Pierpaolo Piccioli’s next act
The former Valentino designer will unveil a debut collection for Balenciaga this week. The stakes could not be higher
From the vast windows in Pierpaolo Piccioli’s new office, right at the very top of the Balenciaga headquarters on one of the grandest avenues in Paris, it feels like you can survey all of fashion’s capital city.
“I can also sunbathe up here,” Piccioli jokes, bathed in light as he reclines on a black leather sofa in his new perch. Covered in tattoos and dressed head to toe in black — his longtime uniform — he has a thin moustache and wears shiny square-framed sunglasses that cover his deeply lined and tanned face.
“A view like this in Paris is very special,” he adds. “Looking out reminds you to appreciate the past while trying to build the future.”
For all the pleasantries — and famously Piccioli is one of the true nice guys of fashion — the stakes are sky-high ahead of his debut collection at Paris Fashion Week on October 4. Under the creative leadership of his predecessor Demna, who left this year to take the reins at Gucci, Balenciaga grew from $390mn in annual revenue to around $2bn, according to analysts’ estimates. At one stage, it was the most hyped luxury brand of the past decade. Both Gucci and Balenciaga are owned by Kering, the struggling French conglomerate which thanks to strategic mis-steps and a global luxury slowdown has seen tumbling group sales, a string of profit warnings and a 50 per cent plunge in its share price over the past two years. Under new chief executive Luca de Meo, a reversal of fortunes is desperately being sought. Gucci may be the biggest brand, but every turnaround now under way in most Kering houses must be a success.
Piccioli, a 58-year-old Italian who spent 25 years at Valentino, eight of them as the sole creative director before leaving in March 2024, was a bold choice for the Balenciaga reset. It is also a potentially risky one.
After all, Piccioli is one of fashion’s great romantics, known for designs full of exuberance, joy and optimism. His Valentino couture shows, full of airy gowns and elegant tailoring in cleverly co-ordinated colours, were especially adored by the fashion industry. Sometimes, for the finale, Piccioli would bring out the seamstresses who had worked on the collection to stand with him on the runway, sending audiences to their feet. Those shows felt warm and human in an industry renowned for being the opposite.
“Pierpaolo is known for his absolute passion for the craft, a couturier and visionary in the truest sense,” says British Vogue’s head of editorial content Chioma Nnadi. “He also happens to be incredibly empathetic and approachable as a person, so that commitment to elegance is rooted in a very soulful place.”
But is that what a world of increasingly casual dressers really wants to buy? Especially from a brand like Balenciaga?
During his tenure, Demna took it from a niche fashion maison to one of the most provocative and boundary-breaking brands in the industry. He asked the world if Crocs and Ikea totes could be worth four-figure price tags, themed shows around war in Ukraine and the rule of capitalism, and was a key architect of the monster sneaker and elevated streetwear trend that dominated sales across the entire sector. Sometimes, he flew too close to the sun, especially with an advertising campaign in 2022 that triggered allegations that he condoned child exploitation, significantly denting both popularity and sales. Now, it’s Piccioli’s turn in the reinvention hot seat.
“Balenciaga and Gucci are brands that soared on streetwear which took the fashion and luxury world by storm,” explains Bernstein luxury analyst Luca Solca. Now, the problem is that streetwear is no longer hyped in the way it was, and the brands that embraced the category cannot rely on it for guaranteed growth.
“The dilemma is this: continue with streetwear and be boring, or try to move away from it but run the risk of taking a wrong approach? For Balenciaga in particular, it is so associated with that aesthetic that it will be hard to return to the status quo ante,” adds Solca. “It’s a very big task for Pierpaolo. Of that, there is no doubt.”
‘I wanted a challenge’
If Piccioli was feeling the strain three weeks before the show, then he certainly wasn’t showing it.
“I don’t feel commercial pressures in this job,” he says with a shrug, a rather astonishing line he also used to say at Valentino. His wrists and neck glisten with golden trinkets, including flashes of orange coral and a delicate charm necklace of iridescent beetles, as he leafs through sketches and swatches of silk gazar that offer glimpses of his Balenciaga vision.
“Of course, you cannot be a designer at a big house today without working closely with other teams, like marketing or retail or with your CEO,” he continues. “We talk all the time. But I respect those people and their ability to do their jobs well. They let me do mine.”
Born in 1967 in Nettuno, a coastal town just outside Rome, Piccioli has always lived and worked near his birthplace. Now, he has moved to Paris. The first thing he did when he got off the plane, he says, is go straight to the Balenciaga archive, a vast warehouse only a few kilometres from the airport. After leaving Valentino last year and spending time with his family (Piccioli has a wife, Simona Caggia, and three children), he was ready to start another chapter, whatever the stakes.
