ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories: Giambattista Valli's Haute Couture

Giambattista Valli is no longer guest member on the couture calendar! The Paris-based designer, who made his debut on the Couture runways for the first time last season, was granted the official haute couture appellation early (typically designers have to wait five years to be eligible) by French fashion's governing body, the Chambre Syndicale.

The << Commission de Classement Couture Création >> in its December 16th, 2011 meeting has awarded the Haute Couture appellation to Giambattista Valli. The designer has been previously showing his collection as invited member in the haute couture schedule.

Enjoy the Giambattista Valli Haute Couture Fashion Show at the end of this post!

LoL, Andrea

"The most beautiful thing about the couture is the devotion", said Giambattista Valli after his debut at Paris Haute Couture Show. That devotion, to time-honored craft and technique was evident in every piece in the chic and understated collection that Valli presented a the early-nineteenth-century arcade where he has recently opened his boutique, a stone's throw from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. By turning the length oom the black-and-white tiled gallery into his runway, and setting rows of ballroom chairs on either side, Valli effectively gave each of his guests a front-row seat to admire the refined detailing of the clothes. And what a front row it was: The age-irrelevant Valli Girls are the best-dressed It Girls around, from Lee Radziwill and generatios of Brandolinis and Dellals, to Daphne Guinness, Princess Clotilde, and Elisa Sednaoui.

The show opened with a white tunice shirt of the type worn by mannequins in an old-fashioned haute couture cabine in between fittings, pulled down like a skirt and worn with a black turtleneck embroidered with a trompe L'oeil necklace of real pearls (mimicking Valli's own signature rope), a gesture that the designer intended to symbolize that this couturewas a "work in progress". And Valli didn't explore any radical new silhouettes here - instead, he remained firmly in his comfort zone, staying true to the early-1960's couture shapes that he loves, and paid subtle homage to Rome's haute couture Dolce Vita of that period , with odes to the stiff architecture of Roberto Capucci, (with whom he once worked), an the romantic embellishments of VALENTINO, in beading of pink or white coral branches and white porcelain flower heads. VaVa's spirit was also present in the animalier prints, and the very finely pleated hiffons (even in a strident lipstick red) that are a specialty of that house. Rhose fragile chiffons were cinched with Lalanne-esque metal belts created by Valli's partner Luigi Scialanga. "I wanted them so suggest the arms of the man around the waist of the girl," explained Valli, "sauvage, wild, strong, against the fragility of the clothes."

The ice-blue chiffon goddess dress and cape that Princess Charlotte wore at the ball to celebrate her uncle's wedding in Monaco two nights before (so evocative of her grandmother Grace Kelly's Edith-Head designed gowns in 1955's To Catch a Thief) was a preview of one that Valli presented on the runway in brilliant red, and the frothing tulle ball-gowns in his finale evoked his recent wedding dress for Charlotte Delhal, and showed that he can not only claim the most coveted clients on the planet, but that he can dress them with timeless elegance and panache too.