Inside the Private World of Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli

In his haste, Pierpaolo Piccioli parks his Mercedes on the bias across two parking spaces at the train station in Nettuno—just as the Rome-bound 12:07 that we were meant to catch whistles out of the station. Piccioli commutes from here every working day to beat the notorious Roman traffic, taking a chauffeured car home at night, but even so he still hasn’t quite mastered the system. Just how often does he miss that train? “Three times a week,” he cracks, his lugubrious eyes twinkling in the winter sunlight.

Piccioli cranks the car into reverse, and we bound on through the flat Roman countryside at breakneck speed to catch the same train before it arrives a couple of stops down the line. Eschewing the trappings of fame and fortune that Valentino Garavani and his partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, embraced so fulsomely has become an essential part of Piccioli’s shtick. Not for him the Bacons and Hockneys and Warhols, the storied château in France, the chalet in Gstaad, the villa on the Appian Way, the stuccoed London town house, the Manhattan pied-à-terre, the yacht—all of them scattered with issues of ¡Hola! and crowded with the real-life glamorous faces seen in its pages.

“Valentino was the brand himself,” says Piccioli as we settle in for our short commute—time Piccioli usually reserves for catching up on iconic old Italian movies on his laptop. “Now everything is about communities—about sharing values, not surfaces—and I want Valentino to be a couture house that is relevant for today for young people. I never wanted to substitute the lifestyle of Valentino for my own,” he adds firmly. “If you’re not in an ivory tower, I think you can dream more.”

Piccioli has remained a remarkably private man: It is a small miracle that he has invited me into his inner world, but I am fast discovering that within it, the designer practices what he preaches. He has chosen, for instance, not to live in Rome itself, but in this provincial seaside place an hour’s journey south.

Growing up in Nettuno, however, surfing the waves crashing just off its coastline, Piccioli always felt something of an outsider. “I wanted to escape,” he says. “I didn’t think I belonged to this place or these people. I always was figuring out what was there beyond the sea.”

Although fascinated by fashion, he had no idea that it could be a career, so he studied literature at Rome University—where his girlfriend, Simona Caggia, whom he had met in high school, was studying law.

He later discovered that the city’s Istituto Europeo di Design had recently begun an experimental fashion program, and so, with his parents’ bemused support, he studied there too. Even then, though, he felt an outsider. The old friends who were making the same commute with him from Nettuno began viewing him differently simply because he was studying fashion. “I was too ‘gay’ for them!” Piccioli says. “I was different from all my gay friends, too, because I had a girlfriend. But I had a lot of passion—and you learn to be alone, in a way. When you’re a kid, it’s not as good. But when you grow up, you understand that that can be your strength—not to be in any of those boxes.”

Piccioli was scouted at school for an internship with Brunello Cucinelli. He surprised the company by asking to be paid. “It was important for me to show that I could make a real job out of this passion,” he explains.

The opportunity, as Piccioli recalls, was “fantastic—the brand was very small [then], so I had the opportunity to see all the processes, from going to Paris for the fabrics, to the fittings, to the advertising campaign. They gave me a big picture of the job.”

Upon graduating, Piccioli joined the team at Fendi with his design-school friend Maria Grazia Chiuri. The atmosphere of the company—run by the formidable quintet of Fendi sisters and Anna Fendi’s daughter, Silvia Venturini, and with inspirational creative direction from a freelancing Karl Lagerfeld—“was very ‘family,’ ” Piccioli recalls, and he and Chiuri stayed there for eight years, until they were hired by Valentino to develop the brand’s nascent accessories division.

“I was happy that I arrived there when I was all grown up,” says Piccioli. “Until I was 30, I thought that fashion was a very nice place. At Valentino, I finally understood the system of fashion. Valentino was formal—very, very formal. There was a ritual, and I liked that.”

Piccioli and Chiuri arrived in January and were expecting to work on Valentino’s following fall collection, but the designer tasked them with working on spring instead. With only two months to find materials and production facilities, they agreed—on the condition that they could work independently and show Valentino only the finished results. “We didn’t have time to share anything with him,” Piccioli explains.

After the casual working environments that he had known, Piccioli surprised the house’s reverential teams by turning up to work in trainers and freely offering his opinions—and occasional criticisms—of Valentino’s work.

“Mr. Valentino is so secure in himself,” says Piccioli, “that if our proposal was better than his, he could choose that. That’s something I really learned from him: to work with people that contribute, not just execute.”

In the end, Valentino was entranced by what they had produced, and their collaboration began. “I loved working with him,” says Piccioli. “I loved to hear him talking about his dreams of a dress drawn with one line.”

