“I Just Love It”: Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli Shares His Dream of Fashion at the Met

How to make 200 people beam with smiles for over an hour? Just put them in front of Pierpaolo Piccioli. The creative director of Valentino spoke with Alina Cho at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last night, delighting the audience with stories of Lady Gaga, Frances McDormand, and his beautiful vision for Valentino. When a picture of his Moncler puffer gowns graced the screen behind the two, the audience let out an audible gasp. Ditto for the image of Piccioli with Naomi Campbell, Natalia Vodianova, and fellow models at the close of his last couture show.

Those versed in the dramatics and romanticism of PPP, as he’s called around Valentino HQ, know well that he can elicit an emotional response from others. (Celine Dion publicly wept at his last couture show, remember?) The clothes he designs are made with care and craft, and he respects the people who make them. That’s why every couture dress is named after the seamstress who sewed it, why his Met Gala guests run the gamut from Adut Akech to Joan Collins, and why his ad campaigns aim to bridge the gap between the real world and fashion fantasies.

Diversity, Inclusivity, and Community are the Key Tenets of Piccioli’s Vision at Valentino

Early on in the talk, Cho brought up Valentino’s guests at this year’s Met Gala: Joan Collins, Naomi Campbell, Julianne Moore, Adut Akech, Mark Ronson, Lykke Li, and Lay Zhang. “I think that all of them together represent what I want from Valentino today. The idea of inclusivity, of diversity, of different kinds of people,” Piccioli said, noting that each works in a different industry and has a different backstory. “I think it is important today for Valentino to [move] away from that idea of exclusivity, to embrace the idea of inclusivity and to [stray] from the idea of lifestyle as the idea of sharing selfies. [We are] going away from lifestyle, embracing the idea of community.”

Later on, Piccioli’s Spring 2019 Couture collection came up for its reinterpretation of an iconic Cecil Beaton photo of pastel Charles James gowns. “What if, rather than swan women who are rich, you put modern women, Black modern women, [in the dresses]?” he said, explaining that he wanted to make very “classic couture” pieces using flowers, ruffles, colors, and embroideries, but change the woman who was inside of the dress. His hope was that it could inspire those kinds of women to see themselves as modern swans. “With that show, I was very aware that you have a voice and you have to use it loudly. . . . I think dreams have to be allowed to everyone—everyone is allowed to dream.” In the end, Valentino cast more than 50 Black models to walk the runway. The process, he admitted, was difficult because contemporary modeling agencies are still not representing many Black models. “We started casting four months before,” he said, noting that when he shared the idea with his friend Naomi Campbell, she offered to close the show. “Many of the girls were very emotional because many of the girls were there because of her. If not for Naomi, they wouldn’t be there. It was a very moving moment for all of us, that show.”

That Spring 2019 Couture Collection Was Partially Inspired by James Joyce

“I didn’t want to think about a theme for that collection, I wanted to approach fabrics, embroideries, everything, with a very free approach. In a way, the old couturiers were not thinking of themes,” Piccioli said. “When I saw the moodboard . . . what was on the board was actually a mess. You didn’t get a link there. It was a stream of consciousness of pieces, fabrics, color. So we looked up the stream of consciousness monologue of Molly Bloom from [Joyce’s Ulysses]. Sometimes if you don’t really understand all the times and the spaces of it, you can really get the deepness of the character.” That stream of consciousness approach also inspired a short film by Luca Guadagnino that featured the collection, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this week.

PPP’s First Solo Collection Is Indebted to Nietzsche

After working with Maria Grazia Chiuri for nearly 20 years, first at Fendi and then at Valentino, Piccioli and his designer partner split up when she took the artistic director position at Christian Dior. Spring 2016 was his first-ever collection as a solo designer. In looking for direction and inspiration, Piccioli started up a conversation with his daughter Benedetta, who was studying for her university exam on Friedrich Nietzsche. The philosopher’s idea of being aware of the past but consciously forgetting it stuck with the designer, and so he wiped the slate clean and began to research other iconoclasts throughout history. The Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch and 1970s designer Zandra Rhodes stuck out in his mind, “so I asked Zandra to interpret Bosch, and these are the prints that came out of that.”

The Best Advice He Ever Got Was From Franca Sozzani

Piccioli and the late Vogue Italia editor in chief Franca Sozzani were close personal friends who had a great impact on each other’s lives. “We were friends, we didn’t share about fashion. We shared about life, values, we laughed a lot together,” he said. It was from Sozzani that he got the best advice about working in fashion. “She just told me, ‘Be free, be who you are. Don’t think about anything else.’ I think that’s the best advice anyone gave me.” Valentino Garavani, founder of the Valentino brand, bestowed similar wisdom: “Believe in yourself always and don’t try to please anybody else.”

Joan Collins Is Every Bit as Fabulous as You’d Hope

Piccioli arrived at this year’s Met Gala with several guests, but let it be known that Dame Joan Collins was really his date. “She is used to being with her husband and her publicist. They were not with us at the Met Gala. They told me, ‘Will you take care of Joan?’ Of course I will,” he began. “During the night I was with Joan, but every time I was trying to take a picture of, say, Naomi or Adut, [Joan would say] ‘Darling, I’m alone.’” In true diva fashion, Collins also had some specific requests for her dress. In the four fittings leading up to the Gala, Collins consistently asked for the dress to be “tighter, darling,” to a point that the seamstresses were concerned. Finally she told Piccioli, “‘Darling, listen, you don’t have to treat me like these young actresses that find everything uncomfortable. I want to be a diva.’” And diva she was—going to the after-parties with Piccioli.

Originally Appeared on Vogue