“Forever Valentino”, the most comprehensive exhibition to date paying homage to the house’s founder, Valentino Garavani, and the house’s haute couture heritage, opened last night at M7, the design and innovation centre in downtown Doha, Msheireb.
Under the creative direction of Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli, Italian curator Massimiliano Gioni and British fashion critic and author Alexander Fury have designed an imaginative curatorial project – Through Valentino The archive’s emotional promenade, where themes, chronology, heritage references are blurred into a moving experience – counterintuitive while remaining cohesive and visually appealing. In a live preview, Piccioli called it “not a retrospective, but a perspective”. Following his approach – emphasizing the creative tension between modernity and tradition, classicism and subversion, exclusivity and inclusivity – his goal is not an ode to the past, but a polyphonic work, a layered The narrative, reflecting the many conversations that shaped the brand’s identity, “his spirit,” he noted, “is essentially timeless.”
Garavani and Piccioli’s past and present creations are in a beautiful , flow discourse. “As designers, our work has to bear witness to the times we live in,” argues Piccioli. “But the beauty we create has to be temporary, because it has to stand the test of time.” In fact, identifying the authorship of many of the clothes in the exhibition does not It’s always that easy. “Through extensive research into the archives, I discovered an unexpected echo between the work of Mr. Garavani and Pierpaolo,” Fury notes. “It’s such a fascinating dynamic, detecting how many Valentinos are in Pierpaolo and how many Pierpaolos are in Valentino.”
