It was “the most personal show I have done here”, the designer Pierpaolo Piccioli said after his Balenciaga presentation at Paris fashion week on Thursday.
Piccioli, who always wears a coral necklace, placed a monumental sculpture of undersea coral crafted from fabric in the middle of the catwalk. Like Cristóbal Balenciaga, Piccioli is both a maximalist and a minimalist. He likes boldness but not fuss, each look one audacious idea executed cleanly. A floor-length ivory cape fastened with a simple gold clasp. A black suit with one bold slash of tangerine at the jacket hem. A gown covered from neck to ankle in bubbles of organza.
“I like surfaces to be either entirely embellished or super clean,” he said. He loves colour for how instinctively we react to it, because “how you feel in your clothes is much more important than how you look in them”.
A year into the job, Piccioli has his reasons to feel the need to stake Balenciaga’s territory as his own. He used the show to remind the Paris audience that his way of making clothes, which is rooted in the craft of the couture atelier rather than in contemporary obsessions with branding and virality and the attention economy, is what Cristobal himself would have wanted for his house.
With Balenciaga sales declining, particularly in menswear, which had become a key source of revenue under the previous designer, Demna, there have been rumblings around Piccioli’s future. A departure after such a brief tenure would be unusual, but in a bleak global market luxury houses are jittery and impatient for results.
Demna’s Balenciaga, with its catwalk shock tactics and apocalypse-cosplay high-end hoodies, was polarising but undeniably compelling. The arrival of Piccioli, a charming Italian couturier whose show notes, signed with kisses, speak of “joy and light” and “mutual nourishment”, whose passion is for making women look beautiful, was a radical change of direction. In March, Balenciaga collaborated with teen drama Euphoria, an unlikely tie up which suggested the designer was being encouraged to re-engage a streetwear-loving clientele who were drifting away.
Piccioli wants to share his enthusiasm for Balenciaga’s couture heritage with customers who are not in the market for ballgowns. He brought couture techniques to work on wardrobe basics, giving a white shirt a dramatic peplum hem and a pair of ripped jeans a moulded hourglass waist. “I like shirts, I like jeans – I like the dignity of them,” he said. “This job is about creating desirability in something familiar, by presenting it in a different way.”
