A fashion show is pretty much a work of art

By Vanessa Friedman

The Venice Biennale has long been a magnet for the fashion swarm, a place for art and ideas like it used to be when shopping for buttons and trim in the garment districts of the world; to perhaps engineer the Next Big Art/Fashion collaboration, a mutually beneficial marketing and trade arrangement that was beginning to look as mechanical as a Ford assembly line.

This past week, however, with a couture show at the Architecture Biennale, Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli took the relationship to a whole different level, more meaningful.

Since around October 2020, he has been conversing with 17 contemporary artists about their work, of course, but mostly about life in general, processes, emotions, what makes them think about how to integrate their points of similarity in fabrics. Not by replicating a painting or sketch line by line, like some sort of ballgown equivalent to a museum souvenir tote (many brands have been there, doing that), but by incorporating the essence of the object so that it takes on a new form.

The results shown at sunset under the brick arches of Gaggiandre, a former Venetian shipbuilding, with puddles on the edge of the runway and Cosima, an English singer who performs live only on piano, is as strong an argument for the interrelation of time, human relationships, and creativity as everything that is produced by fashion.

Coming a week after the last couture show in Paris, and almost a year after the collection was first created (A whole year! It’s like the millennium in fashion time), it was well worth the wait.

The richness of Picciolis’ palette as a designer, he is the best colorist since Yves Saint Laurent went full length; as well as her expendable elegance, and generosity. Not only to the atelier (the show notes check the name of the person who sews each garment) but to the body that will wear the garment.

The way she could pair loose rock khaki hip-slung pants with a tan tank top and matching leather opera gloves, then put on a sky blue cashmere robe completely lined with gold beads. Or tuck a micro LBD under Philip Treacy’s white ostrich feather hat, which looks like a descendant of a jellyfish and sea anemone, its tentacles floating eerily in the wind on a weakened silhouette.

The way she can pair loose rock hip-slung khakis with a tan tank top and matching leather opera gloves. (Valerio Mezzanotti/The New York Times)

Or tuck a purple cashmere scarf over a sparkling spearmint T-shirt, tucked into wine slacks (this is part of his couture men’s outfit) with Kermit the Frog gloves. It’s like putting head first into the Caran dAche box. Nothing seems forced or uncomfortable, but it’s dazzling at the same time.

Sprinkled among all of that are clothing inspired by the obsolete phrases of today; let’s go with galvanizing by artists like Kerstin Brtsch, Luca Coser, Wu Rui and Francis Offman. So there was an opera coat like crumpled white paper and gray-blue storm clouds piled on the horizon, worn with a pale blue dress; a ball gown put together of shadows and silhouettes of interlocking sleeves in ruby ​​and dried blood red.

One pullover jacket that looks like an abstract landscape is made of 46 different types of fabric; the other contained 150. What looked like black brush strokes on a papal red jacket were actually threads, each one painstakingly embroidered as if they had broken in a second.

I’m not trying to create a lifestyle, Piccioli said in his studio in Paris a week before the show, looking at one of those steaming taffeta dresses in pure and saturated tones that capped the collection and referred to a term that has become a rote part of the fashion mantra. It was about wanting the same car, going to the same hotel on vacation. I want to create a community, which is about value and connection.

And, perhaps, the future. Less Death in Venice and more like rebirth.

(This article originally appeared in The New York Times.)

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