Mood for Love by VALENTINO Spring 2015 Haute Couture

For spring 2015 haute couture Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli are in the mood for love. Their inspiration board was lined with quotes from Shakespeare, bits and pieces of Dante's Inferno, and the paintings of Marc Chagall, hopeless romantics all. Chagall, in particular, captivated them. "He had an incredible life, very hard, but he maintained his optimistic vision," Piccioli said. The painter's Russian ancestry provided a leitmotif for the embellishments that are so central to the designers' aesthetic. There were leather flowers appliquéd to rough-hewn linen, naive needlepoint embroideries on long pinafores worn over smocked shirts, and a shearling vest densely decorated with leather paillettes. The Russian pieces were far from humble, but their craftiness pointed to the differences between Chiuri and Piccioli's version of the brand and that of its founder. In this case, at least, they wanted for a touch of Valentino's glamour.

"In some ways, you are flying when you are in love," Chiuri said, apropos of a pair of tulle gowns, one embroidered with rainbows and the other with clouds of silver lamé. It was a beautiful sentiment, and we commend her for expressing herself so earnestly. Sincerity of Chiuri's kind is a true rarity in this business. Nonetheless, the clothes were best when they weren't wearing their heart on their sleeve. A velvet dress straight out of fair Verona in a luminous shade of light blue was striking in its simplicity. Its sisters, a caftan shape in quilted red velvet and a strappy black velvet style with a bodice in the shape of wings, were the show's undisputed highlights sophisticated, rich-looking, and grown-up. The gown with the molten gold bodice will surely be another favorite. Its skirt is stitched with a line from Dante's Inferno, which is fitting. A girl would go to hell and back to get her hands on it.

Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli weren’t talking about all that fairy-fingered delicacy after the show, however. They were far more interested in discussing the emotional, cultural sources they’d fused together to arrive at this imagery: primarily an exhibition of the work of Marc Chagall, which the designers saw in Milan, mixed up with the love poetry of Renaissance Italy. The point about Chagall was that he was a painter possessed of an almost mystical tenderness. He was also Jewish, an immigrant from Russia to France, who kept painting pictures of his long-lost village home life, peasant blouses and big, tiered dresses included. For the Valentino couple, the collection was also about “the power of love,” a reconciling human emotion in our dark times. Over and over again, it magicked glorious one-off beauties into beings nobody else could possibly produce. ​

Discover the VALENTINO Spring 2015 Haute Couture show at the end of this post!

LoL, Andrea 

Selections by ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories

Photo Credit/Source: The House of VALENTINO

Photos by Yannis Vlamos / Indigitalimages

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'VALENTINO Sala Bianca 945 Haute Couture'

VALENTINO Fifth Avenue - For the occasion of the opening of the new VALENTINO flagshipstore, 963 Fifth Avenue in New York last August, the Roman couture house presented on December 10th, 2014, for the first time ever an Haute Couture show in NYC, 945 Madison Avenue. Though a fair number of fashion VIPs were over in Tokyo awaiting the Dior Pre-Fall extravaganza, there were still dozens of the industry’s great and good on hand last night at the Madison Avenue building formerly known as the Whitney Museum of American Art. They had come from places near and far to witness the Valentino Sala Bianca Haute Couture show.

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'Paris Haute Couture | Giambattista Valli Spring Couture 8'

Giambattista Valli’s inspiration board for his Couture No. 8 presentation this spring 2015 season featured images of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel in a pensive mood in the thirties, and then taking a walk in the gardens of the Tuileries in feisty later life juxtaposed with portraits of Janis Joplin, in hippie patchwork and bellbottoms.

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Paris Haute Couture | Atelier VERSACE Fall 2014 Couture

The Atelier Versace show is the first of the Paris haute couture season, showing Donatella Versace’s clothes which will be hand-made, to measure, for individual customers and delivered to them to wear in the fall. “Hot couture!” she purred, as she appraised the extraordinary coming together of a double duchess ball gown skirt and black Lurex corseted bodysuit complete with a gilt metal choker that was about to take to her runway.

The thing about the one and only DV is this: Whether you like her style or not, or even if you can conceive of who will pay for it or not, you cannot help but be impressed by her total conviction and the virtuoso technical feats that go into realizing the results. Who else, for instance, has ever asked an atelier to work out how to make a narrow, navy, strapless bustier dress that separates below the waist into a trouser leg on one side and miniscule shorts on the other? The genius is that such a feat, which combines tailoring with draping skills (two different traditions), can be conjured into existence at all and without a wrinkle or pucker to be seen.

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Versace added that she was interested in “talking about tailoring” and the development of structural talents of the house she has inherited and that ‘fifties couture’ inspired her to carve the curved shoulder lines of the jackets. It’s likely, too, that the grand silhouettes in the Charles James retrospective at the Met had an influence on the voluminous skirts of the finale pieces, but, then again, the results, with their sliced angles, cutaway zones, and boned superstructures, bore more similarity to the 1980s heyday of Thierry Mugler.

‪There’s little point in applying geek-ish historical comparisons when Donatella Versace is designing. Neither she nor her late brother Gianni Versace were ever concerned with anything other than inventing extreme effects for a clientele which lives large and in the present. This season, the upshot involves skin and sparkle and cloth invisibility molded to contours as smoothly as swimwear, and full thigh-to-ankle exposure, one leg at a time. It’s a sensibility that comes more out of the universe of music and performance than the past. And now that there are plenty of daring women at the top of those trees, it’s no vast stretch of the imagination to think who might be competing to wear this sort of thing.

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Selections by ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories

Photo Credits/Source:The House of VERSACE

Photography by Yannis Vlamos / Indigitalimages

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'Glam-Pop Fur by VERSACE Fall/Winter 2014/15'

Still, by the standards of this house, the fall collection was a relatively more relaxed affair, with plenty of day-appropriate trophy jackets and short coats shaggy burgundy shearling, teal fringed leather, an intricate, diagonally pieced black-and-blue fur starring on the runway.

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'Paris Haute Couture | Atelier Versace Spring 2014 Couture'

"A juxtaposition of glamour and mystery, with cinched-in poise meeting the fluidity and provocation of Grace Jones. Different ways with draping: sculpted and controlled to highlight the lines of sleek tailoring, or liberated and sensual for fluid silk jersey dresses."

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