Valentino retired in 2008 and was replaced by Alessandra Facchinetti, but less than one year later she had left and Piccioli and Chiuri were appointed co–creative directors. In their own reset, Piccioli and Chiuri looked at Valentino’s glamorous past through the prism of iconic imagery, with the goal, Piccioli says, of “reestablishing the codes before moving away.” Their fey vision replaced jet-set sexiness with long-sleeved, high-necked fairy-tale dresses that expressed a quality Piccioli describes as “grace”—and were given a modern edge with polite punk accessories.

This powerful new identity was also linked to the history of Rome itself, a city that Piccioli loves, as he explains, for its “layers—from paganism to Pasolini” (not to mention the A.S. Roma football team that he and his son, Pietro, support so passionately).

In 2016, Chiuri left to become the creative director of Dior, and Piccioli assumed Valentino’s creative mantle on his own.

“It was different,” he recalls. “I remember very well the first week trying to understand what part of our past was more mine.” Piccioli was inspired by his daughter’s reading of Nietzsche, with the philosopher’s injunction to be aware of your past without being weighed down by its heaviness.

“Know who you are,” his friend Franca Sozzani, Italian Vogue’s late editor, enjoined him. “You just have to be yourself.”

Piccioli moved his show to the princely Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, with its ghosts and its layered histories; commissioned his friend Alexandre Desplat—the Academy Award–winning composer of The Shape of Water and The Grand Budapest Hotel—to produce an original soundtrack; and began exploring moments of seismic change in history, from illuminated manuscripts giving way to the printing press (“a real revolution, as the digital one is now”) to the aesthetic rebirth of Italy after the devastation of World War II.

“I started to work only on instinct,” he remembers, “and from the first moment, it was different. When there are two, you have to share, to explain. Now I just feel it.”

The collection, although informed by the work that he produced with Chiuri—who was there in the front row for support—revealed the unbridled romanticism and fantasy of Piccioli’s singular vision.

Like Chiuri, Piccioli is grounded by his family life. After law school, Caggia worked in real estate for seven years, but when she discovered that she was pregnant with their daughter Benedetta, now 21, she decided to focus on her family. (The couple’s son, Pietro, is now nineteen, and their younger daughter, Stella, is twelve.) Piccioli was drawn back to his childhood home to raise their family, finally appreciating the “enchantment” of a place that he knew so well, and the couple settled in a 1940s modernist villa in the heart of town. There is a family-friendly swimming pool in the modest garden, where a rescue dog named Miranda (“after Priestly!”) romps, but it is not a trophy establishment in the Garavani-Giammetti mold. Recently, however, Piccioli has added another property to his family’s real-estate portfolio—a holiday retreat a mere fifteen minutes’ walk from home.

Piccioli had admired the green-shuttered, pink-washed Belle Epoque mansion and envied its near-private beach since he was a little boy gamboling in the waves below. From the heights of its paved gardens, one can make out the foundations of a Roman villa half-buried in the sand far below. The house is in the throes of a renovation, the bedrooms a work in progress, but downstairs Piccioli works in the light-spangled study, surrounded by his decorative-arts library. On the walls, his children’s early drawings jostle Richard Haines’s fashion studies of his work. “This is where I come to be alone—to think, to sketch,” says Piccioli. “It’s really peaceful—it’s a kind of ‘no place.’ ” The perfect setting, then, for the man who, less than a week before, won Designer of the Year at the British Fashion Awards—but who has eschewed even a dedicated Wikipedia page.

When we stop in town for an espresso at Piccioli’s favorite café, the barista insists on adding an almond cookie to our order as she congratulates him: A local magazine has just published a front-page story about the prestigious award alongside their coverage of the town’s costumed medieval pageant, and a number of townspeople have already come up to congratulate him. “I didn’t know a British award could be so popular here,” he says, with sheepish pride.

Today, I hope we have a beautiful couture fitting,” says Piccioli as we finally settle into the train. He has been working on the collection since September. “Even simple dresses need time,” he explains. “It’s a crazy process . . . but I love that.” Piccioli sees couture as “the dream” of the house. “I want to get Valentino away from the idea of couture as something that belongs to the past,” he adds. “I really want Valentino to be a couture house of today—to meld couture and street; to do T-shirts and opera coats with the same care. I think the culture of the house—uniqueness, extravagance—has to be in every single product.”

An hour later, we are off the train and at the Palazzo Gabrielli-Mignanelli, the company’s Renaissance corporate headquarters at the foot of the Spanish Steps, where the palazzo’s couture ateliers are abuzz. To prove Piccioli’s point, there are seven craftspeople, each wearing the traditional white laboratory coat, painstakingly hand-rolling 1,700 meters of tiny ruffles of oyster organza and finishing them with minuscule stitches for a single dress that will ultimately require more than 1,000 hours of work. The sketches on the walls spell the story of the collection, which revisits Valentino’s romantic floral prints from the 1970s and ’80s and experiments with the electrifying colors that remind Piccioli of “eighties TV.”

