The history of fashion-and-art collaborations is both fruitful and fraught. It’s one filled with a handful of moments of genuine newness, like the “shoe” hat Salvador Dali famously designed with Elsa Schiaparelli in 1937, and so many others that have resonated like awkwardly performed duets—uneasy exchanges of currency and credibility. But for Valentino creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli, there is something much more essential at the core of the relationship between fashion and art: a shared impulse for self-expression, a mutual desire for human connection. It’s an idea the designer sought to explore in the Valentino Des Atelieres Fall 2021 haute couture collection, unveiled this past July at the Gaggiandre, the 16th-century shipyards at the Arsenale in Venice.
With the help of curator Gianluigi Ricuperati, Piccioli engaged 16 artists—Francis Offman, Luca Coser, and Wu Rui among them—to collaborate on individual looks that graced the Venetian waterway turned runway at sunset. Over the past year, Piccioli spoke with each of the artists extensively about their work and how they view the world; as much as any shared aesthetic or visual language, it was these talks, he says, that informed the collection. As has been Piccioli’s practice for the past several seasons, both the clothes and the casting for the show were nongendered.
The grand finale was a voluminous white and red cape and dress inspired by a pair of minimalist brushstroke paintings byBritish-born artist Jamie Nares. The 68-year-old Nares has been a prolific figure in the New York art world since the early 1970s, when she played a pivotal role in the then-burgeoning down-town film and music scenes. In addition to painting, her work has spanned video, photography, performance, printmaking, and sculpture, along with an array of hybrid forms, and frequently explores notions of physicality, movement, and time. Nares is also known for reinventing the traditional tools of her trade, creating her own implements and devices. The two paintings that served as source material for the Valentino look, It’s Raining in Naples (2003) and Blues in Red #1 (2004), are part of a group Nares has been making since the 1980s using oversize custom-made brushes of her own design, which she swipes across canvases, sometimes while suspended from a harness. Each painting is made up of a single brushstroke; the canvases are laid flat to avoid dripping and treated to allow Nares to wipe away efforts that don’t make the grade—an extraordinary amount of forethought and labor that go into capturing a single gesture in a solitary moment.
In late September, Piccioli, at Valentino headquarters in Rome, reconnected with Nares, who was at home in New York. After the show in Venice, Piccioli had a version of the dress they collaborated on made for Nares, who publicly came out as a transgender person in 2019. Nares is wearing it in the picture that accompanies this conversation about the intersections of fashion, art, and life.
PIERPAOLO PICCIOLI: It’s an old issue, but I feel that fashion is not art because the purpose is different. Art is an urgency of expression of one individual. Fashion has to be related to the body, so it cannot be only about a personal urgency. For this project, I was looking at artists who are, most of them, painters because painting is for art what couture is for fashion. The challenge for me was to translate these two-dimensional artworks into something that was three-dimensional and related with the body—but without going into the world of the museum-souvenir T-shirt, where you’re just using the artwork to decorate a piece of fashion. To me, it was important to translate the actual skills of the artist I was working with to fashion, to make a real conversation. That’s why I decided to work with many artists, not just one. So it was a real need for me to get connected, to have conversations with people who share the same values. Because in the end, to create a community, you have to share values—even if you’re from different parts of the world, even if you’re working on different kinds of paintings or in fashion. The mind, the heart, and humanity—those are the real things that connect people.
JAMIE NARES: Your need to put this together and to be in touch with other people in this virtual world we’ve been living in was palpable. And your insistence on not just applying the painting to the fabric but using it as a kind of raw material, to begin again, was inspired. I personally was so happy to see you take my paintings and shape them into something else and animate them, in a way.
PP: When I saw your paintings, I felt this mix of fragility and strength. There was a vulnerability and a fierceness, these pure brushes of color. Then, after we met, I understood how important the body was in that process, so we decided to do the most beautiful and dramatic couture dress that was very aware of the body. And it was the final dress of the show because it really was about the end of parts both personal and professional for all of us. It was the perfect ending for you, for us, for the process.
JN: I remember, during one long conversation that we had, the idea forming that we’d do a gown. And suddenly my eyes were opened and the imagination was sparked.
PP: The moment when your eyes—
JN: Lit up?
