Valentino Shows Vintage Levi’s Big E 501s at Paris Couture

Blue jeans and a white shirt is Pierpaolo Piccioli’s most divine color pairing yet.

As ever, Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Valentino couture collection staged at sunset today in the gardens of Château de Chantilly north of Paris was filled with color combinations that are so beautifully unexpected they make you gasp: cornflower and periwinkle, brick red and sea green, mustard and sky blue. But the pairing I can’t stop thinking about was vintage Levi’s 501 Big E jeans covered in gilded embroidery, worn with a white silk cady cut-out bodysuit. In other words, the couture version of blue jeans and a white shirt.

Haute couture—particularly when shown in a fairytale-like palace complete with turrets and cupolas—could seem removed from real world concerns like the protests that rocked the French capital last week. But on Instagram Piccioli described his reason for choosing the Château de Chantilly for his show’s backdrop a “resignifying its history into a forum for equality and openness.” Piccioli was talking about the building: a historic 16th-century château that once belonged to one one of the oldest and most distinguished French noble families, the Montmorencys, and which was destroyed during the French Revolution and later rebuilt as an art museum. But he could just as easily be talking about the way he has been quietly “resignifying” the idea of couture itself.

Couture comes from the tradition of royal dressing where grandeur telegraphs social dominance. But under Piccioli’s deft hand, Valentino couture isn’t about massive crinolined ballgowns and tiaras made from the world’s finest fabrics and gemstones—though there are sly vestiges of that in his fall collection, like a regal purple cloak cut form lurex velvet and a floaty black and white taffeta dress patterned like an ermine fur. The finale gowns were unlined wisps of chiffon and organza blowing in the breeze and the jewels were giant crystal waterfall earrings that read as more “yas queen” than Marie Antoinette.

Indeed, the most valuable thing in the collection just might be the aforementioned vintage denim grail, embellished with delicate gold arabesques in Valentino’s embroidery atelier. Those Big E 501s looked more precious even than a pair of trompe-l’oeil jeans made from glass bead embroidered gazar worn by Kaia Gerber. Piccioli’s magical Pantone card alchemy telegraphs that even though you may never have an occasion in your own life to wear a couture feathered jellyfish hat like Dua Lipa or Lady Gaga, you too can play with color and have fun with fashion. And you can certainly wear blue jeans.

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Source: HarpersBazaar.com