Giambattista Valli Couture Fall 2021
A camera swooped in on a model from the ground up, taking in the juicy sherbert shades of her chiffon gown and cape, the bows twisted into her squarish bob, and an expression that telegraphed, “Damn, I look gorgeous!”
“It’s very Ryan Murphy, no?” Giambattista Valli said as he surveyed the filming of his fall 2022 haute couture collection from a monitor.
The color-drenched, idyllic quality of that brief scene was indeed reminiscent of the American television guru’s esthetic — think “Hollywood” but set in France and with a much steeper clothing budget.
“Couture is about fantasy,” Valli said, describing the nonlinear, dreamlike storyline for his film, shot in and around the funky French Communist Party headquarters in Paris, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, and interspersed with outdoor scenes from a French garden.
Flashbacks? Hallucinations? Lucid dreaming? They were all part of Valli’s freewheeling, imaginary celebration of legendary nights out in Paris, the springboard for a collection long on grandeur, with a dash of coquettishness and a soupçon of kink.