PP: I remember very well that moment. It’s like when you have a blurry picture and then it becomes immediately focused and clear and perfect. That is the idea. That is the point to arrive to.
JN: I always think of making work as a kind of cottage industry, like a parallel universe that’s unfolding as I make the paintings. Because the tools and brushes and rigs I make are all products of necessity. They’re born from the necessity to create the tool because I can’t buy it or nobody else can make it. And it’s a necessity that is targeted to a very specific thing I’m trying to do. I once made a film where I sandwiched a glass sphere between two sheets of plexiglass and mounted it in front of the camera lens, and it made this kind of phantom orb that seemed to roll through the world. And I enjoy making these things. It’s a way to pass the time, lost in thought without too much investment in the psychic energy that needs to go into actually making something with them.
PP: To me, the process is part of creation. I try to explain to the people who work with me the kind of emotion I want to deliver, not the execution. Because I don’t want people who work with me to just execute something—I want them to feel it. Every single brushstroke on the cape we made was a print that we applied on top of the cape, so everything was handmade. But I like that in the end, you don’t feel the effort that goes into that right there. You don’t feel that there were 15 prints and thousands of hand stitches. I want you to only feel the magic. Only if you don’t feel the efforts do you get the magic of fashion….If I don’t dream, then I can’t deliver dreams to people. I think it’s difficult for people to feel something if I don’t feel something first.
JN: The emotion is always the most direct communication. It’s the way we experience the world most immediately…I was also so impressed that you gave credit to the people who made the clothes.
PP: Oh, yeah. Because since the very beginning of haute couture, they used to name the dresses after goddesses, actresses, or what-ever, so I decided it was good to give light, to give dignity, to the people actually making the clothes. For a couple of years now, every collection, I name the dresses with the names of the people who made the dress. And so the one that was styled from your artwork has the name of the seamstresses. It is “Daniela A., Francesca, Ylenia, Annamaria, Jamie Nares”—because, of course, it’s the mix of you all that gave birth to the dress.
JN: Dignity is a good word to use in this context.
PP: When we do this job, I feel it’s important to witness your time. That’s why I asked you and all the other artists to be part of this project—because I feel that we have to lead the change. When you see, on the runway of couture, men and women sharing the same kind of wardrobe, where we’re not dividing the world into boxes, then you create a kind of picture—a message of hope for a future where there are no boundaries. It’s a picture, and a picture can sometimes be stronger than any words. When you read a book, you develop an image of the characters and the landscape, and it’s your own imagination. But when you see a movie that is based on a book and then try to read the book, it’s difficult to go back and not see things the way they are in the movie. So you understand the power of the image. When you see an image as clear as men, women—humans—walking together, you don’t have to attach the word equality or freedom. It’s already there.
JN: We just made the movie from scratch.
PP: And once we’ve made the movie, it’s impossible to go back.
JN: Once I’ve come out as a trans person, it’s impossible for me to go back, and the love and dignity and everything you’ve sent my way, Pierpaolo…It’s such a gift, not just to me but to all people who feel different in a way. It’s a way to see that we’re actually not different, that difference is just a momentary feeling.
PP: Because we can come from different cultures and we can have different stories, but there are moments where we find connection because of the humanity we share.
JN: That’s where art and fashion can sometimes have the same end in sight, to find a deeper way to connect with the world. The idea of community has been very important in my life. It was more important than I even realized when I was in the thick of my early years, my coming-of-age years in New York. When you’re young and you find your community, it’s almost like you’re all the same person. You all think the same way and exchange ideas so rapidly. For me, that happened during a very particular time in New York, when I first became aware of fashion and lots of other things because these worlds suddenly comingled in a very explosive way. But as you get older, that all starts to feel somehow further away…You might become part of a bigger community, but it’s maybe not quite as tangible. That’s why it’s good to do work that brings people closer.
PP: That’s my hope.
For Nares, Fashion Editor: Haidee Findlay-Levin; Hair: Mideyah Parker for Oribe; Makeup: Andrew Colvin for Armani Beauty; Manicure: Aja Walton for Essie.
This article originally appeared in the December 2021/January 2022 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR, available on newsstands December 7.
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Pierpaolo Picciolo and Jamie Nares on the Power of Art to Build Community
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