Valentino presents haute couture in Venice

Valentino brought fashion and art together in its emotive catwalk show.

Colour and emotion were in abundance at the Valentino Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2021-22 collection in Venice.

Fashion, at its best, should evoke an emotional response, in the way that great art also can.

The Valentino haute couture show in Venice on Thursday was surely one of the most stirring catwalk shows in recent (even pre-pandemic) memory.

But is fashion art?

It’s a question long asked, and one that Valentino creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli wanted to address in his extravagant collection, shown in Venice on Thursday.

“Fashion is not ‘art’, because the latter has no purpose outside of itself, while the first always has a practical scope, a function, a use,” Piccioli explained.

“Acknowledging differences is the first step in educating ourselves towards a mutual listening, made of curiosity, enthusiasm and respect. This listening needs time, just like haute couture and at the end of the day like art.

“That’s why, this project’s progress has been slow, a pace perhaps unusual for our actual world but right and intimate for the world I would like to live in.”

That project is the Valentino des Ateliers collection, which brought together a group of 17 painters, whose works were incorporated and interpreted into many of the looks, from embroidered linework to fabric-based collages.

Explosive ballgowns concluded the Valentino catwalk show.

The collection was presented in Venice’s Gaggiandre, once a boat-building yard, with the catwalk running over the water and the building’s arches creating a backdrop to the 84 looks for men and women.

Guests were requested to wear white, which, when the colours of the collection exploded into sometimes epic proportions, made perfect sense.

The colour spectrum included shocking pink, chartreuse, lavender, teal, crimson and lime, sometimes combined in revelatory combinations, sometimes in tonal looks, which were especially effective in the menswear ensembles.

Tonal menswear from Valentino in Venice.

A minidress in daffodil seemingly made up of undulating ruffles framed the face of one model, while another mini in floss pink shaped like a small tent left just the face exposed.

Blown-out ballgown silhouettes in searing colours formed the finale of the show.

Colourful leather opera gloves punctuated many looks, and Philip Treacy’s jellyfish-like hats, with their trailing ostrich feather tendrils, trailed behind models on the catwalk.

“Venice was part of the vision I had from the very beginning: it was the only place in the world in which to present such a collection, a context where nothing can be added or subtracted: the light and power of Venice are the perfect setting in which I’d love to immerse my work.”