Paris Haute Couture: Valentino spring/summer 2012

The Valentino couture collection reminded us what has been missing for so long in fashion: charm.

Watching Wednesday night's Valentino show in Paris in the 19th century mansion once occupied by the Rothschilds made me realise what has been missing for so long in fashion: charm.

Perhaps it's due a come-back. "The Artist", a film short on words and action but brimming with old-fashioned values of courtesy and open hearted optimism, is, with the exception of a few confused punters in Liverpool, seducing all who see it. Wallis Simpson - bear with me on this one - is once more proving her mettle as an enduring source of fascination. She may - or according to Madonna may not - have been a woman with dubious values, but by most accounts she knew how to charm.
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In this - and perhaps other areas - she has something in common with Marie Antoinette, one of the muses for the Valentino collection, which is nowadays designed not by the Maestro himself, who has retired to tend his famous tan and infamous pugs, but by Pier-Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri.
A woman with too much time and money on her hands may seem a rather lack-lustre starting point for anyone hoping to make clothes with topical relevance. But muses work in mysterious ways and out of this one Piccioli and Chiuri spun clothes of extraordinary lightness and grace (another word you don't see often in the modern fashion canon).

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Gauzy Chantilly lace the colour of milk or clotted cream was sprinkled with silver beading, washed-out flowers prints were veiled under a layer of tulle, toile de jouys (when did you last see one of those used in grown-up clothing) were whooshed up into frothy ballgowns.

Even the shoes - lace slippers and heeled pumps- looked sweet rather than sexy.
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Backstage, where it's still, just, possible to navigate around the scrum that congregates around the attending celebrities (in this instance Cameron Diaz) and touch the clothes, I did. They were almost weightless - quite a feat given all the embroidery, passmenterie and beading expected in a couture collection. It may have had a nostalgic demure look, but there was something futuristic about the technical engineering. But what was most striking were the necklines: many of them round - not overly prim, but not remotely revealing. "The time for a woman to reveal all she has is definitely over," said Maria Grazia Chiuri. "It feels much stronger to hold back".
If anything can edge the rock chicks and the bling freaks and the cleavage and thigh addicts (charmingly) to one side, this collection is it - the best of the week.



BY LISA ARMSTRONG | 26 JANUARY 2012
http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/columns/lisa-armstrong/TMG9040147/Paris-Haute-Couture-Valentino-springsummer-2012.html