‘A Dress Is Like a Passaporto, No?’ Welcome to Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Valentino

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/t-magazine/valentino-creative-director-pierpaolo-piccioli.html

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IT WAS THE FOURTH of July in Paris, and at Maison Valentino’s fall couture show, revolution was in the air. Inside the ornate drawing rooms of the neo-Classical Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild were bursts of hypersaturated color, explosive proportions and dazzling feats of construction. Here, a gown that resembled a quivering cloud of blush-pink feathers; there, sumptuously draped, Watteau-esque garments of dusty rose and red silk. For the finale, lightweight, angel-sleeved plissé dresses in tart hues — raspberry, tangerine — swept through, the models adorned with matching floral headpieces made of chrysanthemums and orchids. There was little point in overthinking the assortment of references on display: Molly Bloom and the court of Versailles, Ziggy Stardust and classical mythology among them. Opera coats and dresses were covered in pictogramlike satin piecework depicting Pegasus and Perseus, Leda and the Swan, Europa and Taurus. This was an emotional dispatch from the domain of private fantasy, a swaggeringly exuberant collection of clothes that might make us, too, feel immortal. The show concluded with a standing ovation led by a teary, now-retired Valentino Garavani, who founded the company nearly 60 years ago. By the time Pierpaolo Piccioli, Valentino’s 50-year-old creative director, emerged to kiss his wife and embrace Garavani, any lingering questions about the purpose of couture in the 21st century seemed moot, because to ask that would be like pondering what use there is to dreaming, to believing in the impossible.

THE HISTORIES OF the great fashion houses can feel a bit like myths themselves: the Icarus-like reaching for the pinnacles of beauty followed by plummets into debt or drugs; the forefathers cast aside to make way for the new generation.

Valentino’s isn’t like that. In the two years since Piccioli became its sole creative director (from 2008 to 2016 he shared the title with Maria Grazia Chiuri, who left to be Christian Dior’s artistic director), Valentino has retained its original dolce vita grandeur, but it has been leavened with a particular ease and modernity. A series of major moments has recently put Piccioli in the spotlight — Frances McDormand appearing as a rare bird in yards of Mediterranean-blue faille silk and a crown of feathers at the Met Gala this past May; Serena Williams resplendent at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s May wedding reception in a full-skirted satin evening dress painted with yellow and scarlet flowers, black mesh Valentino sneakers peeking out from under the hem. Both were welcome reminders that glamour could be — should be, even — joyful.

All fashion sells a narrative, but these were clothes that touched the imagination while also appearing to be an extension of the wearer. There’s a sense of uncanny intimacy when you see something of yourself in a designer’s work, and Piccioli has set out to deepen that relationship between designer and wearer by following the philosophy that a truly contemporary definition of beauty is expansive enough to appeal to both rap stars and princesses, an ingénue at a premiere and a mother marking the occasion of her daughter’s bat mitzvah. Individuality, in clothing terms, means collections that are filled not just with dream dresses (though oh — the dresses!), but also pieces for the hours before dusk. Real life is composed of not just big events, after all, but also daily ceremony, and whatever the distance between our fantasy selves and actual selves, the confidence one wants to feel in one’s skin — in one’s clothes — is real and universal. Piccioli’s designs are distinguished in part by their generosity: They are otherworldly in their ambition but magnanimous in their wearability and multigenerational appeal. This isn’t a coincidence; Piccioli, a low-key father of three, lives a very earthbound existence. “Today, beauty is about diversity, it’s about the freedom to express yourself,” he says. “This is what I want to stand for.”

