Pierpaolo Piccioli is back in the thick of it again, after what turned out to be his gap year from Valentino. The reveal of his first collection for Balenciaga is tomorrow—the culmination of a whiplash string of events which (deep breath) had: Alessandro Michele leaving Gucci for Valentino, Sabato de Sarno coming and going at Gucci, Demna leaving Balenciaga for Gucci, and Pierpaolo settled right where he is now, looking at me from his office at Balenciaga HQ, on a Zoom call.
PPP, as we know him for short, is tanned and wearing a pale gray T-shirt with his coral necklace, and some other strings of things around his neck. First, I want to check on how he is. What’s it’s like to actually have the luxury of a proper work break for the first time in 34 years? “I took time for myself, for my family. I did a trip around India,” he beams. This must’ve been a dream for someone whose personal style—if not his work—betrays the longing of a hippie born too late (in 1967), and in the wrong place to have been part of the vanguard of the first peace and love trippers. Instead, PPP worked, married, and had three children with his wife Simona and then—astonishingly—became one of the few great haute couturiers of his generation.
Some of the colors and the extravagant volumes of the Valentino couture shows he did, as well as the memory of that time he and Frances McDormand caused absolute mayhem dancing together at the Met in 2018, are indelibly stamped on many of our fashion memories for joyous reasons. All of this was accomplished while he was living in Nettuno, the small town of his birth—another point of admiration which eventually cracked the snobbery of some of the coldest hearts in the industry.
But now, Piccioli has committed to move to Paris to take on Balenciaga, taking his place in the most giant upheaval fashion has seen since the millennium. Perfect timing: he and Simona have just waved their youngest, 19-year-old Stella, off to university. “We are all adults now,” he says, laughing. “Everyone can come and go.” His appointment happened, he says, “in a very organic way. I feel as if choices and life brought me to where I am now. Cristóbal Balenciaga and his story, his process of working, and his integrity about creativity made me feel at home when I arrived here.”
We’ll explore exactly what PPP means by that in a second, but I’m afraid the big questions about the Demna Balenciaga legacy—the years of drama and sensational immersive shows and the oversized streetwear and logos and memes—have to be confronted first. How will he make the brand different? Does it need to be? And what does he feel about staying centered and certain in these wildly difficult times?
“I think what makes something relevant to me is to be very authentic and honest in the way you are. I feel that I am different from Demna, my culture and my path was different,” Piccioli replies. “But yes, talking about this ‘tsunami of chairs,’ I think that respecting who was here before me—embracing the work of Cristóbal, Demna, Nicolas [Ghesquière]—is cooler, and more revolutionary than to deny what’s been before you arrive. It would be stupid of me to say it’s carte blanche—change the stores, change the packaging, change everything, and it’s done. I think,” he continues, “we need to manage this moment with more intelligence, be less stupid and about ego. I think fashion never talks about intelligence. We also have to have a new idea about respect and care, because we as creative directors have responsibility for a lot of people.”
One of the first things Piccioli did was, inevitably, to visit the archive. There, he could cast his couturier’s super-skilled eye over the legendary work of Cristóbal Balenciaga, whose legacy of unattainable perfectionism and superb engineering in cloth is one of the most intimidating—along with Christian Dior’s and Coco Chanel’s—in the history of fashion. Compared to the work of Valentino Garavani, which he saw when he was assisting the Italian master, “there was a lightness, the way he introduced space between the body and fabric—the way it creates silhouettes really interests me. Because there’s no structure inside, there’s air.”
But the thing that really turned the key for him was not in Paris, but what he saw in Getaria in Spain, Balenciaga’s birthplace, when he visited the museum dedicated to the couturier. “I saw this video of someone wearing the Sack Dress in 1957 in the street in Paris, and the passers-by reacting to this woman—not always in a good way. The Sack Dress was outrageous, really outrageous. You see this woman just wearing a dress made with two seams only, and other women walking in the street with the jacket tight to the body, with a corset and big skirt. You see how disruptive it was, how intentional was the gesture of liberating women from strictures.”
Oddly enough, this sounds much like a full-circle moment, what with current fashion being packed with corsets and Marie Antoinette gowns. Are we anticipating radical simplicity from the new Balenciaga then? Maybe not so literally. What Piccioli has taken from that moment of social history is a principle: “That Balenciaga never has to follow the rules. It has to be a bit disruptive, ready for the times. That intentionality has to be maintained. I wanted to get to know his work closely to get the memory of it and transform it. So there’s not any imitation, but a transformation of it. Because I feel that we have to be relevant for this time.”
Disruption? Well, that makes a link back to Demna’s tenure, for sure. What, though, is Piccioli’s opinion on fashion that speaks on political subjects? Demna’s work was hugely politically freighted at times, and Piccioli has spoken out, particularly on conservative views about women, in the past. “I think we are living in a very tough moment. There’s a sort of reactionary moment we’re in, socially, politically, and we can’t deny this,” he observes. “I feel that when you are in fashion, you do a job, so I feel that humanity is a key word for this moment. Not just in fashion, but it’s a moment when all of us have to think in a very human way. What’s happening in the world is too difficult to reflect in fashion. I think fashion has at least to give a moment of hope—because that’s the maximum of what it can be.”
His Valentino years always acted as a burst of joy on the scene, especially when he brought such relatable glory to knocking the stuffing out of haute couture while embracing modern women, models of myriad ethnicities, sizes, and ages. In this creative director, Balenciaga’s parent company Kering has nabbed for itself a top couturier with a pent-up following of wealthy people who will freely spend. They will be looking forward to next July when Piccioli’s first couture collection will be shown.
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As for the rest of us, tomorrow’s the Balenciaga ready-to-wear event to watch. At a wild guess? I think we can expect bold brushes of color—that’s in him. Perhaps, in a way, Piccioli has come to Balenciaga to remember who he was in the first place. That hit him on that trip to Getaria, the small fishing village of Cristóbal’s origin. “I felt like when I was a kid, growing up in Nettuno, by the sea, seeing stuff from far away,” he says. “Being from a small place gives you a different perspective on the world. I like to keep this far perspective—it keeps you with enchanted eyes. Dreaming, not feeling the pressure; feeling everything as an opportunity to do my job.”
