Giambattista Valli is holding fast to the digital supplants of fashion weeks past. He’s putting on his Haute Couture 2021 behind the lens of 11 minutes and 42 stills of hard romance and deft excess – turning outsized tulles into whispered Parisian tales of the night and some frothy moments of fantasy. 

Shot amongst the French Communist Party’s stables in Paris, fashion turns to utter escapism as plissé ruffles and silk chiffons warp and weft in and out of frame. It eddies something of a Parisian Coven, albeit lighter than Ryan Murphy’s vision, with the lucid pulls of time, suspenseful stares into the unknown, hurried and then stately lapses of each frame, predicated very much on what will be next – mystery set to the drag of a silk taffeta cape.

“The past is very heavy and the future is very uncertain, so it’s about being open and free,” Valli tells Vogue’s Andres Christian Madsen in a preview. “You make no expectations; you just get ready. And you have this slight sense of danger—in a positive way—because you’re going out facing the unknown – it’s very open.”

It’s that gloss of reemerging that colors the sinuous shapes and controlled excess of his couture. It’s turned a collection, very much within the Giambattista fold – one playing to his loved tropes of romance, and depth, and fantasy – to now seem utterly fresh and new. Valli turns dense frills linear and shifts peplum billows to shantung trousers with the deft swoop of a camera – always sure to truncate well above the knee (Anthony Vaccarello-above-the-knee) or leave the onus on tulled bouquets and draped lamés to play to the imagination.

For many, couture is a dip into fashions most extreme and Giambattista is often the haute-archetype. For his Fall 2021, the puckered waists, columns of silk faille, and Odile Gilbert hairdos are perhaps his most daring shade of the season – he’s postured the dream into something more tangible. Post-pandemic fashions are colored all the more vivid, and Valli’s visions of dragging tulles and hedged chiffons have become a practical reality – even in just 11 minutes of fanfare. 

Explore Giambattista Valli’s entire Fall 2021 Haute Couture Collection below.