Pierpaolo Piccioli
Italian couturier who modernised Valentino through colour, volume and inclusive casting, and became Balenciaga's creative director in 2025.
Pierpaolo Piccioli is a couturier whose clothes are built to communicate before they are decoded. A saturated colour, an enormous but weightless cape, or a face visibly moved in the audience often tells the story of his work more accurately than a complicated reference list. He spent twenty-five years at Valentino, first in accessories, then as co-creative director with Maria Grazia Chiuri and finally as sole creative director. Since July 2025 he has led Balenciaga, where he succeeded Demna. (Associated Press; Kering)
That move was not a retreat from Demna's contemporary Balenciaga into conventional prettiness. Piccioli's own career has been a long argument that romance and relevance can occupy the same garment. He treats couture as a working method—cutting, construction, the intelligence of an atelier—and uses its scale to make ideas about dignity, individuality and representation publicly visible.
Nettuno, Rome and an education in accessories
Piccioli was born in Rome in 1967 and grew up in the seaside town of Nettuno, where he has continued to live with his family rather than adopting the full-time social life of a fashion capital. He studied literature at the University of Rome and initially imagined a career in cinema. An experimental-fashion course redirected him toward clothes; an internship at Brunello Cucinelli and roughly a decade at Fendi followed. At Fendi he met Maria Grazia Chiuri, beginning one of modern Italian fashion's most consequential design partnerships. (Associated Press; British Vogue)
Valentino hired Piccioli and Chiuri in 1999 to develop its accessories. The assignment mattered. Accessories taught the pair how a house code could be reduced to an object that people use repeatedly, and it placed them close to Valentino Garavani's couture language without asking them to imitate it immediately. When they became joint creative directors on 4 October 2008, after the founder's retirement and Alessandra Facchinetti's brief tenure, they had already spent years learning how the company worked. (Associated Press; Vogue Italia)
Their defining commercial object was the Rockstud, introduced in 2010. Small pyramid studs traced the straps of shoes and the edges of bags, mixing the metal bosses found on Roman doors and palazzi with the attitude of punk. The result was recognisably Valentino—Roman, decorative, carefully made—but much easier to wear than a formal red gown. It became a durable house signature rather than a one-season hit. Both designers consistently described it as a shared invention, an important qualification when attributing pieces from their joint tenure. (Interview; ICON)
A solo language at Valentino
Chiuri left Valentino for Dior in July 2016, and Piccioli continued alone. The separation made his particular instincts easier to see. He simplified the historical quotation around a garment while enlarging its emotional effect: a monastic line cut in an electric colour, a hoodie given the volume of a cape, or a couture gown made to seem buoyant rather than upholstered. He frequently credited individual members of the atelier in collection notes, placing their initials beside the looks they made. The gesture fitted his belief that the creative director supplies a vision but couture is realised collectively. (Vogue; Le Monde)
His Spring 2019 couture show became the clearest expression of that philosophy. Piccioli began with Cecil Beaton's famous 1948 photograph of white society women in Charles James gowns and asked what that image might look like with Black women at its centre. Forty-three of the show's sixty-five looks were modelled by Black women, including Naomi Campbell, Liya Kebede, Adut Akech and newcomers making their couture debuts. The point was not to attach an “ethnic” theme to the clothes. The collection used the established vocabulary of couture—flowers, feathers, ruffles and ball-gown volume—while changing who was permitted to embody its fantasy. (Vogue Runway; Vogue Italia)
The show helped define Piccioli's idea of inclusion. He was not proposing that couture cease to be rare or expensive; he was arguing that its imagery and emotion need not belong to one race, age, body or gender. That position also shaped the people he dressed—among them Zendaya, Frances McDormand, Billy Porter, Florence Pugh and Glenn Close—and the increasingly broad casting of Valentino's ready-to-wear and couture shows. (Vogue Italia; Le Monde)
Pink PP and the discipline of one colour
For Fall 2022, Piccioli reduced almost an entire collection and its set to one high-intensity pink, relieved by a sequence of black looks. Developed with the Pantone Color Institute and named Pink PP, the shade quickly escaped the runway through tailoring, platform shoes, bags and celebrity dressing. Its ubiquity can make the collection look like a marketing exercise in retrospect, but the original premise was formal: remove the distraction of many colours so that viewers attend to silhouette, surface and individual character. (British Vogue; Valentino)
