Excerpt from “Valentino: Mirabilia Romae” with an introduction by Francesco Bonami and photography by Laziz Hamani (Assouline)
Origo gentis Valentino: the origin of the people of Valentino. We look at Valentino as a contemporary myth or an ancient abstraction that brought into Rome an idea alien to the culture of the city: couture. The house of Valentino is like the Pantheon, the building that completely transformed and gave autonomy to Roman architecture, releasing it from the imposing shadow of Greek heritage. Valentino’s couture and design is to Paris what the Pantheon is to Athens. To look at Rome today and to look at Valentino is to look at both a woven tapestry of history and a slow accumulation of layers in which memories and inspiration are confronted by imagination and desires. Where the weight of the past is offset by the lightness of the future and the inevitable, endless transformation of life, with its constantly mutating and yet eternal emotions. Valentino is no longer an individual but a title, like Caesar. Valentino is today an abstract concept endorsed by two figures who, like Apollo and Marsyas, challenge each other in a contest between imagination and craftsmanship, skills and fantasy. Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli are Valentinos. Carrying their vision over a new realm that keeps building its strength, adding layer after layer to its own identity, shedding the past while honoring the heritage of history.
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That is why the fact that they are Romans working in Rome, rooted in the city’s identity and aura, is seminal to their revolutionary understanding of the nature of the house of Valentino. It is their intrinsic belonging to the place that makes their vision of couture unique and part of the eternal mood that envelops a city like Rome. Rome, like Chiuri and Piccioli, is both a sponge and a mirror. They absorb the present and reflect the future while their roots continually grow deeper like the city itself. Just as it is nearly impossible to imagine Rome other than it is today, it is inconceivable to imagine couture in Rome without Valentino. Rome is a city made grandiose by thousands and thousands of details. Chiuri and Piccioli’s luxurious body of work is in its own way grandiose because of the infinite details, by the intensity devoted to the labor necessary to produce those details. […]
The whole philosophy of maison Valentino revolves around this idea of worshipping the irreplaceable simplicity and quality of the human gesture to achieve the most exclusive piece of clothing. This philosophy is grounded in the idea of love as an urgency behind any human activity, from the most ephemeral, like fashion, to art and personal relationships. It was and is a very special form of love for Rome that gave birth many years ago to this unlikely idea of a maison of couture still unique and exceptional today. No one could have imagined that the marriage between Couture and Rome would last this long. Yet it has, and continues to grow ever stronger, thanks to the deep bond that Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli have with both the city and their maison. Mirabilia Urbis. Mirabilia Populo. Mirabilia Amor.