“I wanted a challenge. After so long in one place at Valentino I didn’t want to be in my comfort zone again,” he says. Piccioli was first inspired to get into fashion because of photography. But Cristóbal Balenciaga, whose influence on silhouette, line, spirit and aesthetic remains everywhere in fashion today, had always been one of his design heroes. They both grew up in small towns, he says, not fashion capitals. Both felt inspired by women on the streets, not catwalks.
“He knew what it meant to be relevant, which is so important as a designer. He was a disrupter and innovator,” Piccioli adds, nodding to a framed photo of Balenciaga’s silk gazar 1967 wedding dress leaning against the wall which he says is “one of his greatest inspirations”. Next to that is a framed handwritten scrawl of a Brancusi quote which he calls his manifesto: simplicity is complexity resolved.
Balenciaga widened shoulders, let out waists and pioneered cocoon shapes. His approach to the female body celebrated shape, form and power rather than secondary sexual characteristics, with a radical recasting of the typical feminine silhouette from the hourglass shapes that had come before. This approach and in particular, a love of volume, have also been Piccioli’s longtime calling cards; his sketches for the debut show silhouettes which use the body as a starting point before moving away from it, introducing a third element: air.
“The challenge is to make a new silhouette with no structure inside to keep the shape. Going far from the body, while still keeping the body in mind,” he says excitedly. “You have to think like an architect and change perceptions of space with space itself.”
The dystopian streetwear that defined much of Balenciaga’s previous era feels far away from the studio. He won’t be drawn on colours, other than to say there will be a lot of white — fitting as a carte blanche, or a blank page, for a new start — without erasing house hallmarks entirely.
“I’m not so insecure as to try and cancel what has been before, because a house is made by lots of people. Demna hasn’t disappeared, he just passed me the torch,” Piccioli says. “I have let my instincts go for this new Balenciaga. I don’t want to overthink it. What I do want to do is reflect the state of the world that we are living in.”
Authority with age
Reflecting the current world order has been front of mind for many designers this season. The complicating factor is whether the world is that interested in luxury anymore. Fifty million luxury consumers exited the market between 2022 and 2024, according to a report last year by Bain & Company, many of them aspirational shoppers who felt left behind by skyrocketing prices. HSBC says the average price of luxury goods in Europe rose roughly 52 per cent since 2019. Piccioli acknowledges that a gap between prices and value in his sector has emerged.
“Luxury is in a difficult place now. People can’t feel they are overpaying for what they get,” he says. “That’s why this business needs to lead with pure creativity, now more than ever. You have to create emotional connections, not just skate the surface of things. That’s just not enough.”
The problem is that luxury is a giant product pyramid with runway collections right up at its very pinnacle; you can be moved by an Instagram video of a Paris runway show, but will it still propel you to buy a perfume or a handbag when prices are double what they were before the pandemic? There are other challenges too. While young at heart and ultra playful, the core of Piccioli’s designs until now represented a mature and sophisticated elegance; but most young people under 30 these days appear to prefer pyjamas. Questions have also been raised around his ability to design smash hit accessories, the financial lifeblood of most luxury brands; after the success of the Rockstud line of the early 2010s, Valentino never really had another sure-fire hit. Has he got an “it” bag or shoe in him?
What he does have in spades is experience. Of the 13 designers showing debut collections in Milan and Paris this season, Piccioli is the eldest. He likes it that way, he says, and has plenty of young people around him. Time has made him comfortable in his skin, and he knows when to trust his gut when changing the image of fashion. Piccioli was way ahead of the curve on inclusive casting; proper model diversity, he has said, often made the beauty of his designs in their many idiosyncratic colours sing louder.
“Authority with age is something I like. It gives me the confidence not to worry about trying to please everyone,” he says. “I know perceptions of Balenciaga are that it is young and cool and I want to keep some of what is there now as we move forward into this new stage.”
The pressure on his shoulders — on all these designers’ shoulders to deliver commercially successful collections — must be enormous. So is the workload (Piccioli is in charge of Balenciaga’s womenswear, menswear, accessories and couture). The key to surviving it, he declares from his penthouse with a view of the rooftops of Paris, is staying in touch with reality — or at least opening a window on it. To him, being a creative director is not just a job. He has a sense of responsibility too.
“What’s happening in the world right now is just horrible. I don’t reflect ugliness, but I do try to offer optimism, which I don’t see as escapism, but rather a new way of thinking,” he says. “I am beyond privileged to have freedom of expression, and talk through my clothes. I have always focused on the humanity of design. That isn’t about to change now.”