Pink PP also shows why colour in Piccioli's work is structural rather than an afterthought. He often works with unlikely pairings—violet and acid green, tobacco and lilac, red against turquoise—yet a colour field can do the same work as an architectural cut. It changes the apparent weight of a large dress and the emotional temperature of a room. The monochrome experiment made that process unusually easy to read. (British Vogue)
The enlarged studs of the Roman Stud accessories and the towering Tan-Go platform shoes translated the same period's preference for bold, immediately legible forms into products. They belong to Piccioli's solo authorship, unlike the original Rockstud developed with Chiuri. (Vogue Italia; British Vogue)
Piccioli and Valentino ended their collaboration by mutual agreement on 22 March 2024. The announcement closed a quarter-century at one house, eight years of it under his sole direction. (Associated Press)
Balenciaga, 2025–present
Kering announced Piccioli as Balenciaga's creative director on 19 May 2025, effective 10 July. The appointment joined a designer identified with Roman colour and emotional couture to a house founded on austere engineering. That contrast is real, but so is the common ground: both Piccioli and Cristóbal Balenciaga build volume through cut, place air between cloth and body, and understand couture as a laboratory rather than surface decoration. (Kering; Kering's Balenciaga history)
His debut ready-to-wear collection, Summer 2026, was titled The Heartbeat. It revisited Balenciaga forms—a cocoon back, sack dresses, sculpted tailoring and flowered evening wear—without staging a literal archive remake. The house described the collection as a “recalibration”: Piccioli retained the founder's conversation between body, fabric and empty space while introducing his own warmth and directness. Fall 2026, Body and Being, developed that approach before his first Balenciaga couture presentation. (Balenciaga; Balenciaga campaign)
The 55th Couture Collection, presented in July 2026, placed couture back at the centre of the house rather than treating it as a ceremonial side project. Piccioli approached the archive through method: technically weightless volumes, fabric development and clothes engineered around movement. His Spring 2027 collection has continued that work with featherweight techno taffeta, suggesting that his Balenciaga will be judged less by a single viral object than by how fully couture thinking can organise a modern wardrobe. (Balenciaga; Balenciaga Spring 2027)
Reading and dating the work
Piccioli's Valentino should not be read as one uninterrupted solo tenure. Accessories from 1999 to 2008 came from a studio he helped lead; the collections and Rockstud family from 2008 through July 2016 were co-authored with Maria Grazia Chiuri; work from July 2016 through March 2024 belongs to his sole creative direction. Labels and season codes are still needed to place any individual item precisely. (Associated Press)
At Balenciaga, Piccioli assumed the role only after Demna's final couture show in July 2025. Summer 2026 is his first collection, so products from earlier seasons remain Demna-era designs even when sold during Piccioli's tenure. The useful distinction is between the date of retail availability and the creative season in which an object was conceived. (Kering; Balenciaga)
Piccioli's lasting contribution is not simply that he made couture colourful. He made its labour visible, expanded the public image of who may inhabit it, and proved that a garment can carry a moral position without becoming a slogan. His Balenciaga chapter is still young, but it already clarifies the continuity in his career: volume is a way to give the wearer space, and beauty is most persuasive when more people can recognise themselves inside it.
References
- Kering. “Pierpaolo Piccioli appointed Creative Director of Balenciaga.” 19 May 2025.
- Kering. “Balenciaga.” House history and current creative direction.
- Associated Press. “Valentino's longtime designer Piccioli announces his departure after 25 years.” 22 March 2024.
- Anders Christian Madsen. “Pierpaolo Piccioli speaks to Vogue.” British Vogue, 2018.
- Vogue Italia. “Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri.” Career profile.
- Hamish Bowles. “Valentino Spring 2019 Couture.” Vogue Runway, 23 January 2019.
- Radhika Seth. “Moda couture e casting: l'ultima frontiera della diversità?” Vogue Italia, 26 June 2019.
- Vogue Italia. “Pierpaolo Piccioli: La moda dovrebbe essere inclusione non esclusività.” 2019.
- Sarah Mower. “Pierpaolo Piccioli on Valentino, couture and community.” Vogue, 2018.
- Le Monde. “Pierpaolo Piccioli, le pouvoir des couleurs.” 12 July 2025.
- Interview. “Studly Valentino.” 15 October 2010.
- ICON. “Valentino-Designer Maria Grazia Chiuri und Pierpaolo Piccioli im Interview.” 18 July 2015.
- Alice Newbold. “Everybody Enjoys Eccentricity: Valentino's Hot Pink Suits Us All.” British Vogue, 27 May 2022.
- Selene Oliva. “La nuova Valentino Garavani Roman Stud.” Vogue Italia, 12 March 2021.
- Valentino. “Pink PP: craftsmanship.” 2022.
- Balenciaga. “Summer 26: The Heartbeat.” 2025.
- Balenciaga. “Heart and Body Campaign.” 17 February 2026.
- Balenciaga. “55th Couture Collection.” July 2026.
- Balenciaga. “Spring 27.” 2026.
