Piccioli is right: We’re thankfully long past the time when audiences might work themselves into a pearl-clutching froth at the sight of male models wandering an haute couture runway. Of course you can wear it like this, or any other way. Now Piccioli is more motivated to make a white poplin shirt, which he showed with a long oyster-colored skirt that appeared narrow in the front, yet flared to a train in back in one of the show’s most arresting moments. It used to be that every haute couture look was conceived as a sacred kind of unit. It’s a shape.” A shape that could be timeless that was shown twice (covering either gender), and worn over turtlenecks and pants. Piccioli nailed that with his explanation of a white cashmere cape: “I don’t want to call it that. This is the place where an haute couture house alliance between a designer-director and the people who slice fabric, draw paper patterns, and wield pins and irons can start to challenge stock fashion vocabulary. It had the aura of a new kind of minimalism, not-quite ’90s, but slightly: “I think elegance is not about ‘good taste’” said Piccioli. Along came garments that (also crassly) might ordinarily be classified as hoodies, sweaters, shirts, board shorts, andĬamisoles, acting as foils for amazing lattice-worked coats and sculptural capes. I wanted to work on surfaces, not in a decorative sense, but workmanship which becomes the surface itself.” It would be crass to reduce it to percentages, but the ratio of Valentino daywear (often overlooked in old-normal practice) to eveningwear (large, voluminous, extravagant) had effectively been flipped this time.

“The narrative of the collection is the collection itself. “It’s more about pieces that will give an effortlessness,” Piccioli said. He called the collection Temporal-in the sense both of what it means to be living here, now, and of the quality of designing clothes, made by hand, which will long outlive trends. “My idea is to witness the moment,” he said, just before the filmed runway show aired today.

At Valentino, locked down in Rome with his atelier, Pierpaolo Piccioli has had a proper span of time to apply his brain-power, and the hands of his workforce, to what you might call a new vision of casual couture. Nearly a year in, only now are we beginning to see the true measure of fashion’s creative responses to the pandemic.

2021 fashion runway