VALENTINO RENDEZ-VOUS

Change of perspective. Fashion is imagined in the studio and created in the Atelier, but it is on the street that it becomes alive and real, meeting the imperfection of existence, day after day, lit by the unique identity of the wearer.

 The Creative Director Pierpaolo Piccioli keeps resignifying the Valentino signs. In a tenacious quest for life and truth, which is essentially the urge to root a rich heritage in the present time, he meets, and not only symbolically, the street, with its varied and magmatic humanity.

 The path is made evident in the physicality of movement: on the catwalk, fashion, worn by individuals, arrives after a tour and a detour through alleys and sidewalks. The inversion of meaning is all the more evident and powerful as the elements of the Valentino vocabulary are clearer. Some even come, as they are, from the archive: icons of the house re-edited with philological accuracy and labeled Valentino Archive to travel through space and time, encountering today’s physicality and ways of being. These garments undergoing a vigorous historical displacement – the animal print coat, the white dress worn by Marisa Berenson, the long floral dresses photographed by Chris von Wangenheim – are part of a stylistic weaving dominated by a quest for a new meaning. Tailoring is reinterpreted in the volumes and the vivid, acrylic colors; active-inspired pieces enhance the physicality and sensuality of the body, revealing it. Taffetas, a symbol of Couture, is washed, beaten, deprived of any preciousness to turn into jackets, anoraks, oversized shirts, Bermuda shorts, the play of additions enhanced by the contrasting colors. Denim, worn with precious white shirts that are decorated, inlaid with broderie anglaise, embroidered, is another tribute to the archive. The overblown floral prints are instinctively mixed, while embroideries move from eveningwear

to outerwear. Reconnecting with the street, in the end, means touching the ground: wearing boots, or flat Valentino Garavani Roman Stud sandals, and a re-edition of the snake sandal. A single macro stud closes the cleanly-designed bags.

In the journey through space and time, one thing appears clearly: it is personal identity that creates the aesthetic, and evolves it by fragmenting it.