Roman Spring

Pierpaolo Piccioli took on one of the most fabulous and storied couture houses in the world—and has brought a palpable sense of the real to Valentino’s breathtaking fantasy.

- Hamish Bowles

IN HIS HASTE, Pierpaolo Piccioli parks his Mercedes on the bias across two parking spaces at the train station in Nettuno—just as the Rome-bound 12:07 that we were meant to catch whistles out of the station. Piccioli commutes from here every working day to beat the notorious Roman traffic, taking a chauffeured car home at night, but even so he still hasn’t quite mastered the system. Just how often does he miss that train? “Three times a week,” he cracks, his lugubrious eyes twinkling in the winter sunlight.

Piccioli cranks the car into reverse, and we bound on through the flat Roman countryside at breakneck speed to catch the same train before it arrives a couple of stops down the line. Eschewing the trappings of fame and fortune that Valentino Garavani and his partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, embraced so fulsomely has become an essential part of Piccioli’s shtick. Not for him the Bacons and Hockneys and Warhols, the storied château in France, the chalet in Gstaad, the villa on the Appian Way, the stuccoed London town house, the Manhattan pied-à-terre, the yacht—all of them scattered with issues of ¡Hola! and crowded with the real-life glamorous faces seen in its pages.

“Valentino was the brand himself,” says Piccioli as we settle in for our short commute—time Piccioli usually reserves for catching up on iconic old Italian movies on his laptop. “Now everything is about communities—about sharing values, not surfaces—and I want Valentino to be a couture house that is relevant for today for young people. I never wanted to substitute the lifestyle of Valentino for my own,” he adds firmly. “If you’re not in an ivory tower, I think you can dream more.”