Saving Grace
Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli are reinventing Valentino’s legendary elegance for the next generation. Meet the keepers of the flame as they open the new Valentino flagship in New York.
“Bello, bello, bellissimo!” cries Maria Grazia Chiuri as a model walks slowly toward a cluster of designers and stylists who are staring intently at what she is wearing: a geometrically shaped sheath dress made from latticed cream silk chiffon embellished with bold graphic floral symbols in chocolate brown satin. Seconds after the “
bellissimo,” a half-dozen people clad in crisp white cotton coats enter the room smiling bashfully as Chiuri and the man sitting beside her, Pierpaolo Piccioli, stand up and applaud them.
The dress is one of the works in progress designed by
Valentino creative directors Chiuri and Piccioli for the fall haute couture collection. They are paying tribute to the recent recruits of the house’s couture ateliers, who had sewn the satin motifs with such finesse that the stitches are barely visible. It is a long-standing tradition for trainees to be assigned such seemingly simple tasks, but the artisans themselves appear anything but traditional.
For starters, several of them are male—until recently, Valentino’s couture workshops were staffed solely by women. The new arrivals are also surprisingly young for an industry dominated by older employees, but Valentino has had to expand its workforce to meet the soaring demand since Chiuri and Piccioli’s appointment six years ago. Now, several dozen of the 67 couture employees are in their 20s, and the workshops are filled with fashionably bearded young men and young women shod in fluorescent sneakers.
Nor do their bosses seem out of place among them, because Chiuri, 50, and Piccioli, 48, look more like indie rockers than haute couturiers. The fittings take place beneath the frolicking cherubs painted on the ceiling of a particularly grand room in Palazzo Mignanelli, the imposing late-16th-century mansion beside the Spanish Steps in the heart of Rome that has been Valentino’s headquarters since 1988, yet both creative directors seem dressed for the stage at Coachella. Her eyes ringed with kohl and short hair slicked back, Chiuri sports a dashingly cropped, dramatically fringed black suede cape dress. Knuckle-dusteresque rings ornamented with snakes and skulls gleam menacingly on her fingers, and a serpent bracelet coils around her wrist. “So elegant, so minimalist,” teases Piccioli, who is wearing a white T-shirt beneath a soft denim pajama suit from Valentino’s men’s collection and a high-tech pair of black and white sneakers.
“Couture isn’t something dusty that belongs to the past,” Piccioli says. “Making something that is one of a kind, and making it with great care, feels very modern to us.” So optimistic is the company about its future in couture that it has, in addition to hiring the 20-something ingénues, opened a third atelier for women’s couture and a fourth to produce an experimental men’s line. It is restoring many areas of Palazzo Mignanelli, which have been untouched since the late 1980s. And that’s not the only evidence of Chiuri and Piccioli’s success: There was
Olivia Wilde at the Oscars,
Amy Adams at the Golden Globes,
Katy Perry at the Grammys, and a host of other celebrities who have chosen their graceful, gently sensual dresses for the year’s biggest events. Then there are the Instagram snaps of
Alexa Chung and
Keira Knightley in Valentino’s willowy frocks, and the counterfeit copies of Chiuri and Piccioli’s gold-spike Rockstud shoes and bags piled up in flea markets everywhere. There is also the world’s biggest Valentino store, which debuts on New York’s Fifth Avenue this month. Designed by the British architect David Chipperfield, it features an extraordinary glass facade inspired by the Seagram Building on nearby Park Avenue. Chiuri and Piccioli will decamp to New York in December to celebrate the Fifth Avenue flagship with a couture show featuring pieces specially designed for the event.
At a time when so many fashion and luxury houses are striving to redefine their brands under new creative teams, Valentino is emerging as a role model of how to do so successfully. “If you look back to where Valentino was when Maria Grazia and Pierpaolo took the helm, it’s clear that they’ve changed the clothes quite dramatically, and yet it has been a stealth job,” says Lisa Armstrong, a fashion editor at the British newspaper the
Daily Telegraph. “I can’t imagine that they’ve alienated many of the faithful, but they’ve certainly acquired legions of new fans.”
