“Fashion is not art” says Pierpaolo Piccioli, dry and direct. We are in Venice, the city most easily associated with art in the collective imagination, in the evocative space of the Gaggiandre of the Arsenale, a place dedicated to artistic exhibitions of all kinds, so that the statement has something provocative, not least because Valentino presents here the new high fashion collection, conceived, in some parts, as a dialogue with different artists. If it is not a contradiction, we are close to it, but Piccioli is adamant about not wanting to make art to wear.
A community of creatives for the Atelier
What interests him, however, is to create a factory, a community of creatives around the maison. It involves the writer and curator Gianluigi Ricuperati, which helps him in the selection, and brings together a group of painters of different ages, backgrounds, aesthetic inclinations, in the process, establishing a dialogue with each one that is engraved on the skin of a dress. It is a translation act in which the two-dimensionality of the painting becomes three-dimensionality of the dress, while the artistic technique is transformed into the virtuosity of the couture atelier, with glazes translated into inlays and brushstrokes rendered in carvings. The result is sublime, but the basic problem persists: fashion is not art and when it encounters it, despite the best of intentions, it tends to remain decoration – which is fine, since decorating oneself is a basic human drive. But the artistic theme is only part of this test.
Loading…
Piccioli’s sign and vision of couture
From the act of translation, in fact, little more than twenty dresses out of eighty in total derive: a low percentage, which is almost lost on the catwalk, submerged by inexorable geometries, by saturated and acrylic colors, by dramatic or very short volumes that are the real Piccioli’s sign, the reason for his excellence, repeated with authorial insistence from one collection to another, and ultimately transferred to the masculine as well. Valentino’s couture, in Piccioli’s vision and in the execution of his ateliers – whose expertise deserves separate praise – is ultra-human precision, but vibrates with a powerful sentimentality that opens hot cracks under the glacial semblance. It doesn’t really need anything else, because in this sense it is unique and unrepeatable. Dialogues, translations, openings, the community and the factory are welcome, which broaden and modulate the message. However, the true value is elsewhere, and it already abounds.