In pictures: Valentino takes haute couture to new heights

Fifteen of the most exquisite white gowns we have come to see this season, or perhaps any season, were livestreamed from Rome on Tuesday as part of the Valentino Fall 20 haute couture collection.

A teaser previously released via the French fashion federation during official couture week showed a brief clip in collaboration with filmmaker Nick Knight’s Show Studio, but it revealed nothing of the gloriousness seen in their haute digital presentation. It was on every level as awe-inspiring and breathtaking as a live show.

Some of the gowns, hemmed up to five meters in length, were acrobatically worn with models swinging from a trapeze. This was a static presentation with a small audience of just 30 or so Italian-based journalists, no entourage, no paparazzi scrum, no breaking of social distancing rules. Yet it was the video which let imaginations soar, which saw dresses suspended in mid-air, their lightness beaming positivity as the camera shifted from gown to gown.

Valentino’s collection celebrates dressmaking at its finest. It will have been no easy task to sew these beguiling elongated and ultra complicated gowns when most design teams were working from home.

A rebirth for fashion

Valentino, in a statement, said: “Across history, moments of reset, or restart, invariably put human values at the center. Humanism is the seed of rebirth.”

“This is one of such moments. Focusing on fashion as the profoundly human activity of giving form to matter through the hands, shaping creations that the body inhabits and brings to life, Pierpaolo Piccioli conceives a new start in the space of fifteen silhouettes. He focuses on the human and lets it dialogue with the digital to create a new dream, at once material and immaterial. A dream of pure fashion in which the painstaking work of the Ateliers is handed over to artist Nick Knight to bloom and flourish in light.”

Images courtesy Valentino