Sporting his ordinary uniform of darkish sun shades, a black T-shirt, black pants, and white sneakers, Pierpaolo Piccioli is sitting within the Paris headquarters of Valentino on the Place Vendôme, with its majestic views over the sq. and onto the facade of the Ritz Resort, speaking about how he sees the rarefied world of high fashion. For many years, there was an ongoing dialogue about whether or not clothes made completely by hand for essentially the most restricted of audiences nonetheless is smart, however Piccioli rejects the premise of the query. “I don’t suppose that couture needs to be trendy in the best way you suppose, by way of type or form,” he explains. “To me, modernity means embracing the world that’s round us. Couture works if, on the finish, it’s worn by people who’re of at the moment.”
Since 2017, when he offered his first solo assortment for Valentino, Piccioli has been giving a jolt to high fashion. He has performed with dramatic, sculptural varieties; harnessed the terribly exact methods of the Valentino ateliers; and mixed colours in startling methods. However not like designers of the previous, Piccioli has used his couture collections to advance messages about inclusivity, gender, and variety. “To me, couture is an instrument to say in a good louder approach what I consider in, what I stand for,” he explains. “Couture is pure as a course of, as an strategy, so while you generate consideration with couture, it could possibly have a much bigger impression than with different technique of expression.”
To get a greater sense of his imaginative and prescient, we requested the designer to scour his personal archives and choose among the most emblematic work from his six years designing Valentino couture. Piccioli labored with Liz Johnson Artur, a Russian and Ghanaian artwork photographer primarily based in London, with whom he collaborated on a e book in 2020, Valentino: Collezione Milano. Bringing the garments to life required assembling an eclectic group, together with the American actor Nicola Peltz Beckham, the French mannequin and actor Tina Kunakey, the RuPaul’s Drag Race celebrity Shea Couleé, and the designer’s daughter Benedetta Piccioli.
This previous summer time, Piccioli made certainly one of his strongest couture statements thus far in a outstanding presentation on the Spanish Steps in Rome. Titled “The Starting,” the present featured greater than 100 fashions descending all 136 steps of the historic stairway. First out was Alaato Jazyper, from South Sudan, carrying a dramatic minidress pouf product of monumental taffeta roses, all in Valentino Crimson, paired with black fishnets and black patent leather-based pumps adorned with black feathers. “I actually needed to have individuals in that present who exemplified huge societal modifications, individuals who 30 years in the past may not have been allowed to stroll the runway,” Piccioli says. “There have been guys carrying female attire and greater than 40 Black women. In such a symbolic Italian metropolis, it was going towards each wave of xenophobia and homophobia. It was very classical, very couture, with ruffles and bows, very a lot within the Valentino vocabulary, however really, it was a giant ‘fuck you’ to a standard type of magnificence, to all of the conservatism, the reactionaries of the second. It was about giving a stage—a giant, institutional stage—to people who find themselves not normally allowed to be in such a central house of trend.”
On the base of the steps, a raised white runway continued over the cobblestones of the Piazza di Spagna, turning the nook to the imposing Valentino headquarters. Romans frolicked of their home windows to catch the spectacle and a reside efficiency by English vocalist and composer Labrinth, who was on the prime of the steps. The present ended with Piccioli main members of his atelier, carrying their white coats, down the steps and into the home. He bounded over to hug Giancarlo Giammetti, who based the home along with his associate, Valentino Garavani, in 1960. “It was a touching second after such an emotional present,” recollects Giammetti. “We’re so fortunate to have Pierpaolo. He’s significantly enamored of Valentino and what it could possibly deliver to at the moment’s world.”
It’s the designer’s imaginative and prescient of at the moment that has made the classical home so related—below Piccioli’s watch, Valentino has change into a billion-dollar model. One of many causes for staging the occasion on the Spanish Steps was that Piccioli had seen, from afar throughout the ’80s and ’90s, the alta moda displays that had been held there. “These exhibits had been so stunning and so glamorous to me, however I didn’t wish to re-create their reminiscence,” he explains. “I needed to get the modernity, as a result of that’s what my job is about, delivering a magnificence that displays the time wherein we live.”
