Valentino comes home to Rome

The decision to close fashion month at Palazzo Barberini was, on its surface, a straightforward act of homecoming. Valentino returning to Rome, the city that gave the house its name and its original identity, for a show inspired by two architects who despised each other and spent the better part of the seventeenth century arguing in stone. The logic was clear. The execution was something else.

Palazzo Barberini is not a neutral venue. It is a building defined by argument — begun by Carlo Maderno, continued by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and interrupted at intervals by Francesco Borromini, who contributed the spiral staircase and spent the remainder of his career feuding with Bernini over everything from authorship to the nature of beauty itself. The building holds those competing visions without resolving them. It is, in this sense, a more architecturally honest structure than many of the palaces that succeeded it.

Valentino’s creative director chose this as the backdrop for a collection described at the time as “poetic and spectacular.” Both words are accurate, and both understate what the show actually did, which was to use the specificity of the space — its frescoed ceilings, its competing staircases, its sense of grandeur that is simultaneously assured and unfinished — as a genuine argument about what fashion can mean when it stops trying to be neutral.

The building as position

Fashion shows have been held in extraordinary spaces for as long as the industry has understood that the room a collection enters shapes how it is received. The decision to show in a Baroque palace in Rome rather than in the standard Parisian infrastructure is itself a statement about whose tradition the house is drawing from, and which conversation it considers itself to be entering.

Rome is not, in the geography of fashion week, a city that usually demands this kind of attention. It exists slightly apart from the circuit — present as a cultural reference, absent as a logistical hub. A show there, especially a season-closing show by a house of Valentino’s standing, reorders the map briefly. It says: this is where we belong. This is the argument we are making.

The Borromini-Bernini rivalry that inspired the collection is, among other things, a story about two incompatible ideas of what beauty requires. Bernini believed in the reconciliation of opposites, in surfaces that invite the eye and hold it there. Borromini believed in the dynamic, the unsettled, the form that resists completion. Both were right. Both produced work that has outlasted every subsequent argument about which approach was correct.

Where the clothes stood

Against this architecture, the collection occupied a specific register: formally ambitious, technically assured, and — unlike several of the season’s more talked-about shows — fully inhabitable. The clothes that emerged from Palazzo Barberini were not concepts dressed as garments. They were garments that had thought carefully about what it means to enter a room and alter it.

Photography via Unsplash

The silhouettes moved between the architectural and the draped, between references to Bernini’s marble figures — which always appear to be caught mid-gesture — and something softer, more provisional, that might have come from Borromini’s instinct for the curved line that refuses to close. Whether this reading was intended by the house or arrived at independently is, for practical purposes, irrelevant. The collection sustained it, which is the criterion that matters.

Fashion month ended in a room that Bernini and Borromini both touched and neither finished. The season’s last show used that incompleteness correctly — not as a problem to be solved but as the condition under which ambitious work is always made. It was, in the estimation of those present, the right room and the right clothes. The coincidence of venue and collection is rarer than it should be. When it happens, it is worth recording.