His first couture collection reveals that Balenciaga’s greatest architecture has never been its silhouettes alone, but the people who bring them to life. By Kenneth Richard There are designers who inherit great fashion houses by mastering their archives. Others arrive determined to overturn them. Standing backstage after his first couture collection for Balenciaga, Pierpaolo Piccioli spoke about neither. Instead, he began with the people. Not the collection. Not the silhouettes. Not even Cristóbal Balenciaga. The people. It was a telling […]

Fall 2026 Channels Renaissance Technique And Couture Craft To Capture A Living Portrait Of The Moment By Kenneth Richard Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Balenciaga arrives with a quiet kind of conviction. The designer—long celebrated for his emotional intelligence and poetic sensibility—has entered the house not by dismantling its foundations but by illuminating them. For Winter 2026, Piccioli frames his vision through the Renaissance technique of clair-obscur, the interplay of light and shadow used by painters from Caravaggio to Leonardo to carve depth […]

Piccioli Brings His Mastery Of The Cut To Balenciaga, Reconciling Past And Present In A Debut Of Grace And Power. By Kenneth Richard The air at Balenciaga’s Paris headquarters felt almost ecclesiastical. More temple than corporate address, the marble halls glowed with reverence as guests took their seats. It was here, only months earlier, that Demna had staged a retrospective exhibition to close his tenure. Now, in a rare passage of fashion history, the incoming and outgoing creative directors overlapped […]