Piccioli was born in 1967 in Nettuno, a modest coastal city some 35 miles south of Rome. It’s the place he and his spouse, Simona Caggia, raised their youngsters, Benedetta, 25; Pietro, 23; and Stella, 16. He studied philosophy at college, then switched to trend and commenced his profession as a junior designer at Fendi, the place he met Karl Lagerfeld. “Karl was obsessive about the thought of the current and by no means going again to the previous, which was an essential lesson for me,” Piccioli says. “However most essential at Fendi was the thought of household, of the group, of constructing one thing collectively.” In 1999, Piccioli landed at Valentino, designing equipment. Then, in 2008, after Valentino retired, Piccioli assumed the title of co-creative director, sharing it with Maria Grazia Chiuri till 2016, when Chiuri left to design Dior.
Apart from particular displays just like the one in Rome or one other in Venice, Piccioli has unfurled his imaginative and prescient for Valentino couture in a suitably spectacular house in Paris: the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, a Nineteenth-century neoclassical townhouse in Faubourg Saint-Honoré. From the start, he sought to emphasise the particular nature of couture. His spring/summer time 2018 assortment included such spectacular exits as a pair of full pants in black crepe paired with a silk georgette prime with ruffles and lace that required 700 hours of hand embroidery. (Every ensemble was named for a employee within the couture atelier.) He additionally confirmed his adventurousness with colour, pairing an extended teal tunic with a sky blue cape and an oversize hat in brilliant crimson ostrich feathers, made with grasp milliner Philip Treacy.
For Piccioli, range in casting is as essential as the garments. The fashions in his spring/summer time 2022 couture assortment included Lara Stone, 38; Kristen McMenamy, 57; Marie Sophie Wilson, 73; and Jon Kortajarena, 37. In January 2019, in a present that he dubbed “Black Magnificence,” Piccioli ensured that of the 65 fashions he labored with, 42 had been Black. His temper board was crammed with iconic photographs of ladies comparable to Eartha Kitt; trend pictures from Nineteen Sixties Ebony; work by Manet, Gauguin, and Kerry James Marshall; and the well-known 1948 picture by Cecil Beaton of a salon crammed with eight girls in night confections by Charles James. The presentation was accompanied by a Maria Callas aria from La Wally, higher often called the opera from the movie Diva. On the finish of the present, a grouping of fashions carrying robes in vivid shades— lavender, stunning pink, chartreuse, and, after all, crimson—assembled to re-create a brand new model of the Beaton picture, solely this time, it included a half dozen Black girls and, on the middle, a regal Naomi Campbell in a sheer ruffled ballgown in black taffeta.
“There have been all of those feelings within the air that I nonetheless really feel,” Piccioli says of that second. “Not due to the garments, as a result of the garments had been classical. There was one thing within the air, some feeling, that created a way of urgency to do this assortment. That’s once I do my job greatest, when I’m able to ship a powerful picture of magnificence that additionally has which means, while you overlap the medium and the message.”
Given the energy of his statements, it’s not shocking that Valentino couture has been embraced by Hollywood stars starting from Glenn Near Jennifer Lopez to Zendaya, who wore a spectacular look to the Oscars this yr: a cropped white silk satin shirt and an extended skirt in silver embroidered organza. Even when dressing celebrities, Piccioli straddles the road between classical magnificence and attention-grabbing urgency. At this previous summer time’s premiere of Don’t Fear Darling, on the 2022 Venice Movie Pageant, Florence Pugh commanded consideration in a black glitter-printed tulle gown embroidered with silver sequins; it radiated timeless movie-star magnificence. However on the Met Gala in 2018, Frances McDormand appeared in one thing extra surprising: a lemon yellow jumpsuit with a voluminous cape in teal faille and organza, and a towering—and face-obscuring—headpiece of blue leaves.
