VALENTINO Fall/Winter 2015/16 RTW

Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli are good sports they allowed their final model to be yanked offstage by Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson so they could stage their ridiculously good-looking Zoolander 2 walk-off. But back to the Italian duo. This season, their collection touched on many of the things that we’ve got our eye on over the past four weeks of shows: a sense of dark, velvety Victoriana, a whiff of the free-floating seventies, an underlying suggestion of erotic strictness. Nuns included. The designers summed it up in a preview: “We think you should be free to be who you are.”

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On the runway, they spelled all this out in a collection which quietly captured an entire Valentino spectrum: practical to pretty, elaborate to dead simple and most of it in black and white. You have to use old-fashioned words to describe this: refined, exquisite, restrained, poised, elegant and so on. But these are new-fashioned results, for women of many ages and nations.

From where does all this emanate apart from Rome, where these two conduct the oldest and most finely tuned orchestra of couture skills in Italy? Chiuri and Piccioli always start by explaining their collections as being inspired by muses. This time, the muses were muses; two women who were each fabric and fashion designers in their own right. Emilie Louise Flöge lived and worked as a textile designer and dressmaker in turn-of-the-century Vienna, was both a lover of Gustav Klimt and one of those unforgettable faces painted by him. Celia Birtwell, also a print designer, collaborated with her late husband Ossie Clark in London’s swinging seventies and was famously painted by David Hockney. Birtwell was at the show she’d designed the schematic blue and red poppies that appeared near its end. In their research, Chiuri and Piccioli found parallels between the two-tone checkerboard and triangle patterns used by both artists: the source of the bold stripes and geometric engineered into their opening looks. Nevertheless, that information doesn’t fully explain the variety and beauty here. All you need is eyes to see.​

Between the fluid frocks and fanciful designs, guests were treated to more beauty than expected at Valentino’s show when Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson reclaimed their places at the top of the heap as Derek Zoolander and Hansel. The only names in male modeling worth remembering might have taken to the catwalk in coordinated pajama-set looks, but it was their streetwear that had everyone swooning. Traipsing about Paris while donning the Italian house’s reworked camouflage print, the duo elevated fatigues into haute territory. While girls have been suiting up for seasons Kate Moss, Rita Ora, and Naomi Watts to name a few the boys demonstrate that adding a dash of bold color or playing with tone-on-tone dressing can be just as powerful and alluring. Especially if that palette is in Blue Steel.

Maria Grazia Chiuri (VALENTINO), Owen Wilson (Hansel), 

Ben Stiller (Derek Zoolander), Pierpaolo Piccioli (VALENTINO)

Selections by ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories 

Photo Credit/Source: The House of VALENTINO

Photos:

Instagram by ANDREA JANKE @andreajankeofficial

Still by Kevin Tachman

Runway by Kim Weston Arnold / Indigitalimages 

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'The New Bourgeoisie by CHANEL Fall/Winter 2015/16 '

Karl Lagerfeld set his Chanel collection in that most quintessential of Parisian settings: a bistro and café that he playfully named 'Brasserie Gabrielle', complete with waiters serving croissants and coffee at the bar to the fashion show’s guests, and classic flower arrangements of palm fronds and beetroot red flowers.

 'Brasserie Gabrielle' by CHANEL F/W '15/16 

via Instagram by ANDREA JANKE @andreajankeofficial

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