After the last Paris Fashion Week (September 28th – October 6th), we can confidently say that all the top brands have identified the spring/summer 2022 as the period to showcase their most coveted styles. In this perspective, the new collections are – in a few words – ambitious, fancy, even arrogant: in short, haute couture at its best. There are a few Maisons that clearly grabbed the lion’s share and enticed the highest number of flashes by the photographers: among them Maison Valentino climbed to the top of the podium, thanks mainly to its Valentino Garavani collection bags for women.
The new ones, besides carrying on a glorious tradition, managed to emphasize one of the main features of the historical Italian Maison: its continuous, inexhaustible desire to be inspired by the arts, in their broadest sense. A strong artistic bent emerges from each creation, and the Valentino Garavani collection shoulder bags are no exception in this sense. On the contrary, they are able to even epitomize the purest essence of this attitude. Below, we’ll discover more about these designs.
- Valentino Garavani shoulder purses don’t pander the typical hues of a specific season: they go the opposite way. It’s a technique borrowed from musical composition, called counterpoint, and consisting in performing simultaneously two or more different melody lines. Many classical pieces (just think about Ludwig van Beethoven’s Hammerklavier) have within them one or more counterpoints. In the case of Valentino Garavani bags, the opposition – more radical in some cases, more quiet in some otherwise – results in a systematic use of gaudy colors, snarky shapes, and unconventional textures that stand out against an autumn landscape painted mainly with soft colors. Quite the opposite, the upcoming spring/summer collection will be characterized by soft hues and gentle nuances, trying to compensate for the typical bursting colors of the hottest seasons of the year.
- Valentino Garavani purses have a fascination for details. This is attributable to the long-standing penchant of the whole Maison for a few specific pictorial currents, from Impressionism to Pointillism. Those currents had made the single detail more important than the general framework. Artists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, and Paul Signac created an actual iconography of the modern world based on the direct observation of the surrounding reality, trying to isolate from it the most interesting and/or fascinating details. Similarly, women’s Valentino Garavani shoulder bags work with painstaking precision on the definition of many details: and in the end, all of them become way more important than the basic manufacturing pattern they are inserted in.
- Those manufacturers depict the spirit of their time more thoroughly than a photograph. An invention without a future: this is – supposedly – how Louis Lumière described cinema, his newborn creation, in 1895. History has told that Lumière had dramatically misjudged it and its potential persistence through time. Nonetheless, as the generations went by, cinema came out more and more clearly as the art of an eternal present, a sort of hyper-extension of photography, with the addition of the time element. Designer fashion itself is able to fix a moment, describing an era with an incredible precision. Working exactly on the same dimension of the imaginary, fashion and cinema are able to seize the moment and reproduce a specific Zeitgeist. To the point that they are probably the most meaningful remains of the era, they come from. Hence, it is no coincidence if cinema has often used pieces of clothing and accessories coming directly from the most recent catwalks, while the fashion industry keeps on taking inspiration from popular movies, from the literal quotation to a simple tribute.