The challenges of ushering a big heritage brand into the 21st century are manifold: Just ask Alessandra Facchinetti, who lasted less than a year at the house after Garavani, along with his business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, retired in 2008. Overseen by its founders for longer than many other great houses — Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, Chanel — the house of Valentino was an especially weighty inheritance. It is not only one of the world’s last couture ateliers, but in its 10 annual collections — spanning men’s wear, women’s wear and couture — it must translate the ethos and aesthetics of a brand associated with a lost era of Italian glamour to a fast-moving fashion world governed by an attention economy. In Facchinetti’s wake, Piccioli and Chiuri stepped in from the company’s accessories department, delivering clothes of deeply feminine loveliness that modernized the house while revitalizing it, reportedly quadrupling profits over seven years. When Chiuri left in 2016, everyone wondered what Piccioli, literally the straight guy in the house, would produce on his own. Many believed the diaphanous, delicately embroidered Guinevere dresses and flamenco frocks that had distinguished the pair’s successful tenure had surely come from the mind of a woman. But the romantic mood has only continued under Piccioli, combined with a cooler, more subversive poetry. He’s also infused the house’s couture with a sculptural purity and an unparalleled color sensibility — a revelatory and accessible suggestion of what modern made-to-measure should be, revealed in even the quietest moments in the show, like a butterfly-knotted, shoulder-exposing top in celadon Mikado silk paired with petrol wool pants: the highest form of luxury found in a laser-sharp simplicity, a strikingly focused vision.

“My job as a designer is to reflect an idea of the times we live in,” says Piccioli. “And in Valentino, I feel that I’m in the right place, because the values of the house are my personal values. I’m Italian, I’m Roman, and so Valentino is part of my own culture, my own story. This idea of craft, of beautiful tradition, is expressed through the human touch. A couture house means people. It means a personal approach. And that’s as important now as it was in the ’60s.”

ROMANS MAY SIMPLY be better than the rest of us at remaining on nodding terms with the past. Living in the shadow of the Colosseum, it’s hard not to cultivate a sense of history lightly worn, a respect for old rituals that give shape to the day: a late-morning espresso, an early-evening passeggiata. Valentino’s story began in Rome in 1960, before ready-to-wear exploded in Milan; these days, the city remains somewhat apart from both the industry and pop culture, making it an ideal place to explore fashion’s superconsciousness of time, which in Piccioli’s solo collections, as in Garavani’s, has found its expression less in iconography — say, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel re-created on a skirt — than in deeper archetypal coding, with silhouettes and colors that echo the religion and culture in which they were born.

“Valentino has always been about balancing tradition and innovation,” says Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While curating the current exhibit, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” Bolton was particularly drawn to Piccioli’s 2017 couture collection, inspired by the 17th-century Spanish ecclesiastical painter Francisco de Zurbarán. One of the stars of the exhibit is Valentino’s cardinal-red taffeta dress that’s priestly in silhouette, but with a low-necked, rustling sensuousness that makes it appear as though it could just slip off the body. “What Pierpaolo has done is introduce a sort of light-handedness. A reverence, but not overly reverential,” Bolton says. “In that way, he’s an example that a designer should follow when it comes to taking over a couture house with such a strong legacy.”

Visiting the Palazzo Valentino, the brand’s headquarters on Piazza Mignanelli in Rome, can induce rapid-transit time travel. A recent renovation has left the space airy and monasterial, revealing 16th-century frescoes on the ceilings. Warhols depicting the face of Garavani and a half-century’s worth of magazine covers line one hallway. Piccioli, who radiates a warm intelligence and quiet authority, is dressed in a black Valentino tracksuit, an item the designer, a dreamer described as passionate and simpatico by those who work with him, has turned into one of the brand’s unlikely totems. Prominent on his office shelves are books on Pier Paolo Pasolini and Fra Angelico, and hanging on opposing walls is a 1988 Francesco Clemente painting titled “Never-Ending Tale,” and an entirely black, intricately stitched canvas by Brazilian artist Sidival Fila, a friend of Piccioli. In the adjoining room, photographs — John Lennon with David Bowie, Henry Clarke’s 1968 portrait of Marisa Berenson in a Valentino minidress with a white parrot — share space with mood boards covered with images from Greek mythology; Maria Callas; and the anti-Versailles, the palace belonging to Philippe Égalité, the revolutionary Bourbon.

