ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories: The Modern Day-Chic by VALENTINO Fall/Winter 2014/15

“It’s important to give people the freedom to be themselves,” said Maria Grazia Chiuri about a fall collection which consolidated the feelings that choice and variety are staging a comeback in fashion for winter. She and her design partner Pierpaolo Piccioli have conspired in widening the perspective at VALENTINO. It can now include the simple and reserved, the elaborate and the fragile, day clothes and party clothes, the teen ingenue and the ageless sophisticate.

Discover the VALENTINO F/W 2014/15 runway show at the end of this post!

LoL, Andrea

On this runway, you will perceive many of the long-sleeved, covered-up, virginal Valentino tulle, lace embroidery dresses that have impacted fashion so influentially since these designers took over at the house. They are now sprinkled with wool-embroidered flowers and, on the last dress to appear, a spangled constellation of stars in the skirt, and a giant heart on the bodice.

Perhaps they didn’t need to show quite so many of them we know Valentino “owns” those treasures. But the surprise this season is something like a gray cape, buckled at the neck, worn over a cream silk pie-frill shirt and wide pants: young, modern day-chic. Or the sequence of totally plain things, cut from a square of fabric, gathered in with a single line of elastication. Monastic is the fashion term generally used to describe to that look. Though it doesn’t quite apply to the one in black leather an example of the erotic frequency which is beginning to be registered this season.

There is more to explain, if you care to know where the Valentino designers began their research for this show. They said they’d been looking into another layer of the artistic and cultural history of Rome, where they live. The work of the fifties artist Giosetta Fioroni, a member of the radical School of the Piazza del Popolo, early Italian performance pieces, and the Commedia dell’arte explain the pink Pop Art and harlequin patterns that played out here. Then there were the Renaissance fairy-tale tapestries that were translated into extraordinary Lurex-shot knits and incredibly light patchworks of flower and animal imagery made into shearling coats. But honestly, isn’t all that superfluous to understanding the individual, and individualistic, appeal of these clothes? Really, the Chiuri and Piccioli duo aims simply to offer women personal clothes that will be keepers for life. As Piccioli put it, “Each outfit is an artistic piece. We like to be timeless.”

Selections by ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories

Photo Credit/Source: VOGUE

Photography by Kevin Tachman & Kim Weston Arnold / Indigitalimages

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