Personal note from Pierpaolo Piccioli - Valentino

Beginning is oblivion, hope, freedom and promise. Gestation of future, feverish expectation, uncertainty.

A personal story, the conversation with Valentino, how much of him is in me and how much I returned. The exchange, imagined and real, around shapes, proportions, colours. I never felt the need to take anything away before adding my own point of view.

The history of Valentino enjoys the absolute privilege of love, the infatuation of anyone who works here.

The Show, 23 years in a day, Piazza di Spagna, Rome, the place where there is no time limit because here everything coexist simultaneously.

The Atelier, the perpetual genesis, the coordinates in which all our journeys converge, a tree with roots as deep as the underground of this city, where the seamstresses and tailors who understand my gestures as they understood those of Mr Valentino, interweave the plot of each dress with their lives. In Haute Couture there are no paper patterns, no map, no trace except the one left at the bottom of the soul. Nothing more than haute couture is transformed starting from an absolute zero.

Capturing and sharing that moment of candid nothingness in which everything is still possible is an exercise that I repeat every time with the same wonder. The craftsmanship of Haute Couture cites the artistic practice but doesn’t need or aim to identify with it: the three-dimensionality of materials, the thickness, the intimate involvement that each dress necessarily entails due to the enormous amount of time its execution requires, this is what this two worlds have in common. I tell who I am, I frame an image, what I see around me and what I would like to see. Fashion that was one confined into a perimeter made of measures, dictates, is now free. The power of beauty makes it possible to imagine a future where people, the intrinsic value of our humanity, are at the center of everything. Beauty is resilience. Dream, purpose, intention and method converge in the photograph of a sunset finale. There is no nostalgia because there is no hypothetical alternative ending, this is what we all chose together. Beginning and end coincide, in that moment when the orderly sequence of time breaks and something new exists, breathes and lives. This is the Beginning, this is us