As you can say ‘Rosso Valentino’, now we may say ‘Noir Valentino’. This new concept, developed through the Valentino Le Noir Fall/Winter 2024-25 collection, is the new language that the Maison’s Creative Director, Pierpaolo Piccioli, chose to reconsider Valentino through the lens of black – here representative not of an absence of color, nor an exercise in monochrome or monotone, but rather the discovery of an entire spectrum of shades, infinitely nuanced, within one. He always considered color a powerful channel of immediate and direct communication – one consistently utilized as a means of recalibrating perception, reappraising form and function, and as a color, black has always held within itself a multitude of definitions and meanings, ever-transforming, perceived by all. A color of the everyday, here black is amplified, used to recontextualize the signs and signifiers of Valentino – rosettes, ruffles, embroideries, lace.

A contraposition in black, between lightness and toughness, then and now, was explored through shapes given sculptural quality in intense velvets and crêpe, while transparencies of chiffon veil the skin. As for the archetypical silhouettes of Valentino, glamorous lines and definite shoulders unmistakably drawn from the 1980s, they were re-examined without nostalgia, sharpened to delineate bodies of today. In this black universe, gestures drawn from the past become new, observed from a fresh viewpoint, and given a different identity.