Tears and cheers greeted the unforgettable Valentino show a year ago, when designer Pierpaolo Piccioli produced a couture collection of intense beauty, celebrating dark skins.
The poetic result overwhelmed an audience, headed by founder Valentino Garavani himself, and left an emotional Celine Dion in tears.

Fashion is about change and no-one expected the designer to replicate previous events. But there was a major difference for summer 2020, as the models walked out in dresses that firmly traced – even constrained – the body line, in contrast to the fluidity of previous seasons. The cut was linear, wiping out all the vast and voluminous shapes.]

And the collection was far from casual; the look of the women was structured, hair ‘done’ in the traditional way, with the designer naming his inspiration as the mid-century modernist art movement. That was interpreted in the clothes as something not exactly cold, but quite different from the voluptuous tenderness of recent shows.