After the Valentino haute couture show in January, I had a hunch that we hadn’t seen nothing yet So powerful was that moment, where candy-coloured taffeta robes wafted around gilded opera-booming salons and handkerchiefs were pulled out of pockets like Marie-Antoinette had risen from her early grave, that it had to resound through everything in its wake “It was authentic,” Pierpaolo Piccioli offered when I saw him last week, the day before a follow-up collection that broke the fashion internet under folds and folds of the dreams from which this kind of dressmaking is spun.

“I wanted to have a very free approach For me couture is a place where you liberate your dreams,” he said “It's fantasy, intimacy, emotions altogether” indigital Advertisement As I observed the reactions to John Galliano’s return to menswear in his first men’s collection for Maison Margiela the week prior to the haute couture shows in January, it. More