“I needed to shift the thought of Valentino muses from way of life to extra of a group, which means that you simply select individuals due to what they stand for, not only for what they symbolize or for his or her bodily magnificence,” Piccioli explains. “So, Zendaya and Frances McDormand and Glenn Shut are all utterly completely different, one from the opposite, however they share a powerful individuality, an actual uniqueness, and a way of values.”
The Valentino group now thinks of a few of their superstar purchasers as “divas.” As a substitute of the previous operatic thought, nonetheless, for them the phrase is a portmanteau of “completely different values.” And Piccioli expands the idea to incorporate males like Lewis Hamilton, one of many world’s greatest Method 1 drivers, who posed in pink with Zendaya for this fall’s ready-to-wear marketing campaign. “Lewis is a diva to us,” the designer says. “In one of the tough sports activities on the earth, he stands for human rights. He at all times says that he needs to offer voice to those that don’t have one. I like these sorts of people who find themselves in several fields and are utilizing their voice and their work, their implausible work, to be much more forceful.”
It explains why Piccioli’s designs have turned up in locations the place couture has by no means gone earlier than. This previous spring, on RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars season 7, Shea Couleé, one of many contestants, working immediately with the home, took to the runway in a floral, full-length Valentino robe and gown, with Maasai-inspired neck rings and sculptural braided hair shaped right into a gravity-defying crown. It was the primary time anybody on Drag Race had worn high fashion. “I didn’t really feel that that was one thing provocative,” Piccioli says. “I felt that it was regular, that it was pure, which is the one technique to give it authenticity. In fact, we had been conscious that it might be provocative, however that was not the rationale why we did it. The reason being simply because I prefer it—that’s it.”
In discussing Valentino’s residence base of Rome, Piccioli provides a way of his nuanced view of the world. He invokes examples from the centuries of Catholic imagery that may be discovered on each nook, in addition to the tough, sensual imaginative and prescient of the town depicted by movie director Pier Paolo Pasolini. “My Roma is product of layers,” Piccioli explains. “It isn’t a scene you can describe in a single phrase—it is filled with contrasts and tensions. I just like the paganism of Roma that’s nonetheless there, this stress with the Catholic facet and the ability of the church. There may be the sensation that magnificence lies not in anybody factor, however is this sort of easy steadiness between many alternative issues. I like a spot the place all these contrasts reside collectively.”
Piccioli has a profoundly inclusive strategy to his work. In a discipline the place many nonetheless suppose {that a} designer ought to be issuing diktats from above, he emphasizes the function of group. “Considering again to my couture exhibits, all of them show that you are able to do one thing particular if you’re a part of a great group, if everybody believes in what you’re doing, if they’re all a part of the identical dream,” Piccioli explains. “If not, I might simply be alone. I couldn’t do that with out the entire individuals who work with me and who consider in what I dream.”
Nicola Peltz Beckham’s Hair by David Von Cannon for R+Co at A-Body Company; Make-up by Emily Cheng on the Wall Group.
Hair by Claire Grech for L’Oréal Professionnel; make-up by Dariia Day for Charlotte Tilbury at Calliste Company. Fashions: Benedetta Piccioli at Girls Administration Milan; Nicola Peltz Beckham, Omowunmi Shodeko, and Nyaduel Bawar at Woman; Devyn Garcia at DNA; Wali at Girls Administration New York; Feranmi Ajetomobi at Premium; Jinrong Huang at Subsequent; Timothé Domenico at M Administration; Shea Couleé; Tina Kunakey. Casting by Michelle Lee at Michelle Lee Casting.
Produced by Cebe Studio; Govt Producer: Claire Burman; Senior Producer: Sophie Baillavoine; Producer: Nicoleta Iliescu; Manufacturing assistants: Freya Reeves, Kayla King, Sveva Rossino, Catinca Negut; Photograph assistant: Jeremy Cardoso; Vogue assistants: Nina Clements, Elie Merveille; Hair assistant: Rehma Grace; Make-up assistants: Marta Vertere, Laurie Maurie.