OUT OF BOUNDS

Valentino Creative Director Pierpaolo Piccioli is daringly blurring boundaries and fearlessly breaking convention with haute couture for men.

By JON ROTH
Photography ANDRÉ LUCAT

To a certain set of fashion-minded people, the words “haute couture” call up a heady cloud of rarified associations. There are the clients, all wealthy, all women, who think nothing of paying unthinkable sums for the one-of-a-kind pieces they will wear to weddings, to galas, to the opera, or just out to lunch. There is the designer and his white-coated team, moving from studio to fitting room to workroom as they collaborate on the latest creation. And above all there are the gowns: elegant or outrageous, depending on the client and the house, but always exquisitely hand-assembled, cut and sewn to the wearer’s exact tastes and proportions. Gowns that are, unquestionably, works of art.

What happens to haute couture, then, when the gowns go out the window? What happens to couture when it is made for men?

Valentino Creative Director Pierpaolo Piccioli has showed us exactly what that looks like, debuting a boundary-breaking haute couture collection designed for men and women in equal measure. This is the first time Valentino has offered men’s couture in its almost 60-year history, and one of the only instances of true men’s couture at any house, ever.

Yet Piccioli explained his decision with characteristic understatement, “It’s for the very first time, but couture is for people,” he said. “I don’t care about gendered fashion.”

The designer may downplay his foray into men’s couture, but the fact remains he’s subverting age-old fashion tradition. Haute couture as a designation originated in the mid-1800s with the dressmaker Charles Worth, and any garment claiming the title has to meet an extremely strict set of requirements: they must be fitted to a client’s exact measurements over a series of meetings with the designer and his team, and created entirely by hand at an atelier in Paris. Valentino, which is based in Rome, is a Correspondent member of the exclusive Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture that determines which houses can claim the haute couture title.

Of course, it’s easy for men to procure custom-made clothes. The commonly touted male equivalent to a haute couture gown would be a bespoke, Savile Row suit, which is cut and sewn in an intensive process involving the selection of patterns, fabric, and repeated fittings. But a Savile Row suit, or similar garment from any qualified tailor, is still an entirely different undertaking: more workmanlike, less artistic. It takes a different set of skills, and produces a more uniform product.

But lately, men seem to be tiring of anything too uniform, preferring instead to push at the boundaries of traditionally “masculine” apparel. After a long history of women’s fashion borrowing from the codes of menswear - think tailored suiting, military, and sport-inspired designs - many men are finally taking a survey of women’s closets: adopting softer silhouettes, plush fabrics, and vibrant colors that fall far outside the definition of traditional masculine fashion as we’ve known it for at least the past 200 years.

What’s inspired this new sartorial curiosity? Some might ascribe it to a very slow swing of the pendulum, a reaction to the past two centuries of uniform, dark suiting. Look a little further back in fashion history, say before the Industrial Revolution, and men who could afford it wore clothing at least as brilliant and bright as their feminine counterparts: a parade of colorful silks, gown-like overcoats, and glittering accessories. Centuries later, the desire to peacock may have simply resurfaced. Or perhaps the desire has been there all along, and it’s only today that we’ve felt comfortable expressing it. Each generation pushes the fashion envelope further, but especially today there’s a newfound comfort in blurring the boundaries between gender, and a fearlessness in breaking convention that could come from growing up in a hyper-connected world, where men with a taste for more luxurious styles can see they’re not outliers, but part of a community.

Now Piccioli is catering to that audience, offering clothes that could still be coded traditionally “male”, but constructed with an artful grace and attention to detail that’s usually reserved for female customers. Piccioli said he intended to “reset and re-program in a couture of today that updates classic rituals and processes through garments designed to express oneself, as anyone desires. Women, men: naturally, smoothly.” Titled “Code Temporal,” the central conceit of the collection was about breaking down barriers: between eras, between genders, between the designer, the craftspeople, and the wearer. The result was something of a transformation for Valentino as a fashion house. In tossing aside labels, the collection felt of-the-moment and futuristic, all at once.

With this collection, Piccioli is throwing open the windows on the sometimes airless world of haute couture, inviting innovation and cross-pollination. “I really want Valentino to be a couture house of today,” he said. “To meld couture and street; to do T-shirts and opera coats with the same care.” The designer has noted that his first collection of haute couture for men and women includes more “daywear” than his usual offerings, meaning “casual clothes”. This, too, contributes to the contemporary feel of the collection: more of us are wearing T-shirts than opera coats, these days. Why can’t haute couture evolve along with us?

“My idea is to witness the moment,” Piccioli said. “This is now. This is the future. No gender boundaries. No boundaries at all.” And in our current moment, there’s a real appetite for infusing romance into everyday things.

Having spent 22 years at Valentino, and five years as the brand’s sole Creative Director, Piccioli seems uniquely suited to bring haute couture into new territory. Unbound by restrictive traditions, the designer has an open-minded, easygoing quality. He is famously open to the input of his team, particularly his younger employees, and he pays close attention to where the culture is headed.

“When I observe new generations, I see an incredible strength and assertiveness,” Piccioli said. “They don’t need to specify what they are wearing, they pick up what they like, whether it’s a men’s or a women’s piece.”

Early responses to Valentino’s men’s couture support Piccioli’s observation. The fashion house says there has been an enthusiastic reception from male customers - especially those based in Europe, the United States, and in China - and there are plans to take a couture team across the globe to meet with interested clients. This should come as no surprise: the majority of the garments that fall under the “men’s couture” designation fit within the realm of possibility for even conservative-minded men. Not corsets or skirts, but trousers, shorts and sweaters: traditionally male-coded pieces, now executed with the same artistry and attention that might be lavished on a ball gown. Some men may avoid overly feminine clothes, but few are afraid to avail themselves of the very finest design and craft, provided it fits their tastes and finances.

If Valentino’s first foray into haute couture for men seems to be a success, what does it mean for the future of men’s fashion at large? It’s a difficult question to answer. Ultimately very few people actually purchase couture clothing, but the designs have an outsize impact, both in terms of red carpet visibility, and in the trickle-down effect that comes when couture designs are reimagined at a mass scale. So even if Piccioli’s work here has little practical outlet, it still widens the aperture of possibility for men, injecting a sense of beauty and artistry into a menswear world that often treats utility as the ultimate goal.

This is Piccioli’s proposition for Valentino: to retain the romance of the past while adapting to the demands of the present. He is a designer who can venerate the exquisite workmanship of couture while at the same time acknowledging these pieces will now appear in new situations, and on different bodies, than the originators of haute couture may have imagined. He puts forth a singular vision: that we can be romantic and also practical. Graceful and modern. The duality of Piccioli’s approach makes space for once-transgressive concepts like men’s couture, because he believes the power of the garment lies as much in the creator as the wearer. “The essence of couture is in the intrinsic nature of its execution, and it is something that doesn’t need to have any gender limitation,” he said. “Beauty has no gender, beauty is.”

Rather than codify the feminine and the masculine, Piccioli aims to put the two in conversation. He does this to fulfil his own creative urge, but also answer the needs of a new type of client, and a new generation that defies convention: refusing to don the garments of the past just because that’s what tradition dictates. There is a new fearlessness to how men dress themselves, and the designer is ready to help create clothes for those who know how to embrace beauty.

As Piccioli put it, “There are not two labels, there is just one - couture - and a new generation of people who wear menswear and womenswear with no boundaries.”