The massively influential Valentino couture show Pierpaolo Piccioli staged in January, with its diverse cast, has been reverberating throughout the wide world of fashion ever since—visibly shifting the needle of the industry toward volume and glamour, and cementing the normalization of inclusive casting. Piccioli is a magnetic, down-to-earth guy who cares about celebrating the skilled people who work for him, a man on an intuitive mission to place fashion on a positive plane. “I feel that people are looking for emotion and dreams—but not distant dreams,” he said today before his ready-to-wear show was about to take to the runway. “I want to create a community for Valentino. I mean something different from ‘lifestyle,’ which is about owning objects. It’s about people who share values.”
In prepping this show, he’d reached out laterally in two directions to connect with cocreators from beyond the exclusive realms of the Roman house. One was the continuation of the creative brainstorming with Jun Takahashi of Undercover that the pair started with Valentino’s menswear. This time they morphed together a print of a 19th-century neoclassical sculpture of kissing lovers with a pop-punkish image of roses. The prints proliferated over coats and dresses, settling most beautifully as a cut-out pink bloom appliquéd on white lace in the breast of a slim cream midi dress.
Piccioli had also been hit by the resonances of the direct action Movement for the Emancipation of Poetry, which anonymously pastes lyrical lines on walls in cities around the world. The idea of publicly accessible poetry about love and tenderness led him to commission the Scottish poet and artist Robert Montgomery and the three young writers (Greta Bellamacina, Mustafa The Poet, and Yrsa Daley-Ward) to contribute to a slim volume, Valentino on Love, which was left on seats for the audience to pick up. An illuminated billboard with lines by Montgomery stood at the end of the runway, reading, “The people you love become ghosts inside of you and like this you keep them alive.” Piccioli showed how he’d picked lines from the anthology to be printed or embroidered inside coats, on mid-layers of tulle dresses, inside bags and boots—so that only the wearer would know they are there.
In between all these gestures consciously intended to include a much younger customer—there was a series of leggy tunics and short coats—came the timeless, drop-dead-simple side of Valentino. The beauty of the cut and balance of a red A-line silk dress with an integral scarf flung diagonally across it, or a deep purple floor-length gown with fluted panels visible only in movement—these are the fashion poetics that Piccioli and his team make near impossible to translate into words but whose appeal will speak beyond seasons and down generations.
