Haute Couture weeks are often accompanied by the same debates and the usual features wondering if high fashion can still be considered relevant in our times.
Piccioli continued his studies in combining modern daywear and grand high fashion in Valentino's S/S 18 collection, showcased last week in Paris at the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild.
The catwalk opened with a dichotomic look: a grand yellow faille coat with an oversized ruffle was matched with what looked like plain double-wool brown trousers and a basic white tank. The look was accessorised with a cumbersome pale blue ostrich feather hat, courtesy of Philip Treacy.
The jellyfish-shaped (or were they mushrooms?) hats returned throughout the collection, in aquamarine, mint, pink, burgundy and wysteria and in some cases the plumes turned into leaves and flowers blooming from the models' heads.
Maria Grazia Chiuri, Piccioli's previous creative partner at Valentino, was inspired in her collection for Dior by the Surrealist artist Leonor Fini and, somehow uncannily, these first Valentino looks called to mind Fini's headdress in her "Self-Portrait in a Red Hat" or the colours of another painting by Fini, "Gardienne des Sources".
Yet Piccioli wasn't looking at Fini for this collection: this Haute Couture for modern times was indeed made of the everyday language of fashion, but its trenchcoats and tops that evoked the practical appeal of a sweatshirt, were combined with the semantics of couture – that is feathers, opera-length gloves, ruffles, and voluminous taffeta capes.
Then followed long and short dresses, evening gowns with billowing capes in floral prints, tent dresses that engulfed models, tulle gowns that wrapped them in ethereal layers and cocktail dresses echoing the '80s.
Clashes of colours prevailed throughout the collection: a fuchsia top was matched with red trousers, pale blue gloves and a beige coat; in other cases a sash in a bright colour broke the linearity of a design, adding a quirky note to ordinary neutrals.
Tailored looks included double-layer coats in cashmere, functional pants and trenchcoats, but actresses looking for black gowns to promote on the red carpet the #MeToo and Time's Up campaigns will find some monastic yet elegant capes or the "Irene" dress, made with layers of gauze and silk crepe drops edged with a silk hem that transformed from small to large elements as they extended from bustier to skirt.
Inspirations moved from Haute Couture pictures and in particular from a photograph that had mesmerised Piccioli when he was a young man.
The image in questions was taken by Deborah Turbeville for Valentino in 1977 and showed a model clad in a voluminous red gown surrounded by more models dressed in black (View this photo).
That picture was one of the many on the designer's mood board for the house's S/S 18 collection, and symbolised the first fascination he felt for the house he now represents.
Piccioli then went beyond the picture and symbolically crossed the threshold of the house of Valentino where craftspeople work to make the dream of Haute Couture real and that was the moment when his passion for high fashion became more real.
The designer decided indeed to show the respect he has for the people working in the Rome atelier by naming the looks after their makers.
So, you had ordinary names such as Laura, Silvia and Irene for extravagant gowns with rather complicated stories and techniques behind them, matched here and there with jewellery representing hands and scissors, the tools of the artisans at Valentino.
Piccioli seemed to have genuine gratitude for the makers and their stories and even asked them to write a note about what couture means for them. The hand-written letters were then displayed inside white envelopes, while a "V" logo was recreated with their signatures.
Yet there was another inspiration here, maybe linked with the artisanal one: there were still echoes of Piccioli's A/W 17 collection for Valentino inspired by Francisco de Zurbarán in some looks, but Piccioli also moved from the paintings of Jacopo Carrucci, known as Pontormo (1494-1557).
The billowing pink cape in the background of Pontormo's "Visitation" was turned into an ample dress in soft pink; the heavenly blue shades in the "Deposition" inspired an imposing cape, and the attire of the Virgin Mary in "The Holy Family with the Young St. John" seemed echoed in a gown in the house's trademark red (the Met Museum should maybe pay attention to the religious undertones of the collection for its coming "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" exhibition).
There was maybe a further hidden connection between art and cinema here as Pier Paolo Pasolini recreated tableaux vivants of Pontormo's paintings in "La Ricotta" and Piccioli is also a Pasolini fan (remember the Valentino collection linked with Pasolini's Medea?).
In this collection religion was more to be interpreted as reverence for the work of the craftspeople working in a fashion atelier. The final message behind these gowns was indeed that only when fashion looks at the human beings behind it, at the men and women who make it, it has the power of becoming a religious experience.
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