Spring/Summer Couture : I Hope You Like Yellow

Atelier Versace

Atelier Versace

Alexis Mabille

Christian Dior

Christoffe Josse

Giambattista Valli

Maurizio Galante

Giambattista Valli

Floral Explosions! Giambattista Valli Fall/Winter 2012/13 Haute Couture

PARIS, July 2, 2012

By Tim Blanks

Giambattista Valli spun a bucolic backstory for his Couture collection: nymphs, fairies, silvery reflections in woodland ponds. And the Master's Margarita, witchy and wanton in her dealings with the devil. Ain't couture grand! Remarkably, these pagan sentiments almost managed to infiltrate the clothes. They certainly shaped the prints.

Valli was thinking that the couture dream is so far away from what constitutes "fashion" in most people's minds that he could follow his fantasy into some timeless realm, a place where the transience of beauty was arrested, kind of like the dreamy fairyland in Ridley Scott's Legend. It was a lovely idea, embodied by models whose veiled heads were studded with butterflies. But the clothes didn't match the concept.

That was partly a function of Valli's solid grounding in Roman alta moda. If the prints brought the moda, the silhouettes looked merely alta, ruffled to discomfort, extended into traditional volumes that looked… er… stuffy.

There were moments when the concept crossed over into glamorous conviction. A coat designed to look like the grass of a woodland glade had a shaggy splendor. A sequin underskirt shimmered like sunlight on water. The final outfit, an orgy of ruffles, had a tenebrous sensuality. Otherwise, Valli's party-girl froth went off the fizz with this collection.

Giambattista Valli Haute Couture S/S 2012 Paris

Giambattista Valli, Haute Couture F/W 11.12 Paris

PARIS, July 4, 2011

By Tim Blanks - style.com

On the day when he was finally able to realize his long-nursed couture dreams,Giambattista Valli rose to the challenge of tradition with a collection that threw down the gauntlet to anyone who would insist that this rarified métier is on its last legs. Valli celebrated the past when he used the white poplin shirtdress—the blouse de cabine—of the atelier worker as a building block. The most obvious example: the way he layered a black lamé tweed skirt over the "blouse." But if that combination of casual and couture felt like essential Valli, there were many more examples of the designer's ability to meld formality and—for want of a better word—fun. Try a cocktail dress that proceeded downward from a pink coral yoke to a crystal-ed black body to a hem of ostrich feathers. Or the coat-dress in oh-so-serious gazar that dissolved from a coral bodice to a skirt in lacquered lemon blossom.

Amid such sensual pleasures, Valli anchored the floaty and the flyaway, conveying the essential rigor of couture design with his animal-printed mousselines and monochrome florals. He even paraded a penitent, a woman in an ostrich-feather sheath swathed in a black lace veil. But, more to the Vatican-friendly point, Valli also proposed a shot of red, like Valentino before him. Perhaps it's no wonder couture-inclined designers from Rome love red. You could almost say it's by papal decree.