Giambattista Valli is having a busy year. In May, he announced his H&M designer collaboration at the amfAR gala in Cannes with Kendall Jenner by his side and racked up 600 million media impressions for his limited-edition see-now-buy-now capsule with the fast-fashion giant in the process. Come November, he’ll launch the rest of the project with another event the location and scope of which is still TBD. And over the weekend he dressed Charlotte Casiraghi, a granddaughter of Grace Kelly, in a one-of-a-kind dress for her and Dimitri Rassam’s second nuptials.
It’s not surprising that Valli’s instinct for haute couture week was to create a “moment of peace.” His idea was to stage an exhibition rather than a show, but it’s not necessarily the easy way out that it sounds. “Everything has to be perfect,” he said of the installation. “You can’t get away with what you can get away with at a show.”
Valli approached the exhibition as a reexamination of his successes. The presentation opened with a group of mannequins dressed in monogrammed white button-downs and big tulle skirts. Two large rooms followed, one dedicated to what he described as the art of the atelier—i.e., a bustier dress embellished neckline to hem in three-dimensional silk taffeta peony blooms and a micro-minidress of wool crepe and silk with tiny embroideries of orange blossoms and dahlia petals. The second room was filled with his “obsessions,” which more of less boil down to rose prints, ruffles, exuberant volumes, and, bien sûr, high-low numbers of the sort Jenner rocked in Cannes.
If the dresses looked familiar, they were people pleasers all the same. Valli said that a photo of his two tulle confections in the Costume Institute’s “Camp: Notes on Fashion” exhibition was his most successful Instagram post ever. Naturally, in the exhibition’s final room he displayed reprises of his extravagant birds-of-paradise dresses in new colors, including pale mint, peachy orange, and light blue.
Valli said those 600 million H&M collaboration impressions taught him that “the GBV dream is so big for so many people.” It will be interesting to see what he gleaned from the self-curation process when couture week comes around again in January.
