in fashion right now are a little bit scared of beauty,” he said backstage moments before the show. “There’s a lot of research into intellectual beauty, alternative beauty, a more edgy beauty, to break the rules. But I’m the opposite. I love the idea of something harmonious, sensual, romantic.”
Simple, then. Except not. If this was one of Valli’s more effortless-looking couture outings—that is, he managed to keep the supersize volumes down to the three finale dresses in pleated tulle, each one using a mere 350 meters of fabric—there was plenty of work behind even the most deceptively simple looks. The draping that echoed his sculptural inspiration looked terrific on a billowing chiffon dress dotted with delicate floral buds, bands of jeweling emphasizing the sighing softness of the fabric. But it was even better when it was worked in layers of brown and black chiffon, falling into undulating folds, sliding in controlled fashion off the shoulder. Come Oscar night, that’s the kind of dress that could speak to the seriousness of the times we live in, yet still look impossibly elegant.
