When Italy loosened its restrictions, Giambattista Valli visited his native Rome. There, the naked streets—awaiting the return of tourists—gave him a rare opportunity to connect with the core of his hometown. “It’s the only moment you’re going to catch what Rome really is,” he said on a video call from his adopted home of Paris. Visiting the quiet villas and monuments, he could feel the Roman-Parisian culture clash within his own heart. It made him think of a like-minded spirit from another time: Pauline Bonaparte Borghese, the sister of Napoleon, who married a Roman aristocrat and shocked the city’s high society with her liberated French ways.
“She brought a new attitude to Rome. She was getting naked with super comfort. It was very scandalous at the time,” Valli said. “When Paulina arrived in Rome, everybody was very conservative, very tied up in the pope and Italian tradition. She arrived and got naked and confident and didn’t care.” Her story rang a bell: “When I arrived in Paris from Rome, women seemed much freer—more naked, more confident about their bodies. Here, they don’t wear leggings in the winter. Sometimes they don’t even wear make-up, just lipstick. That’s different to Romans.”
Looking to the near future ahead—a wardrobe for our impending reemergence—Valli detected in that attitude something he thought felt right for now. “That’s why I love this very short and confident silhouette: great legs and great brains,” as he put it. His collection was largely composed of short dresses with a big energy about them, fusing a Parisian silhouette with Roman floral embroideries and the ruffs and puffs of Valli’s haute couture language. “Get back in action,” he said. “It’s a silhouette for a new life and a freedom for women to express their femininity in their own way.”
With consistent lightness, Valli transported the chic black-and-whiteness of French cinema—little bouclé skirt suits and workwear pantsuits—into a more romantic Roman mindset, eventually expanding his silhouette into prim ballroom dresses that never got fussy. “There’s a line of people waiting to get married, waiting to have parties, and we will want to get dressed,” Valli declared. “I’m tired of sweatpants!” Illustrating our return to the wonders of the real world, he framed models’ eyes with a painter’s brushstrokes as a memory of the Roman ceilings they’d been gazing at in awe, their eyes as big as teacups. “We say, ‘It stayed in my eyes,’” Valli smiled, ever the poet.
