Pierpaolo Piccioli’s haute homecoming at Balenciaga
For his first haute couture collection at Balenciaga, for fall/winter 26, Pierpaolo Piccioli reinvented Cristóbal’s codes without losing his own. EE72 Fashion Critic Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
You do you. The millennial mantra could have been the motto for Pierpaolo Piccioli’s first haute couture collection for Balenciaga. Staged in the garden of the Cité Internationale Universitaire – illuminated by the bright light of the blazing July sun – the show felt like a homecoming to the form and colour language that has made Piccioli one of the most beloved couturiers in the industry. It wasn’t that it rehashed his Valentino orchestrations. He delivered plenty of studious tributes to the sculptural courage of Cristóbal Balenciaga. It was that it did something that feels more personal than honing the archival codes of a grand maison: it re-established your emotional connection to a living, breathing designer, whose work has contributed so much to our idea of contemporary couture, and fashion as a whole. It was major.
During a preview on the eve of the show, Piccioli – now a year into his Balenciaga tenure – was frank about his evolution at the house. “Now, I feel completely me in Balenciaga. I felt me before, but I didn’t feel like all the people were involved in the same process. It took a while to get people to understand what I was doing,” he said, referring to his design team and atelier. “You cannot change the brand if you don’t change the culture of the people in the brand. You have to change from inside. You have to make people excited and passionate about your project. I feel like that has happened now.” As illustrated in the show, that process involved a certain splicing of codes: the form language of Balenciaga with the painterly palette of Piccioli; and a harmonising between the explosive gestures of texture and shape of the house’s founder and its custodian.
Now, I feel completely me in Balenciaga. You cannot change the brand if you don’t change the culture of the people in the brand. You have to change from inside. You have to make people excited and passionate about your project. I feel like that has happened now.
Pierpaolo Piccioli
For me, couture is life. Once you do couture, you set the language. You understand deeply the soul of the company.
Pierpaolo Piccioli
If the collection looked decidedly Piccioli from a bird’s-eye perspective – or make that the drones hovering over the circular set design – there was plenty of Cristóbal up close. Studying a sculptural, futuristic dress from 1961, Piccioli had spent months concocting an ingenious technique to make it lighter and more contemporary-couture in spirit. He scanned the body of the model and cast her physique in plaster. Then, he moulded leather around the form, which allowed him to construct an under-structure in soft tailoring. Eventually, that construction was covered in the finest cashmere, creating a hyper-sculptural, super-light dress, which appeared in four different manifestations. “We tried and experimented and set the language,” Piccioli said, noting that he’d worked on the collection since October. “Here, it’s taken more time, but I feel completely me in Balenciaga now.”
The show felt like the culmination of a build-up: a resolution, but also a fresh start. Piccioli lives for haute couture and his love for it is electrifying. “For me, couture is life. Once you do couture, you set the language. You understand deeply the soul of the company. Here, I’ve done stuff I’ve never done at Valentino. In some dresses, I melded tailoring and flou in a very easy way. Maybe it’s also because they’re younger here. They wanted to experiment with me. You don’t have the rules of couture in the same way. But you can apply couture to everything else,” he said. “Couture, to me, is a culture that can be spread over categories. You have to know how to use the skill and get the best from it. I always thought you should know the skill but then hide it, to get the magic.” Come ready-to-wear in September, Piccioli’s Balenciaga will be recharged and ready to rumble.
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