Piccioli is especially drawn to the early Renaissance and punk, along with other eras when the status quo cracked open to reveal something new. And while he has a scholar’s knowledge of visual culture — Valentino’s office is filled with stacks of Piccioli’s own reference books — he talks about his touchstones in more Proustian terms: “I’m interested in memory, but I don’t want to retell the past. I want to remember the emotion you had first looking at a picture and the fantasy you have about the characters.” He describes an enigmatic 1977 Deborah Turbeville photograph of a woman in a red Valentino dress, surrounded by four other models in black. The ambivalent, seemingly spontaneous scene fascinated him as a student. Years later, he located the dress in the archives and found it was not at all as he’d imagined, and so he made a design based not on the original but on his own memory of it.

That space between the imagination and reality is where he likes to operate, in the realm of allegory, myth and the stories our subconscious tells us. “A dress is like a passaporto, no?” he says. “Grace” is a descriptor Piccioli likes to use to explain what he’s after — a less fusty version of elegance, but a word also suggestive of movement and a more interior, spiritual sort of beauty. I can’t help but smile at an over-earnest quote from Maya Angelou I glimpse in one of the personal scrapbooks he keeps for each collection: “Everything in the universe has a rhythm; everything dances.” Rare, surely, is the Angelou-quoting couturier.

The fantasy of fashion tends to land best when it is grounded in the genuine, and Piccioli has sensitive antennas for anything that feels superannuated or overly decorative: “I’m not interested in beautiful dolls or peacocks. Being yourself, I think, is the coolest thing you can do.” To that end, Piccioli has redefined Valentino-style luxury as artisanal and personal — aspirational, yes, but not in the way of yachts-and-jets exclusivity; he finds the idea of “lifestyle” especially dated. Part of making Valentino a touch more democratic was his renewed focus on daytime. A New York-inspired collection of glam leisure — variations on that now-iconic tracksuit in jewel-toned hammered silk, with refined, Spirograph-like topstitching, technical Jersey hoodie dresses and studded pool slides and sneakers — has been his most overtly “street” work to date, prompting some of us to envision a parallel, mythic life in which we might exist exclusively in silk sweats and evening wear. “I think if you work on daywear pieces and give them a different perception, your message can be delivered more strongly,” he says. “People can relate. Otherwise, you are just talking to the niche.”

PICCIOLI GREW UP in the seaside town of Nettuno, about 40 miles outside the capital, dreaming of that mythic elsewhere. Cinema and books were his passports — the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, the novels of Gabriel García Márquez — but drawing was his talent. His parents (his mother ran a small boutique with her sisters, his father worked in the office of a local business) were puzzled but supportive when he applied to Rome’s Istituto Europeo di Design, where, on the strength of his sketches, he was selected in his second year to interview for a prized internship as a design assistant. When he won the position, beating out third- and fourth-year students, he said that he would only take it if he were paid. “Maybe I was rude to ask for this,” he says. “But now I know it was because I wanted to demonstrate to myself that it could be a profession and not just a hobby.”

In the late ’80s, he met Chiuri through a mutual friend and they hit it off, and while working together for a decade at Fendi in the ’90s they helped develop the iconic baguette bag, precisely the kind of must-have objet Valentino was lacking. It was Giammetti who hired them away in 1999, says Carlos Souza, Valentino’s longtime brand ambassador, and soon the duo created an even bigger hit with their Rockstud design, bedazzling classic shoe and bag shapes with metal pyramid studs inspired by the hardware on Roman palazzo doors. Now ubiquitous, the embellishment’s genius was in the wearably punk, urban-gladiator edge it lent to the brand’s gossamer clothes, and it has become one of the industry’s enduring best sellers.

