Standing in front of this table on Tuesday night were the designers who took over the Valentino label in late 2008: Maria Grazia Chiuri, kohl-eyed and almost nunlike in a black dress with a white collar, and Pierpaolo Piccioli, skinny in a Sinatra suit, with a boyish face. It was their party, to mark the reopening this week of the Valentino store on Avenue Montaigne, which had been overhauled by the architect David Chipperfield to reflect their vision of the label.
And to one side, though no less visible, was Valentino Garavani himself, with his business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, the men who made Valentino a household name, and a legendary one at that.
As they arrived, the guests, including the retail chiefs of Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman, the editors of international magazines, movie stars, socialites and the designer Alber Elbaz, first paid tribute to Ms. Chiuri and Mr. Piccioli. They complimented the designers on their fall collection of austere lace dresses and furs inspired by the paintings of Flemish masters, shown that afternoon in the Tuileries Garden.
And then, those guests stepped over to Valentino to kiss the ring. Mr. Elbaz even bowed to him.
“They get better every season,” Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis, Vogue’s style editor at large, said of Ms. Chiuri and Mr. Piccioli. Ms. von Thurn und Taxis is a princess who is descended from a long line of Valentino customers. “But it must be hard to work with a living legend,” she said.
More than any other designer who has walked away from a fashion empire — Hubert de Givenchy or Emanuel Ungaro or, to a lesser degree, Calvin Klein — Mr. Garavani, at 80, has remained in the spotlight since his ostensible retirement in 2008.
That year, the documentary “Valentino: The Last Emperor” made him a celebrity for a new generation of customers, and he and Mr. Giammetti have since created an online museum, in 2011, and also participated in a major couture exhibition that closed last week in London. Two weeks ago, they attended every major party in Los Angeles on the Oscars circuit, at the same time that the Valentino company was trying to lure celebrities with red-carpet dresses from the most recent couture collections designed by Ms. Chiuri and Mr. Piccioli. (There were two successes, with Sally Field and Jennifer Aniston, and one major embarrassment, with Anne Hathaway.)
When they first took over the collection, Ms. Chiuri and Mr. Piccioli were described as “very Valentino,” which was meant as a compliment, at least in the eyes of Mr. Garavani’s loyalists, if not critics who wanted to see something new. There was red, there was lace, there were cocktail dresses. Having designed accessories for Valentino for a decade, they understood, perhaps better than anyone, the codes of his house. Alessandra Facchinetti, a former Gucci designer, had immediately succeeded Mr. Garavani, but she was fired after two seasons of going too far in her own direction. (Ms. Facchinetti has recently joined Tod’s as creative director.)
Replacing any designer is like walking a tightrope; replacing Mr. Garavani is like walking on a thread. Ms. Chiuri and Mr. Piccioli have managed to do that better than anyone might have imagined, and they are now coming into their own.
Their most recent collections have included designs that are often regal and conservative in appearance, like church dresses, with high collars, but with lively filigree or floral lace patterns. It looks nothing like the Valentino of old, and no one has complained. Tuesday’s show included a Delftware-inspired dress made of five meters of fabric, each meter requiring 28 hours of handwork as the designers attempt to bring a couture sensibility to their ready-to-wear.
“It is wonderful what they are doing,” Mr. Garavani said. “This is how the future of Valentino can be modern.”
Ms. Chiuri and Mr. Piccioli are, as Cathy Horyn, the fashion critic of The New York Times, wrote of their spring couture show, “more self-critical and demanding.” It is probably not a coincidence that this change coincides with a restructuring of the Valentino business and a new investor that has put it on more solid financial footing. Valentino was acquired last July by Mayhoola, an investor group from Qatar.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/fashion/valentinos-name-their-vision.html?partner=rss&emc=rss