After half a year, Valentino 2023 spring/Summer Haute Couture series returned to Paris, transforming a classical building on the banks of the Seine into a show venue for this conference.

The Seine River defines the romantic temperament of Paris, but also the two sides of the completely different styles together, often said "right bank money, left bank brain", and haute couture is the ultimate combination of wealth and culture.

After a hundred years of baptism, haute couture in The new era is still looking for its own positioning and future trend, and Pierpaolo Piccioli, who has won The Fashion Awards Designer of the Year twice in four years, is undoubtedly the leader.

"Le Club Couture", just judging from the name of Valentino's new haute couture collection, this is destined to be an unusual release.

The encounter and connection of "Club" and "Cuture" is an attempt by creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli to break through concepts and practices, making the nightclub culture for public entertainment and the haute couture symbolizing the clothing level at the top of the pyramid boldly break the boundary, bringing a new visual and wearing experience.

When the limousine passes the magnificent Alexandre III Bridge over the Seine, from the right bank to the left bank, and stops at the steps leading to Faust Paris, opening model Naomi Apajok from South Sudan steps out of the car, a collision between haute couture and nightclub culture begins.

The iron doors of Faust Paris in Arts and crafts style are endowed with a dark and attractive purple filter, and the outside and inside of one door are the difference between the open-air club and the high-end restaurant, while the well-tailored suit shape of the upper body of Apajok and the bow decoration at the waist also highlight the contrast aesthetic feeling. Diverging collisions around occasion, proportion and profile abound throughout the series.

In Piccioli's words, this is a challenge to the impossibility of haute couture uniforms. Through the extension of the imagination, the orthodox suit can be combined with short shorts, the bodices can be spliced with huge hemlines, the swimsuit style and the ensemble of feathered shawls can be arbitrary, these styles and techniques from haute couture. It is introduced into the tailoring and structure of personal items such as underwear, so that imagination and reality become one.

Haute couture is far from uncannily glamorous; in Piccioli's world, it is a mixture of hardness and softness, romance and power.

In the subsequent looks, we can clearly see his combination of flowing and light fabrics with athletic elements, whether it is elastic straps on the shoulder, colorful bodypants, sports corsets, or ballet-inspired drawstrings, and the sheer tulle and chiffon that create a sense of volume, conveying a youthful and energetic side of couture.

Even seemingly regular coats, short coats and shorts, in this season's Valentino haute couture collection also presented a contrast in material, color and proportion, romantic white gauze flounces like a ray of fragrance from the front of the stiff long coat, the bold pop striped coat, the smart black feather coat under the long coat. It's a sexy see-through top and low-rise crop shorts.

Even the bow element was unexpectedly removed from the sweet filter, and a large number of black and white bows were decorated in more crisp fabrics, embellished on the shoulders, waist, and even arranged into abstract mesh lace, becoming the visual focus of the look.

The three sets of ultra-short and oversized shawl matching styles pushed the sense of contrast in the Valentino show this season to the extreme, providing girls who linger between the old time and the new culture with a choice of a combination, wearing a fine garment, luxury is undoubtedly shown; Remove the huge hemline, leaving only the strapless top and shorts, you can enjoy the colorful nightlife.

In fact, the contrast is not only in Valentino's haute couture collection this season, but also in Piccioli himself.

In a previous interview with American VOGUE, Piccioli admitted that his pace of life has not changed too much because of the glamour of the fashion industry, even though he has won many honors and achievements in the past six years, he still insists that every day from his hometown, The seaside town of Nettuno takes an hour by train to the studio in Rome for another day's work.

Day after day, the switch between work and life allows him to withdraw from the gorgeous suspended fashion industry in time and look at his creativity more rationally.

Such a lifestyle makes him look like an outlier in the fashion circle, but Piccioli, who has a clear mind, recognized his differences early on, and tried to embrace individual differences in design, bringing more diversified design, he once used "lonely" to describe his growth process.

In literature and engineering classmates, I am the more fancy one. But when I came to design school, I was the one who looked ordinary.

In the eyes of Nettuno's neighbors, I came from a wealthy family who went to private school, but I was also the poorest of the private schools. In design school, I was one of the few who had a girlfriend, and in my friends' eyes, the guys in design school were usually in same-sex relationships.