Yahoo News Giambattista Valli Offers Couture Gowns With Personality
In Paris, you can spot a Giambattista Valli couture show from a mile away. Clients and street style stars wearing puff tulle dresses in all shades of vibrant saffron yellows, baby pinks, and rich blues flood the area like pieces of shiny hard candy against the flat, gray cobblestone. And today, for the designer’s fall 2024 haute couture show, he stuck to what he knows: big tulle dresses with excessive volume that move like nothing else. But with one twist—an Indian influence coupled with his usual vision of Italian opulence.
When the lights went down inside the mirrored room at 7 Place Vendôme, a couple of Indian musicians began playing while the first dresses debuted on the runway. Valli showed bouquet-like gowns; frothy silk gossamer fantasies covered in floating florals, some like garlands of Indian jasmine. Blossoms of fabric were everywhere: styled with a veil, positioned as a bustier on a floor length dress or cascading down from those signature tulle dresses the designer is so well-known for. “It’s like a surreal conversation between my love for India, all kinds of paradise gardens, and the iconography of Botticelli,” he told ELLE backstage after the show. “There’s this conversation between two cultures. And I really believe they can melt together and you can really see fields with no wall, with no separations.”
Some of the models had their faces painted blue or lilac (some Hindu gods are depicted as having blue skin), others wore gowns that swooped into transparent hoods. The designer experimented with draping, creating textural wonderlands through sculptural sleeves, capes trailing off of floral print gowns and bell-shaped puffs of fabric layered over longer hemlines. The mint greens, royal purples, and raspberry reds were also a welcome dose of explosive color in a couture season that has so far (even if it’s only day one!) been dominated mostly by neutrals and darker hues.
With just 33 looks in the collection, it was tightly curated. Many of the models wore flat shoes, giving the pieces a real-world feel, even if the gowns were incredibly extravagant. A lime-green dress made entirely of floating marabou feathers looked both alien and ethereal at once, while a sunflower yellow tulle option was so big it barely fit through the narrow runway aisle. That’s typical for Valli. “Those last few dresses were very much the signature to Giambattista Valli, but with different volumes,” he said. “It was about colors that you can smell; you can bite. It was about this lightness, but giving volumes with the lightness. There were these chiffon-like muslin dresses, like they were getting volumes with the movement of the wind. There was lightness and volume at the same time.”
One thing is clear: each look had its own personality and wasn’t afraid to proudly take up space. To wear a Giambattista Valli couture gown is to indulge in a rare sort of fantasy, if not for the bold colors and incredible embellishments, for transparent size and volume alone.
You Might Also Like
