Essential Pieces of the Wardrobe: Valentino Le Blanc

White radically removes embellishment and glorifies form. The design path leads to the essence of Couture separated into its fundamental elements that are then selected by Creative Director Pierpaolo Piccioli and introduced into the ordinary universality of the white shirt.

White is not a minimal or minimalistic choice but comes from afar, from the sixteenth-century monochrome technique that, through a balance of chiaroscuro and of solids and spaces, makes images three- dimensional with spectacular results.

White is therefore instrumental in the celebration of forms and volumes explored and expressed as vestment epiphanies with powerful and glorious purity. In this tabula rasa and creative territory that admits no errors, Pierpaolo Piccioli demonstrates his sartorial expertise free of chromatic distractions.

Le Blanc is a project of dreamlike architectural structures in poplin that abandons the preciousness of materials to express possible, contemporary and participatory audacity. The language of variations in white on the shirt form is the compendium of a hybridization between couture, the founding gene of the Valentino story, and Prêt-à-Porter that manifests the present day made of visions and sharing, experiences and extravagances, hypotheses and perspectives.

It is made of suspended intimacy and real dreams that are achievable as well as the needs for new generations that deserve a space for personal expression within the creative dialogue, according to the new rules that have to be written based on one’s own feelings, experiences and time.

Le Blanc celebrates the primeval ability of Couture to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

The creative process becomes a genuine Couture experience for women who decide to embrace this vision through a Made-to-Order service available in pop-ups and pop-ins present in a selection of boutiques around the world. It is not a decorative customization, but the possibility of intervening on shapes, volumes, cuts and all the details that make up the garment, personally designing it with the support of an individual tailoring service. The flower is the element that unites the design project and visual, found both in the store installations with maxi flowers, and in the campaign by Inez & Vinoodh. It links the 12 shirts in the capsule collection to the graphic and sculptural floral compositions to the SuperVee shoulder bag, inspired by the Maison archive and a point of reference in the Valentino Spring/ Summer 2020 collection.