This flexibility of vision — the ability to toggle between and combine new and old, high and low, street and couture — is what has enabled Piccioli to modernize Valentino. “You know, when you work in Roma, you can’t compete with Caravaggio or Bernini, so you do what you can,” he laughs. Now, after 19 years at the house, he knows that continuity means more than just resurrecting a print or the neckline of a dress, or deploying the iconic Valentino red (Piccioli’s reds are often warmer and richer than Garavani’s original, often paired with Pepto pinks): It also means constantly looking forward. A cosmetics partnership with L’Oréal, slotted for next year, will follow a recent project with hip-hop artists Nas, Keith Ape, Syd and ASAP Ferg on the spring 2019 men’s shoe collection. All this genuineness, it must be said, feels genuine: This is a man who likes Alexandre Desplat and Kendrick Lamar, Stanley Kubrick and “Say Yes to the Dress.”

Today, Piccioli still lives in Nettuno, where he met his wife, Simona, in high school; they’ve been married for 25 years and have three children, Benedetta (21), Pietro (20) and Stella (12), as well as a new puppy, Miranda. According to him, they’re unmoved by his position as the creative director of a billion-dollar fashion house; at home, he is simply husband, father. (Simona, he notes, has never asked him what she should wear.) He bounces ideas off them, and Stella gives him ideas of what to listen to (Troye Sivan, one of her favorite musicians, has become the face of the men’s wear campaign). Work nights run late, but when Piccioli isn’t traveling, he likes to spend the morning with his family and commute by train. They are, he implies, what saves him. “I don’t want to forget how my dreams were as a kid, because I think they allow me to work with the same kind of passion and to not feel the pressures that are a kind of stereotype in fashion,” he says. “I feel lucky to do what I was dreaming to do with my life, and maybe going back every day to that place, and to my family, allows me to be exactly who I am.”

WHEN PICCIOLI WAS anxiously working on his first solo collection, Benedetta, who studies literature at the university, happened to be reading Nietzsche: “There’s an idea [in his work] that any act requires oblivion. I understood then that I had to do what I was feeling. There was no other option.” That collection, spring 2017’s ready-to-wear, featured prints drawn from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” — a fabric collaboration with Zandra Rhodes, the most romantic of the British punk designers — and swirling flocks of swallows on diaphanous silk and intarsia pieces woven on a warping machine designed by Leonardo da Vinci. It was ultra-pretty, but there was also an edge to its soft breeziness, and the supersaturated color palette hinted at the beginning of greater changes to come: “My metamorphosis,” he says now.

Chiuri’s departure, drama-free, prompted a big shift in his approach. “When you work together, you don’t compromise if you respect one another, but you do discuss everything, and so the process becomes more rational,” Piccioli says. “Being alone, I learned to allow myself to be more intuitive, more free.” He made changes to his design team, and when I meet them — they’re in jeans and T-shirts, busy behind computers — I’m struck by how young they are. They inspired him to play with a Valentino logo for men’s wear; now, a bold VLTN appears on everything from handbags to a limited-edition yoga mat.

For the Rome-inspired resort 2019 collection, all breezy day dresses and colorful ’70s-style separates, he riffed on a vintage Valentino logo in psychedelic black-and-white silk prints. The looks were insouciant but also classically glamorous, belying the notion that youthfulness should be synonymous with slouchiness or sex.

Piccioli claims he doesn’t think a lot about age, but Valentino is one of the few places one can still find an amazing evening dress with sleeves — important for many of his older customers. McDormand turned to Piccioli for a dress to wear to the Academy Awards earlier this year after a friend told her that she resembled a Shaker woman from the 1800s at the Golden Globes. Her choice, a long, intricately patterned black-and-gold Valentino couture dress that covered her like delicate armor, glittered subtly under the stage lights. “It made me feel like a warrior, and I didn’t have to wear a thing under it,” she told me. “It was the perfect dress. Perfect.” When Piccioli invited her to join him at the Met Gala in May, she knew exactly what she wanted to wear: the cape and feather headdress that was the final look at the spring couture show. (He also made her the acid green jumpsuit she wore underneath.) “I had just rewatched ‘Paris Is Burning,’ and the minute I put it on, I knew I could pull it off,” she said. “And we had so much fun that night! I think it’s the most fun I’ve ever had in an article of clothing.”

