Valentino Couture Show in Rome a Way to Give Back to the City
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MILAN — “It will be an unprecedented event,” said Roberto Gualtieri, mayor of Rome, speaking about the upcoming Valentino fall 2022 couture show scheduled to be held in the Italian capital on July 8.
The show will be a way “to give back” to the city of Rome, said Valentino’s chief executive officer Jacopo Venturini during a press conference held and livestreamed on Monday morning in the Italian capital.
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The couture house will stage the show across a few streets in an area running from Piazza Mignanelli, housing its headquarters, and the nearby Spanish Steps, but not many details were available to keep the surprise alive.
Venturini revealed that Valentino has pledged an undisclosed sum to restore the mosaics of the Terme di Caracalla, the city’s antique and second-largest Roman public baths, where a dinner will be held after the show, and it will also donate new palm trees to replace some ailing ones near the Spanish Steps.
Students from a number of fashion and design schools will be admitted to the couture show and to cap this off, Valentino will open its archives July 10 to 12 to visitors, including said students.
“This has been my long-harbored dream,” said creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli of staging the show in the city. “Rome is the stage of our daily activities, and it’s not only a touristic site, we are proudly aware of the identity of this beautiful city where contrasts coexist everywhere.”
The show will be called “The Beginning.” Piccioli said it may sound counterintuitive after his 23 years at the company, “but in couture it’s always a new beginning.”
The designer emphasized a series of messages that have long been dear to him, ranging from inclusivity, diversity and building a community to speaking out about social and political issues through fashion, “otherwise beauty would just be empty and superficial. I feel it is my duty to talk about this historical moment and for values we believe in. Images have this power and there’s no need for explanations. We must speak up as we see that certain rights should not be taken for granted, we must fight every day for rights that are of all human beings” — comments as timely as ever given the current context.
“Fashion has a responsibility through beauty. We must give a voice to those that do not have one. I think Valentino in the past was associated with lifestyle, people that would share superficial things, castles, cars, dogs. For me today, Valentino should stand for a community that shares the same values, which are also my values,” the designer said.
Piccioli also said the collection stems from “an ideal conversation with Valentino Garavani, but not as a homage and without nostalgia, but rather as in a dialogue with him.”
The designer hinted at the possibility that individuals other than professional models and perhaps some of the seamstresses would be part of the show, as it is “the people that change” these iconic Roman landmarks, which are an “extension of out atelier, where we live our daily lives, not only touristic sites.”
Gualtieri and Alessandro Onorato, city councilor with responsibilities over major events, tourism, sports and fashion, touted the event as marking “a return of Rome as a fashion capital.” There will be special lighting, 10 locations in the city “customized” in Valentino, 82 banners, 120 signboards and 750 institutional fliers in town to “rediscover our pride in Rome through beauty,” Onorato said.
The event will be the beginning of a month of initiatives that will involve the whole city, including couture week AltaRoma, and will show “that investing in Rome can be done, and quickly and we want to relaunch the city as an international stage [for events].” He said the idea is to work with Milan and Italy’s Camera della Moda. “I have already met [chairman] Carlo Capasa and we want to work with the association, not in contrast with it,” Onorato said.
Valentino has traditionally presented its couture collections in Paris, but Rome has been a stage for the brand before.
The restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic drove Piccioli to hold Valentino’s fall 2020 couture show, “Of Grace and LIght,” in July that year at the Cinecittà studios outside Rome in front of a very small group of journalists. The performance included a striking video filmed by Nick Knight, followed by a presentation of 15 white gowns as high as 16 feet worn by the likes of Mariacarla Boscono and Vittoria Ceretti perched on swings suspended from the ceiling or installed on towering, hidden platforms.
In January last year, as Italy faced another wave of the pandemic, the couture show was unveiled digitally, and called “Code Temporal,” and Piccioli selected the 14th-century Palazzo Colonna in Rome to stage the show.
Last July, the “Valentino Des Ateliers” fall 2021-22 couture collection was held in Venice at the Gaggiandre at the Arsenale.
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