Photo Precious metals were combined with a strict palette of black, white and red at Valentino. Credit Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times
PARIS — The Paris couture shows concluded Wednesday night with, well, a conclusion: the final Valentino show designed by the longtime team of Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, the pair who had proved to the world that fashion fairy tales were possible, and that a brand intimately associated with a single founder could have a well-written transition and a happy second act in the hands of others.
It was a tale told on the runway and off, in the way they imbued the house with a high romanticism married to an almost monklike purity of line, a youthful lightness of being with its own discipline, and in the alacrity with which customers responded.
Yet the morning after Ms. Chiuri took her bow in lock step with Mr. Piccioli came an email announcing that, as had been expected, she was leaving the brand she had helped reinvent. (The understanding is she will soon join Dior, and Mr. Piccioli would be in charge of the house from now on.)
Whatever the reason — and you can read what you want into their show notes, which stated, "the world is a stage, on which each individual represents himself"; in the release, Ms. Chiuri simply offered thanks and the generic, "I am ready to embark on a new professional challenge" — and whatever happens next, the collection was a powerful final statement.
Inspired by Shakespeare and made up of 61 looks named after character traits ("Honor," "Melancholy," "Wonder," "Majesty"), it was built on a strict palette of black, white and red, leavened by precious metals and a single jolt of royal purple, and a slim silhouette defined by an Elizabethan ruff at the neck and long, precise Renaissance lines.
Slide Show Valentino: Fall 2016 CreditGuillaume Roujas/Nowfashion
They could be slim, in narrow trousers and a cropped jacket, paired with flat riding boots, or monklike, with coats long-sleeved and round-necked, sweeping the floor. They could be Juliet swoony, in silvery tulle and bronze leather sequins atop sheer chiffon, or regal, in glimmering taffeta bedecked with a tapestry of unicorns (that one took 110 hours to paint by hand).
Ultimately, they were almost papal, in silk and wool, ermine and tulle. It has been said that Ms. Chiuri and Mr. Piccioli, who have been working in tandem for more than two decades, were no longer getting along. If so, in their tension, they found beauty. They even made a romper — in organza, traced with an armature of velvet — look elegant.
Creative sparks can come from the most unexpected places. For Jean Paul Gaultier, for example, they came from the forest, old growth and new. Though Mr. Gaultier has recently seemed to lean heavily on the pop culture riff, this time the source material led him to his most restrained collection in years, in multiple shades of green and brown: satin body-skimming jumpsuits and silk gowns marked by cedar whorls; lush cashmere cardigans belted and trimmed in fur over leather pencil skirts; wood-nymph evening dresses and a strapless showstopper with a black velvet bodice and silver jacquard body strafed with pines under a matching opera coat.
Photo From Jean Paul Gaultier's fall 2016 couture collection. Credit Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times
(There was a Paul Bunyan moment, too, but it was thankfully brief.)
For Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, it came from recycling: specifically, fabric from past Viktor & Rolf collections. Working on a two-garment base of military jacket and vintage hobo trousers, they macraméd and wove rainbows of chiffon and tulle as if tunics and coats were so many haute potholders. They encrusted patches with buttons, paillettes and pearls and swathed mille-feuilles of rough-edged organza around shoulders and hips. Though the designers can get caught up in their artistic pretensions, here the sheer craftiness of the exercise grounded their more overblown tendencies and made for a charming, thought-provoking result.
Photo At Viktor & Rolf, the designers used fabric from past collections. Credit Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times
Interestingly, not that long ago, both Mr. Gaultier and Viktor & Rolf gave up ready-to-wear to concentrate on couture, in an acknowledgment of the pressures that designers face with multiple collections a year, and the difficulty of being truly inventive in that time frame. Those decisions are beginning to pay off.
Yet one of the notable attributes of Mr. Piccioli and Ms. Chiuri as a team was that they never seemed to feel that stress. (Indeed, they almost seemed to thrive on it.) Whether this can continue as they strike out on their own remains to be seen. In the meantime, the curtain falls on this midsummer night's dream to well-earned applause.
It will rise on the next act in September.
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