Valentino Spring/Summer 2018 Ready-To-Wear Collection.....Fashionweekly...On Fow24news.com

Pierpaolo Piccioli is not one for sci-fi. If there’s a futuristic breeze sweeping over fashion this season, it's hit the Valentino designer from a unexpected angle. His oldest daughter is studying Italian literature at university, and re-introduced her father to The Frenzy of Orlando, the Renaissance epic poem by Ludovico Ariosto.....
Written as early as 1516, it marked the first time the moon was referenced as a physical place. “I was very impressed by the part when Orlando loses his mind for love, and his best friend has to go to the moon to recover his sanity,” Piccioli said in a preview on Place Vendôme on Friday afternoon. “It’s important, because the moon is the place where you can find what is lost in the heart. I like this idea of the moon as a second opportunity.”

 Let’s not downplay the wow factor. When Piccioli presents his literary and historical references, so philosophically and romantically you can feel it comes from the heart, you get a bit soft in the knees. On the moodboards he uses religiously in his work, there was a photograph titled Earthrise taken of our planet in 1968 by astronauts on a mission to the moon. Below it was a quote by one of them, Bill Anders, which Piccioli ceremoniously read aloud. “We came all this way to explore the moon,” he recited, “and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” Piccioli is sensitive to his surroundings, forever on his own intergalactic mission of the soul to find answers and solutions to the problems we face as earthlings. This season was no different.

 He didn't want his futuristic reference to be seen as escapism - hence his disinterest in sci-fi. "That’s more about escaping. I like parallel universes," he explained. Echoing Rick Owens' sentiment earlier this week, Piccioli doesn't veil reality in dreamy blinkers. He tries to better it with poetry and beauty. And so, his take on futurism manifested itself in a universe he knows well. He looked to the costumes Piero Tosi designed for Federico Fellini's Tommy Dammit in 1968, capturing the Space Age mentality of the era - a look Paco Rabanne distilled and bottled. It manifested itself most literally in a silver grey ball gown embellished with transparent disc sequins, referencing one of Tosi's costumes. "They give a different light to something known," Piccioli mused of the shiny paillettes.

 The moon represented to him a different perspective on life and all its troubles, an idea he'd tried to filter through to garments which were enhanced, expanded and alienised from their normal shapes and functions. A T-shape halter panel was attached to a classic shirt or dress like something out of Star Trek; different patches of "the most common, nothing special" little flowers were piped together in a sporty dress, fusing prettiness and sportiness into something less than normal. "To see where you live everyday and what you already know with different eyes. That’s the approach: to make extraordinary what is ordinary,” he said, seconds before it knocked on the salon door to a preview session that was about to get a lot less ordinary.

 As it opened and backs straightened, a beautiful young man with long curly hair chaperoned in a perfectly preened pug. Then entered Giancarlo Gimametti, silver-haired and dashing, and finally – as if with natural fanfare – the Emperor himself, Mr Valentino. He joined us in the sofa watching Piccioli’s creations modelled before him, uttering the occasional, “Bellissimo!” All he asked was one thing: to see a dress styled with a stiletto. “Not the flat,” he said and pointed to a sexified grandmother kitten heel with a bow. In the eyes of Valentino, everything is elevated. Piccioli talked about Mr Valentino's work in the Eighties as adding "a gloss to normal life". There was a picture of him on the moodboard escorting a glammed-up girl-next-door Brooke Shields to an event that decade. You could see hints of it in Piccioli's sportification of glamour - say, a silken ivory parachute dress?


That, of course, was just as rooted in space travel, a reference you could tell had amused Piccioli in the midst of all his romantic poetry. The peach plastic jacket that opened the show had a shoulder best described as orbital. A pink boiler suit had a whiff of astronaut about it, backed up by a white utilitarian space-walk jacket with yellow pockets. Then came the Saturnic ring collars, and the ruffle structure over a mini dress, which resembled the frame of a rocket suit. To the score of Interstellar it wasn't hard to get into the mood, but it was Piccioli's observations that stole the show. "To see with a moonish perspective what's ordinary," he reiterated. "We live in a moment, and fashion is made to make more fantastic what’s ordinary." If that was his objective he completed his mission. In the words of another astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, you could say Piccioli "went to the moon as a technician but returned as a humanitarian."

November 16, 2017