Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Exuberant Valentino Outing Was the Highlight of Paris Couture Week.
Vogue writes ‘For me it’s about more than clothes,” said Pierpaolo Piccioli backstage at his magisterial Valentino collection, which effectively brought Paris’s haute couture season to a close. Celine Dion stood by to congratulate him, still fighting the tears that had convulsed her during the show. “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 himself were on hand to support Piccioli, and if the pre-show 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 midcentury swans on his inspiration board. Piccioli had surrounded the image with others taken from the pages of Ebony and Jet magazine from that period through the 1970s that included such icons of black style 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,” says Piccioli, “but you can invent new harmonies for color.” This season, those unexpected mixes include 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 rouleaux fringe beloved of Valentino himself—in pale mauve. Even the solid colors were remarkable and included voluminous ballgowns 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.”
