In the new series What I Loved, Harper’s Bazaar editors highlight one standout look from Paris Couture Week.
As ever, Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Valentino couture collection—staged at sunset today in the gardens of Château de Chantilly, north of Paris—was filled with color combinations so beautifully unexpected they make you gasp: cornflower and periwinkle, mustard and sky blue, coral and Valentino red. But the pairing I can’t stop thinking about was vintage “Big E” Levi’s 501s covered in gilded embroidery, worn with a white silk cady cutout bodysuit. In other words, the couture version of blue jeans and a white shirt.
Haute couture—particularly when shown at a fairy-tale palace complete with turrets and cupolas—could seem removed from real-world concerns like the protests that rocked the French capital last week. But on Instagram, Piccioli described his motivation for choosing the Château de Chantilly as his show’s backdrop: “resignifying its history into a forum for equality and openness.” Piccioli was talking about the building, a historic 16th-century château that once belonged to one one of the oldest and most distinguished French noble families, the Montmorencys, and which was destroyed during the French Revolution and later rebuilt as an art museum. But he could just as easily have been referring to the way he has been quietly “resignifying” the idea of couture itself.
Couture comes from the tradition of royal dressing, in which grandeur telegraphs social dominance. But under Piccioli’s deft hand, Valentino couture isn’t about massive crinolined ball gowns and tiaras made from the world’s finest fabrics and gemstones—though there were sly vestiges of that mode in his fall collection, like a regal purple cloak cut from lurex velvet and a floaty black-and-white taffeta dress patterned like an ermine fur. The ball gowns were wisps of chiffon and organza blowing in the breeze, and the jewels were giant crystal waterfall earrings that read more “yas queen” than Marie Antoinette.
Indeed, the most valuable thing in the collection just might be the aforementioned vintage denim grail, embellished with delicate gold arabesques in Valentino’s embroidery atelier. Those “Big E” 501s looked more precious than even a pair of trompe-l’oeil jeans made from glass-bead-embroidered gazar. Piccioli’s magical Pantone card alchemy telegraphs that, even though you may never have occasion in your own life to wear a couture feathered jellyfish hat like Dua Lipa or Lady Gaga, you too can play with color and have fun with fashion. And you can certainly wear blue jeans.
