“My job is about delivering my idea of beauty, but related to the time I live in. I need to be a witness to my time – to give a different identity to the codes of Valentino, a different meaning to a world that everybody knows. You can see the same things and you can have a different kind of emotion, different values. Diversity is a value, being different is a value. Being romantic is a strength”
– Pierpaolo Piccioli, December 2020
It takes no great leap of thinking to identify that Pierpaolo Piccioli is a romantic at heart. He has peppered his Valentino shows with poetry – in the sense of the superlative metaphors often utilised to describe his clothing, and in the literal sense, embroidering words on the outside and even hiding them on the inside of his garments. I once interviewed him on the steps of Auguste Rodin’s tomb in Paris, in front of the artist’s most famous statue, dubbed The Thinker by the world but originally titled The Poet. Piccioli took drags of cigarettes, dressed all in black like a beatnik, and told me about love – his love for his job, sure, but also more significantly for his children and his wife. He has tattoos of all their names. Another time, he pointed out to me that ‘Roma’ – where Valentino is based – is just ‘amor’ backwards. I’d never noticed that. But Piccioli has a way with words: he originally studied literature at the Sapienza Università di Roma, before he switched his passion for the poetry of Alighieri and D’Annunzio to an ongoing and intense love affair with fashion. For better, for worse.
It is undoubtedly a difficult time to be in love with fashion – for the past 12 months, fashion shows have been displaced and cancelled due to the pandemic, employees working from home, rather than together in ateliers. This time, I don’t interview Piccioli in a romantic setting. There are no sculptures in the background, nor are we together in his vaulted office in Valentino’s storied headquarters, the Palazzo Gabrielli-Mignanelli – a building that is even grander than it sounds. Instead, we speak over Zoom: one time he’s in that office, another he’s at his home in Nettuno, just outside Rome, by the sea, where he spent much of the Italian lockdowns of 2020 surrounded by family and dreaming about fashion.
Nostalgia is a bitch. When I first interviewed Piccioli in 2014, it was the day after Valentino had staged an haute couture show with imperial ceremony across the Piazza di Spagna, under the setting July sun – beforehand, guests were shown around a cluster of the city’s little-seen sites, such as the 17th-century Biblioteca Angelica library and a hideaway where a Medici cardinal used to take his lovers. The experience was incredible, and – the Latin word for ‘marvels’, or things that inspire wonder.
