Pierpaolo Piccioli employed most of Valentino's Haute Couture tropes for the 45 designs included in the fashion house's show that look place last Thursday at Beijing's Summer Palace, in China. Connoisseurs didn't just spot connections with paintings and in particular with Piero della Francesca and Fra Angelico in the designs, but also with architectures.
Behind some of the monumental constructions of ruffles, bows and rosettes on the runway, there were hints at Rome's Pantheon, the 2,000 year old pagan temple-turned church characterised by the most impressive and unreinforced concrete dome in the world, a feature that throughout the decades inspired not just fashion, but also jewellery designers.
Piccioli employed the Pantheon already in his A/W 15 Haute Couture collection for Valentino that featured a cape with a literal representation of the Pantheon dome coffers (inset panels), that radiate from the central oculus. Distributed in five rows of twenty-eight square coffers of diminishing size, the coffers have been a fascinating object of study for centuries as they are based on a complex design.
The design showcased in Beijing that displayed a connection with the Pantheon, could instead be considered as a fantasy interpretation of this construction, a new rendition of the A/W 15 design, with the coffers transformed into bows that gradually went from small to extra-large. Many of the gowns on the Beijing runways came in a special shade of red that was a combination of Valentino red, Valentino pink, and Chinese red that Piccioli dubbed "Daydream Red".
The colour instantly conjured up the colour of rose petals, a further connection with the Pantheon and in particular with the Pentecost ceremony at the Pantheon when firefighters reach the top of the dome and drop thousands of red rose petals onto the faithful from the oculus to commemorate the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Virgin Mary and the Apostles and the blood shed by Jesus (as a further connection with Roman legends, inspirations and history, the red/pink palette in the collection also evoked the unsettling yet sublime painting "The Roses of Heliogabalus" by Alma Tadema).
So, while in yesterday's post we looked at "soft" architecture and at the power of fabrics in spaces, in this case fabric is instead employed to transform architectural features into feminine and wearable architectural constructions (and in a way the theme and colour palette of this post ties in with the pink brutalism theme we looked at a week ago via the film "Paradise Hills").
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