At Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli Wants To ‘Deliver New Dreams For A New Moment’

The world right feels like a place dictated by restrictions: where you can’t go, what you can’t do, who you cannot see. Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli has a creative solution for the constraints of living amidst the coronavirus pandemic: dreaming. The designer, calling into the Vogue Global Conversations from his home in Nettuno, Italy, discussed the transportive and emotional dreams that fashion can create with Vogue Paris’s Emmanuelle Alt, arguing that true fashion should be transportive above all else.

“I think in this moment, you have to think out of the box,” Piccioli began. “You have to create new rules.” The new rules he is writing at Valentino, where he designs menswear, womenswear, accessories, and haute couture, have everything to do with fashion as a means of enlightenment and fantasy. “Fashion to me is a big word. I think in the last decade we’ve produced a lot of stuff. […] You don’t really connect with stuff, you can connect with people through emotions,” he said. “I think that fashion is something that is about your idea of beauty relating to the time that we’re living. […] It has to do with dreams, emotions, poetry, lightness.”

Citing Diana Vreeland’s famous quote “Give them what they never knew they wanted,” Piccioli continued: “The idea is not to deliver stuff, it’s not to deliver new clothes: it’s to deliver new dreams and new emotions for a new moment.”

How to deliver a new future when the present seems bleak? Piccioli is steadfast that to do so, designers need to speak through their craft—not through empty marketing statements. “I don’t want to do any slogans about inclusivity,” he declared. “If you do fashion, I think you’re relevant when you deliver messages through fashion and not through slogans. […] We’re talking a lot about inclusivity and diversity. I don’t really feel that we have to talk about this; we have to do it, we have to act. We don’t have to talk.”

Alt cited Piccioli’s spring 2019 couture show and its tableau vivant finale of all black models as a moment where the message of togetherness was obvious. That idea ties into what Piccioli is doing to build a community around Valentino. “The idea of community is the new world,” he said. “I think community means a group of people that share the same values. It’s very different from lifestyle, the word of the last decade. Lifestyle is a word that means a group of people sharing surface, community means sharing values. I feel that now more than ever we have to be communities of people that share the same values.”

This month, the brand announced its Valentino Empathy campaign, in which 24 friends of the label, from Gwyneth Paltrow to Rossy de Palma to Adut Akech, will be photographed wearing Valentino in their homes by their loved ones. Because the talent has donated their time, Valentino is able to reallocate its budget for a brand campaign as a €1 million donation to Rome’s Lazzaro Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases hospital. “The campaign is our job, it’s the image, but we’ll be able to donate with our job,” Piccioli said. “The only thing I can do is do my job and hopefully be helpful to other people.”

Piccioli also explained how he and Valentino’s petite mains are currently working on a couture collection to be presented sometime this year. The brand’s history as a purveyor of the most high-level couture fantasy must continue, he argued, with clothes that feel “more radical [and] more extreme” in their beauty. “I feel that it’s important; even being aware of this situation, we have the responsibility to allow people to dream. That’s our job,” he continued. “Even if you feel your times, I don’t think you have to reflect your times; you have to react to your times, giving a new idea of beauty. You have to try to give the light at the end of the tunnel, you don’t have to see the darkness.” For Piccioli, that light burns bright when creativity comes above all else.