Even so, rebuilding Valentino without Mr. Valentino (as everyone at the company still calls its namesake, Valentino Garavani) has been an arduous endeavor. A towering force in fashion since 1960, when he started the house, until his retirement in 2008, the Sheikh of Chic, as
Women’s Wear Daily dubbed him, was as famous for his sybaritic lifestyle—the jets, the yacht, the pugs, the fabulous parties at magnificent homes like the 17th-century Château de Wideville near Paris—as for his beautifully feminine collections. The media mythology began early on, when Elizabeth Taylor ordered a white chiffon gown while shooting
Cleopatra in Rome in 1961 and wore it to the
Spartacus premiere. (The following day she helped herself to seven outfits as a quid pro quo for the publicity.) Valentino and his partner,
Giancarlo Giammetti, subsequently proved to have a knack for wrangling favorable terms from retailers—and for discreetly rejuvenating their entourage, which has included everyone from Jackie Kennedy and Audrey Hepburn in the ’60s to
Gwyneth Paltrow and
Anne Hathaway in recent years.
Valentino’s first successor, the Italian designer
Alessandra Facchinetti, garnered positive reviews—in 2008, Cathy Horyn hailed one couture collection as “gorgeous” in the
New York Times—but was charged with veering too far from house tradition, not least by Valentino and Giammetti, and left after two seasons. Stefano Sassi, who had been appointed chief executive officer in 2006 with the unenviable challenge of orchestrating the succession, advocated for two insiders to replace her; Chiuri and Piccioli had worked for Valentino since 1999, designing shoes, bags, and other accessories.
Piccioli and Chiuri met by chance in the late ’80s, when Piccioli, then studying in Rome, visited a mutual friend in Florence. As a favor to the friend, Chiuri, who was working as an assistant to a Florentine fashion designer, offered to meet Piccioli at the train station. Off she went, clutching a handwritten sign reading pierpaolo. They hit it off instantly, having lots in common: two Romans with a love of fashion, art, photography, and film. Whereas Chiuri, the daughter of a dressmaker, was “born into fashion,” as she puts it, and spent her teens scouring flea markets for vintage bags, Piccioli developed his interest more discursively. “I always liked the idea of telling stories,” he recalls. “As a teenager, I was more into movies and photography, but then I understood that I really liked what you could say with fashion.”
After Chiuri was offered a job with Fendi’s design team in Rome in 1989, she asked if Piccioli could join her, and he arrived two years later. “I like working with other people, spending time with them and talking through ideas,” she explains. “I don’t like working on my own.” “I’m definitely the same,” Piccioli chimes in. “It’s so much better to share a vision in fashion. I think things through more with Maria Grazia than I would on my own. I hate—we both hate—the idea of a designer alone with just a pen, paper, flowers, and candles. It’s such an old idea.” “And so boring,” adds Chiuri, rolling her eyes mock-theatrically.
They have been a professional couple ever since. She is the more instinctive of the two and he the more reflective, but they share every task, rather than dividing responsibilities, and are so at ease that they often finish each other’s sentences. Having thrived at Fendi, where they helped design the house’s blockbuster
Baguette bag, they flourished in their discreet but increasingly profitable accessories niche at Valentino. By the time Facchinetti departed, they had worked there for almost a decade and had firmly established their family lives in Rome: Chiuri with her husband and two children in the city center, and Piccioli with his wife and their three kids in Nettuno, a small coastal town about 40 miles away
Even so, their early collections received lackluster, sometimes hostile reviews. “Frankly, I’d be worried about getting too close to one of those prickly, encrusted numbers,” wrote Horyn in 2009 in the
New York Times after their second couture show;
Women’s Wear Daily dismissed the following season’s as “too desperate to be achingly cool.” Giammetti grumbled publicly—the
Los Angeles Times likened him and Valentino to “cantankerous grandparents”—yet Chiuri and Piccioli ploughed on.
“When Valentino was there as the figurehead, the company had the luxury of never having to think about what it stood for,” observes Chipperfield, who started working with the house on the design of its stores the same year of Chiuri and Piccioli’s appointment. “But when he left, everyone came out of the shadows trying to work out whether something was ‘in the spirit of Valentino’ or ‘not very Valentino.’ The same thing happens to every company in that position.”
