“For me, it’s about more than clothes,” said Pierpaolo Piccioli backstage at his magisterial Valentino show, which effectively brought Paris’s haute couture season to a close. Céline Dion stood by to congratulate him, still fighting the tears that had convulsed her during the presentation. “You have given women back their beauty,” said Dion, bursting into tears again.
Designers including Raf Simons, Clare Waight Keller, Giambattista Valli, Christian Louboutin, and Valentino Garavani himself were on hand to support Piccioli, and if the preshow atmosphere was ripe with anticipation, Piccioli did not disappoint. The collection was indeed transportingly beautiful, a triumph of audacious color, flawless workmanship, and bravura statements for night leavened with glamorous and insouciant real-life propositions for day.
And then there was the show casting. In the midst of fittings two days earlier, Piccioli had diversity on his mind. “What if Cecil Beaton’s [1948] photograph of those Charles James dresses could be with black women?” he asked, pointing out that iconic picture of a bevy of mid-century swans on his inspiration board. Piccioli had surrounded the image with others taken from the pages of Ebony and Jet magazines from that period through the 1970s, which included such icons as Eartha Kitt and Beverly Johnson. They were joined by stately medieval depictions of black Madonnas, painterly representations of black beauty like the women in Kerry James Marshall’s impactful contemporary work, and the cover girls of Franca Sozzani’s July 2008 Black Issue of Italian Vogue. Piccioli’s casting shamed the tokenism of even recent memory and included Sozzani’s cover girls, Liya Kebede and Naomi Campbell, alongside newcomers such as Ugbad Abdi, making her runway debut, her face framed in volutes of chestnut brown horsehair crin. The diversity in the show made Piccioli’s idiosyncratic colors sing even louder.
“You don’t invent color,” said Piccioli, “but you can invent new harmonies for color.” This season, those unexpected mixes included a sugared almond pink cashmere coat faced in coral, worn with a chocolate crepe blouse and emerald gabardine pants, or a lilac serape thrown over orange pants and an oyster crepe blouson fringed with floor length budellini—the padded rouleau fringe beloved of Valentino himself—in pale mauve. Even the solid colors were remarkable and included voluminous ball gowns in Matisse blue organza, peridot green sequins, turquoise lace, and tangerine silk faille.
“I don’t believe in modernist couture,” Piccioli protested during that preview. “I love couture for what it is—the lightness, the uniqueness.” Nevertheless, by taking the tropes of the haute couture and of the house’s particular brand of romantic femininity—ruffles, ball gown volumes, lace, and old-fashioned wallpaper florals—as well as the techniques and embellishments that Valentino himself perfected through the years and reworking them in dynamic ways, Piccioli created a couture that looked entirely relevant for 2019 and beyond.
“I don’t like to show the efforts [it takes] to arrive at the magic,” said Piccioli as he pointed out the astonishing details of the clothes in the Valentino atelier that are transplanted from Rome to the brand’s Paris HQ in the Place Vendôme for the days leading up to the show. The famed workmanship is a justifiable source of pride for the house, and some of the more extraordinary details were printed alongside the descriptions of the looks in the run-of-show program. It is worth considering them. This season, for instance, the signature budellini that shimmied on a big-sleeved gown of silk organza scattered with cabbage roses required an additional 236 meters of the same costly custom-designed fabric, while an astonishing 63 meters of bitter yellow faille were required to make a ball gown with a butterfly-winged bow in back that was worthy of a Zurbarán saint. Seven hundred hours of handwork, meanwhile, went into a floral-print dress with insertions of metallic lace, creating a subtle patchwork. And the narrow organza ruffles on a gown of pale organza and lace—each one rolled and finished by hand with stitches so small and invisible that they can barely be detected by the human eye—contributed to the 1,050 hours of work on the dress. This is what haute couture means; even the handcrafted hosiery was fashioned from collages of couture lace.
Many of the models’ eyes were framed in petals to transform them into flower fairies out of the 19th-century French artist J. J. Grandville or the 1960s makeup genius Pablo Manzoni, and the 65 looks were each named for flowers. By the time Campbell sashayed through the salons of the palatial late-19th-century townhouse built for Salomon Mayer von Rothschild wearing Chocolate Dahlia of deepest brown translucent organza, hemmed with deep tiers of taffeta ruffles, the crowd was on its feet cheering this celebration of grace and beauty.