Piccioli and Chiuri were accused of insensitive cultural appropriation after their spring 2016 ready-to-wear show, which featured a cast of largely white girls in an African-­inspired collection with their hair dressed in cornrows. Today Piccioli is enthusiastically embracing a message of inclusivity by showing his latest collection largely on women of color. “It’s a great statement for black girls to not be marginalized,” he says. “Let’s put them in the center of the picture.” His inspiration boards are covered with images of Renaissance black Madonnas, the figures in Kerry James Marshall paintings, and tastemaking women from the pages of 1960s Jet and Ebony magazines. Piccioli has already started work on the casting, with help from stylist Joe McKenna, the famed Azzedine Alaïa whisperer who is part of Piccioli’s starry show team along with makeup maven Pat McGrath and hairdresser Guido Palau. (In the end, 48 out of the 65 models were black, with a teary-eyed Naomi Campbell sporting the finale look.)

The designer is joined in the fittings by Benedetta, who is following in his footsteps by studying literature at the University of Rome and has come to see him on her lunch break. Piccioli himself lunches every day in a narrow room next to his palatial office—“I don’t have time to go out,” he says—where one wall of images of his designs for the house faces off against the iconic imagery of Valentino’s era-defining clothes.

In addition to his work on collections and new stores, Piccioli has been traveling back and forth to Luxembourg to work on costumes for the Japanese composer Teizo Matsumura’s opera, Silence, and took a week off to collaborate on a short movie with style-hungry auteur Luca Guadagnino. He also spends time with haute couture clients, and with the actresses who now often require exclusive designs for their red carpet appearances—although Piccioli recalls that Lady Gaga reserved look 35 from the fall haute couture, a vast crinoline of soft pink feathers, practically the moment that Kaia Gerber wafted through the Salomon de Rothschild salons wearing it. Gaga subsequently donned the dress to the Venice Film Festival premiere of A Star Is Born. (“She was to die for,” remembers Piccioli, who escorted her.)

After lunch, Piccioli pops into his offices, one of which was Valentino’s former aerie (the flowery Traviata tapestries now replaced by photographs of David Bowie and Serge Gainsbourg). In the magnificent room next door, a sixteenth-century pope once came to meet with his family. Giammetti once held court here, too, surrounded by Italian Empire furniture and extraordinary examples of 1930s Scuola Romana art. “It was intimidating,” recalls Piccioli. “For me, it has to be more comfortable.” He has added convivial seating areas for meetings.

His design team alone is 70 strong. “I want people that share the same passion I do,” says Piccioli. “They die for fashion!” Mindful of Valentino’s example, “I try to have people say what they think,” he adds. Piccioli wanted to change the logo, for instance, which he found too commercial—“but the kids on the teams were obsessed with it,” he says, “and I re-saw it with their eyes.” The resulting VLTN abbreviation now appears on everything from T-shirts to an intarsia mink coat.

Together, Piccioli and his design army are responsible for two women’s ready-to-wear shows a year, two pre-collections, two haute couture collections, two men’s collections, two men’s pre-collections, four annual accessories collections, and more work still for the lower-priced Red Valentino line. The pre-collection presentations in particular, once shown quietly to buyers and rarely to the press, have now assumed an importance that reflects their preeminent commercial significance. On November 27, for instance, Piccioli presented the pre–fall 2019 installment in a raw concrete warehouse space in Tokyo, where he decided to play with “the well-known codes of the house—red, ruffles, bows”—and collaborated with the artist Izumi Miyazaki and with Jun Takahashi from Undercover (a relationship that Piccioli is developing for his fall 2019 ready-to-wear). “It’s a new experience every collection,” he says.

He is unusually attuned to his host country—still the largest luxury market in the world after the United States. “I’m very impressed by the poetry of Japan’s culture,” says Piccioli, who first visited the country some 25 years ago. “It’s so modern, with a sense of tradition that is romantic, not nostalgic. You feel the symbolic, ritualistic act of dressing up,” he tells me. “It’s almost like a ceremony. In Japan, even streetwear is more sophisticated, more cultivated.” Backstage, as he greeted the playful Dynel-wigged influencers who had been flown in from around the world, along with the glitteringly chic local clients, Piccioli was already thinking about the men’s fall 2019 and the spring 2019 haute couture collections, a little over a month away, and I was reminded of a quote from Heraclitus that he included in one of the albums of sketches, inspiration images, and even seating charts that he assembles to celebrate each of his collections: “The sun is new each day.”

Watch: At Valentino, Fantasy Meets Reality for Spring 2019: