Review of Valentino Spring 2024 Men’s Fashion Show
Stories in Bloom
By Mark Wittmer
The house’s first standalone men’s show in years, Valentino kicked off Milan Men’s Spring 2024 with a quietly beautiful ode to storytelling. Titled “The Narratives” in continuation of its literature-focused projects, the collection used both literal text, visual symbolism, and the art of tailoring to explore the unfolding of personal journeys.
Presented at the Università degli Studi di Milano, the show included a limited number of spots open to students and the public – a welcome democratizing move. This setting also nicely set the stage for the theme of growth time that pervaded the collection, acknowledging time for education, art, and study as an essential component in a young man’s development into a full human.
The clothes themselves didn’t strike us with anything that new for Pierpaolo Piccioli – elegantly relaxed tailoring, fluidity of drape, chic elegance that felt young but not too young, unimposing excellence of craftsmanship, and a deft sensitivity to the impact of solid color – but these aesthetic building blocks took on new meaning as the collection progressed through its spectrum of colors set to the gently moving live soundtrack by singer-songwriter d4vd.
Aside from the lush simplicity of the silhouettes themselves, the collection’s main visual motif was the poppy flower, which bloomed as prints, embroidered sequins, and appliqué – a lovely visual metaphor of the collection’s motif of blossoming, of creating one’s own story.
Balancing freedom and rigor, the collection is a deeply felt and masterfully realized ode to the endless shapes the story of modern manhood takes.
