Valentino’s lyrical spring/summer 2016 haute couture collection

  |   02-02-2016

 

Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Picciolo have created a haute couture spring/summer 2016 collection of exotic early-20th-century Venetian-pagan romanticism. It celebrated femininity, the body and romantic tales and fantasy with barefoot nymphs with gold metal serpents writhing in their tresses.

 

The designers created a collection with a lyrical touch that live beyond the syncopated rhythms of fashion. The body, which is no longer the object but the subject, as a source of formal research, creates a subtle and individual beauty. The woman is the protagonist of the narration. Free in her gestures and in her thoughts. Barefoot, in order to find an earthly contact, which is the most realistic and personal form of inner balance.

 

Demure, floor-length dresses sparkle in transparency. There were also a few plunging Grecian neckline dresses. What really stood out was the fabric that made each dress a paradox of age-old hand-wrought elaborateness and youthful simplicity. A plethora of velvet pleated, knotted and woven dresses came to light in rich burgundy, burnt sienna and dark mossy green.

 

In this journey the creative directors look at the figure of Mariano Fortuny: the alchemist who manipulates light in order to fix eternity, the artist on the borderline between Eastern Byzantine and Western Classic, who creates the modern dress, the delphos, grasping the impulses of progress in the recesses of tradition. In a composite yet natural choreography, Fortuny is surrounded by a crystalized gallery of characters whose research on freedom of gesture springs from a profound notion of the female physicality freed from cages and constraints: ballerinas Loïe Fuller and Ruth St. Denis, but also Isadora Duncan and later Martha Graham. From the reconquest of the body established by these artists, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli capture the absolute, sensational modernity: the desire to knock down structures and cultural obstacles for a return to nature.

 

The collection has a vertical and airy approach. Worldliness thickens on the surfaces: tattered touches on velvets, pleats exclusively handmade as if ready to melt away, patchwork composed of opulent weaving, animals and hand-painted volutes. The tactile richness derives from a collaboration with the textile archive Fortuny. Purified orientalism becomes precious Byzantine or explicit japonisme in kimono style coats, in carps and dragon patterns painted on long robes. The shapes are fluid, consistencies are impalpable: overlapping tunics, pleated velvet delphos, column dresses with intangible consistency. Lightness suggests movement, barely fixed by embroideries which overlap with patchwork and pleats. A patina made of a human and touching imperfection pervades all, in a harmony of delicate colours that thicken in tones of green, red, all the way to black. The ethereal image is spangled with statement jewellery by Alessandro Gaggio and Harumi Klossowski.

 

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