Pierpaolo Piccioli is showing me a video of Naomi Campbell and himself giving their all at karaoke the night before we meet in his Valentino pop-up store on a street corner in Harajuku. He’s a fan of the karaoke in Shibuya – “it has to be the room from Lost In Translation” – and Naomi happened to be in town. The creative director of Valentino first came to Tokyo fifteen years ago and fell in love with what he calls “the idea of classic culture mixed with extreme modernity.” Now he’s back for one of the sporadic events Valentino rolls out around the globe every year. This one, a pop-up store based on the luxe tracksuits of his sporty Resort 2018 collection, complete with basketballs, caps and water bottles branded “VLTN”, the house’s newest monogram. “This place is a new way of seeing Valentino; of getting the idea of couture and the traditions of the house, but pushing them into a different world,” he reflects.
"There’s something worrying about this reactionary world. I don’t like the intolerance. I like the freedom of being whoever you are."
Events in non-Western parts of the world have become standard practice for the big fashion houses; a way of keeping in touch with their global markets. But for the contemplative Piccioli, taking his show on the road is more than a clever business trick. “I always felt that fashion had a social responsibility, so delivering values you believe in is an opportunity to try to change people’s perceptions. It gives a sense to what I do — the hope that it can be more than just a piece of fabric.” A year ago, he invited me to Moscow for a similar Valentino happening on what proved to be a momentous day. There’s no way Piccioli could have planned it, but just hours after Donald Trump won the election on November 8th, we arrived in the country that played such a significant part in his campaign. That night, surrounded by likely Trump supporters in an upmarket restaurant in Moscow, Piccioli arrived casually wearing a cap with the slogan “Fuck Donald Trump.”
He still has it, he assures me, although his Tokyo cap of choice is an electric pink number he’s picked up from one of the stores in Harajuku — a more optimistic gesture on Piccioli’s part. “I didn’t expect anything good from what happened a year ago, so it didn’t surprise me,” he says, reflecting on the year that’s passed since our visit to Moscow. “That’s why we have to say every day, if we believe in freedom we have to work for freedom. I feel like I have to deliver with the collection the values I believe in: diversity and freedom. One year later, I think you have to fight for what you already have. You have to deliver through fashion the values of not only clothes. It’s a way to reflect what you believe in.” It was true for his spring/summer 2018 show in Paris last month, a highly philosophical Space Age collection that pictured the world we live in “from a Moonish perspective,” as Piccioli told me at the time.
His starting point was a conversation with his twenty-year-old daughter Benedetta, who had come across the poem Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto in her current studies. Written in 1532, it signified the first time the Moon was referenced as a physical place. “Every collection for me is born with a reflection about the moment I’m living in, and talking to her about this idea of the Moon as a second opportunity, as described in Orlando Furioso,was a starting point for me to reflect on a new perspective on Valentino, given all the things you already know in fashion. It’s a new opportunity to be seen in a different way,” the fifty-year-old designer tells me. His children with his wife, Simona Caggia, also count a son, Pietro, aged eighteen, and a younger daughter, Stella, aged eleven. “Having discussions with them makes me see things through their eyes, which are fresher than mine — less thoughtful, more immediate,” Piccioli notes and laughs.
“My daughters like fashion,” he notes, “but my son is not interested at all. I have the most conservative son. Maybe it’s a reaction to his father,” he quips. Piccioli doesn’t say it, but through his children he is given access to that most elusive of current phenomena: the millennial perspective, a generational point of view that turns stone to gold in the contemporary fashion climate. With their savvy social media ways, they’ve done exactly that to the sportswear sphere Valentino has now zoned in on for their Japanese outing — a contrast, perhaps, to the house’s haute couture disposition? “Yeah, but I don’t think couture is old. I think it’s a human approach to fashion,” Piccioli argues, noting that the white stitching on his Resort 2018 tracksuits were lifted from the hidden process of the couture craft. In Moscow last year, no doubt fuelled by the election that had just taken place, Piccioli reflected on his role as couturier in a contemporary world.
“There’s something worrying about this reactionary world. I don’t like the intolerance, the giving people boxes to stay in. I like freedom of being whoever you are,” he told me at the time. “My whole job at this house today is about individuality and evaluating diversity. Couture talks about a one-of-a-kind uniqueness. It’s about valuing diversity, and in this moment I think it’s super important to talk about diversity as beauty.” A year on, in Tokyo, he’s found the same message in the sportswear, which the millennial generation values as highly as haute couture. “In a way sport is the most universal culture, because it’s not divided into races, sexes or ages. Sport is for everybody,” Piccioli says. “I like it when something is so universal because then it can become very individual. Offering items like a tracksuit, a t-shirt, or a sweatshirt means you can wear them with your own personal style. It’s not a way of uniforming people, but an opportunity to diversify them.”
It’s the hyper-individuality inherent to the young people Valentino’s pop-up store in Tokyo is inevitably targeting, its Internet-like VLTN branding in tow, and an increasingly global spirit of a generation with a mindset set on change. “Sometimes we try to describe the new generation giving them tax. But I think they actually are exactly like this. They don’t care. They just are the way they are,” Piccioli says. “I like their freedom: just being the way they are, floating along with no boundaries.” On the backdrop of Tokyo, with all the futuristic Blade Runner and Ghost In the Shell associations it currently carries, this designer found the perfect scene to play out the humanist philosophies his era of Valentino has come to define. “I think Tokyo perfectly reflects the idea of transition as a starting point for modernity,” Piccioli points out, and no words could be a better conclusion to the newest chapter in his worldly Valentino conquests.
The #VLTNTokyo pop-up store runs until 19 November at QC CUBE, 4-21-8 Jingumae Shibuya-ku Tokyo.
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