For FW24 Valentino’s creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli was inspired by shades of noir.
According to Piccioli, he has always considered colour a powerful channel of communication and for FW24 wanted to reconsider Valentino “through the lens of black.”
Rather than viewing this focus as an absence of colour, the designer viewed it as an opportunity to discover “an entire spectrum of shades, infinitely nuanced, within one.”
The show notes that accompanied his latest collection showcased at Paris Fashion Week discussed this theme in his latest work:
“[it is ] representative of universality and individuality, of uniform and idiosyncrasies, black physically functions like no other colour, absorbing light. Its depths are explored, and a lexicon of black is presented. Likewise, philosophically, it absorbs our projected cultural definitions and ramifications, memories and meanings. Here, black can become a colour not of sobriety but of exuberance, a shade that offers a rebellion to romance, a sharp graphicism to flou.”
The collection – called “Le Noir” – was also inspired by the use of black in the work of several iconic creatives. Including the shades of black used in Mark Rothko’s artwork, the reflective blacks of Pierre Soulages and the sculptural black forms of Constantin Brâncuși.
In a similar vein, Piccioli points to the philosophical connotations of the shade – French thinker and poet Charles Baudelaire is quoted by the house as calling black “the uniform [worn by] democracy.”
The result is a collection that manages to capture a nuance of shades, and the universality of colour, in one concise stroke.