Valentino’s couture is one of Piccioli’s greatest prides, and since taking over, he has chronicled both its artistry and fantasy on the company’s Instagram account, paying tribute to the women and men who make it. Nowhere, of course, is the dream life of clothes more exalted: Everything is made to order by hand in one of Valentino’s three couture ateliers on the palazzo’s second floor. While the craftsmanship of the house’s ready-to-wear is already couture-level in many ways — its supple leather separates, delicately embellished evening gowns and deeply decadent unlined furs — Piccioli’s couture collections often offers a more private luxury: Logos and extraneous embellishment are stripped away to reveal a spare, heightened vision. Hanging on a rack in the sanctumlike salon where clients go for fittings, the samples appear so light as to levitate. A fluid caped dress that appears to be made from a single piece of weighty cornflower silk calls to mind Brancusi’s dictum, another favorite of Piccioli: Simplicity is complexity resolved. In one corner, a finished dress awaits a client on a bespoke mannequin, glowing pinkly through its white paper wrappings.

These are clothes, hundreds of hours in the making, that defy fashion’s ephemerality. A cashmere coat of elongated proportions provokes a desire to take off my clothes right there and fold myself naked in it: It is a forever coat. Even the more fantastical moments in Piccioli’s couture collections tend to be defined by a sort of cleanliness, and the quietest details can be the most astonishing: The fine pleats of a simple emerald chiffon skirt are lined with the tiniest of bird feathers; the white cotton shirt he holds out for me to examine is actually hand embroidered throughout in all-white stitching. “The most humble material, cotton. But even the most luxurious fabric is cheap compared with the value of the labor,” he says.

For the spring 2018 couture collection, Piccioli honored his team of seamstresses, including the four artisans who oversee them, known as premieres (no one here uses the depersonalizing term petites mains) by naming the dresses after them. For the fall 2018 couture collection, he asked the seamstresses to christen the dresses themselves. Elide Morelli, Antonietta de Angelis, Irene Stranieri and Alessandra Martini began working at Maison Valentino as teenagers, and they are full of stories: Morelli recalls making clothes for a newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy; de Angelis had been researching corsetry worn at Versailles for the soon-to-be unveiled collection. When I ask if a dress has ever been impossible to realize, Stranieri tells me, “At the beginning, you see the sketch, and you know you’re going to have thousands of difficulties, you’re saying it’s never going to happen, but day by day, stitch by stitch, you make the dream real.”

Overhead, a cloaklike dress of carmine silk, more Umberto Eco than “Handmaid’s Tale,” is suspended from the frescoed ceiling like a glamorous portent from the future. “Very Italian, no? Not like in France,” says Piccioli of the lively, buzzing space, smiling when I emerge. “I started this collection with the idea of romanticism as a strength,” he explains. “I asked my older daughter if she could remember any myths that have a happy ending. And she said no, there isn’t one. It’s like, if you follow your heart you will have to renounce something, you will have to make a sacrifice. And so, I think it’s time to turn the finale: If you follow your heart, it can be good.”

Model: Adut Akech Bior / The Society Management. Hair by Gary Gill at Streeters. Makeup by Nami Yoshida at Bryant Artists using Chanel Les Beiges. Casting by Samuel Ellis Scheinman. Production: Brachfeld Paris. Photographer’s assistants: Jack Day, Pablo Freda and Aurèle Ferrero. Hair assistant: Thomas Wright. Makeup assistant: Jay Kwan. Stylist’s assistant: Ray Tetauira