VALENTINO. pre-fall 2022

(Images:  Valentino 2022)

After Pierpaolo Piccioli's dramatic Couture showing with its striking hues, he has returned for a pre-fall exposé for Valentino and like many of his contemporaries, Piccioli has looked at the fashion timeliness of the last 50 years, whilst sourcing ideas of what people are wearing on the streets, in his reconfiguring of Valentino's finer arrays into a more accessible template.  Yet, the shift from tailored looks to more styled street attire feels like Piccioli is reestablishing the seminal brand name to represent current trends and it can be, for many designers, a fatal turn when aligning an established and recognized direction into newer markets.   Particularly for luxury fashion brands and their creative directors.   

Despite Valentino beginning at the cusp of 1960's as an modernist aesthetic, founder Valentino Garavani's iconic fashion house had always retained that Made-in-Italy tailoring and refined sleekness  over the five decades of its inception.  With Piccioli's Pre-Fall 2022 collection drawing from the uniquely U.K 60's subculture known as the Mods, which ironically borrowed and utilized a lot of Italian styling, that held its own distinction as an English symbolism of rebellious youth.  Later morphing into the swinging sixties styles, as a prelude to the 'Hippie' looks that soon followed, to which  Piccioli's latest collection encapsulates those three points of time, under the so called subcultures of fashion.

Yet, it would be hard pressed for me to say that this is a rebellious collection or even reflective of any counter culture today, sans that the styles presented are of a high fashion take, as quoted by  Piccioli's for his Pre-Fall ensemble, that they were,  “...adapted to today’s lifestyle and our real social context.”   As the so called counter culture that many seek, remains very much elusive as a driving force for fashion and societal change.  In other words, it doesn't exist any more than a simulacrum of used concepts of fashion and style that have, in respect to Piccioli's new collection, been done before.

However,  Piccioli is a smart designer and in an encompassing form he has laid out the collection to suit those 1960's London Swinging Sixties styles, while inserting Valentino's finery that was the 1970's of flowing skirts and post hippie eros styles of the Los Angeles boulevard dreamers, touching upon New York City's voracious and hedonistic looks of the early1980's.   Piccioli's Pre-Fall array certainly has an eclectic feel, although it does seem to be clashing within its time lines in cultivating styles of the past.   

The question I ask.  Can Piccioli manage the couture of Valentino while imprinting a rawer edge to brand?