Valentino Spring 2020 Ad Campaign

Valentino’s latest campaign highlights the disruptive power of color.

Creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli continues his exploration of monochrome that characterizes the house’s Spring 2020 collection. The runway show heavily featured entirely white looks; a recent campaign was all in black. Now, like a brilliant bolt of lightning across a grayscale sky, Piccioli has struck us with fluorescents.

Luscious photography and film by duo Inez and Vinoodh capture the neon greens and pinks using techniques that reveal an unexpected dynamism within monochrome. They deploy flashing lights in alternating colors to situate a single shade in different chromatic contexts. A blacklight especially emphasizes the unique power and richness of the color of each dress. The background setting of a stately boudoir, with various shadows and complex design elements, serves to heighten the disruptively singular effect of solid fluorescent color.

Inez and Vinoodh show that aesthetic strength comes from an understanding of environment and how to relate oneself to it, how to express oneself within it. In a sea of complexity and maximalism, something as simple and essential as a single color becomes unexpectedly beautiful and strong.

With this latest campaign, the truly masterful nature of Pierpaolo Piccioli’s mind has been revealed. This celebration of color recontextualizes and amplifies the already impressive moves that have come before. Each step is exciting and smart in its own right: the divinely refreshing white of the runway show, the seductively elegant black of the previous campaign, and now the ecstatic burst of color. Taken together, they form a monument to the basic elements of humanity’s most essential sense – to color and light. This monument heralds an epoch whose philosophy unifies the most basic elements of experience with the most sublime ideas of beauty. We couldn’t be more glad that Valentino has shown their true colors.