Pierpaolo Piccioli And Jamie Nares On Finding The True Labours Of Love

Valentino designer Pierpaolo Piccioli and artist Jamie Nares on finding community, collaborating on couture, and the true labours of love

The history of fashion-and-art collaborations is both fruitful and fraught. It’s one filled with a handful of moments of genuine newness, like the “shoe” hat Salvador Dalí famously designed with Elsa Schiaparelli in 1937 and so many others that have resonated like awkwardly performed duets—uneasy exchanges of currency and credibility. But for Valentino’s Creative Director Pierpaolo Piccioli, there is something much more essential at the core of the relationship between fashion and art: A shared impulse for self-expression, a mutual desire for human connection. It’s an idea the designer sought to explore in the Valentino Des Ateliers fall/winter 2021 haute couture collection, unveiled last July at the Gaggiandre, the 16th-century shipyards at the Arsenale in Venice.

With the help of curator Gianluigi Ricuperati, Piccioli engaged 16 artists—Francis Offman, Luca Coser and Wu Rui among them—to collaborate on individual looks that graced the Venetian-waterway-turned-runway at sunset. Over the past year, Piccioli spoke with each of the artists extensively about their work and how they view the world; as much as any shared aesthetic or visual language, it was these talks, he says, that informed the collection. As has been Piccioli’s practice for the past several seasons, both the clothes and the casting for the show were non-gendered.