Beauty that is not absolute. Fashion house VALENTINO unveiled their Spring Summer 2022 Haute Couture Collection on January 26th, during the ongoing Paris Fashion Week. Named “Anatomy of Couture”, the collection rethinks the rituals and processes of Couture in order to create a new canon that reflects the richness and diversity of the contemporary world.
HAUTE COUTURE
Creative Director Pierpaolo Piccioli imagined this collection on a variety of women with different body types and ages. The collection is built as a composite harmony of physical types and the clothes that dress them, studied through a long process, both scientific and poetic.
The body, that of women in particular, is both a matter of fact and a cultural construct, of which beauty canons change over time, imposing now tense verticality, now soft horizontality, celebrating certain parts of the anatomy over others. In the system of Haute Couture this drive to idealization materializes in the body of the house model, on which everything is designed and built, becoming real while remaining an abstraction. – from Valentino.
The starting and ending point of the whole process behind the collection is body. Silhouettes follow it closely, or detach from it. Nudity glimmers from extremely short hems, peeping from deep necklines that reveal the torso. A strong sense of verticality alternates with breezy horizontality. The codes of Valentino Couture are reiterated in a dialogue that is not a fragmentation but a coherent proposal expressed through different body frames. The intimate dialogue between who thinks the clothes, who makes them and who wears them is reflected in the intimacy of the presentation.
