For Fall 2019, Valentino Courts Poets

Alongside Valentino's Fall 2019 collection, designer Pierpaolo Piccioli launched a small booklet of poetry with contributions from Greta Bellamacina, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Mustafa The Poet, and Robert Montgomery called On Love. At Vogue, Brooke Bobb explains that Piccioli "enlisted the help of four contemporary poets to interpret his latest wares via words on paper: Greta Bellamacina, who got her start as an actress in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and is a published author who was short-listed for Young Poet Laureate of London in 2014; Yrsa Daley-Ward, activist and author of Bone and The Terrible; Mustafa The Poet, who has cowritten songs with Drake and The Weeknd; and Robert Montgomery, a Scottish poet and artist who creates large-scale public installations with his written work." More from there: 

The result was a booklet of poems titled On Love, which describes and highlights the romance of the clothes and the ethos of freedom of imagination at the Roman fashion house. Each poet met with Piccioli privately as he was designing the collection. They spoke about the garments, but also about the power of love and self-expression. As Bellamacina wrote in the booklet, “These poems were inspired by Pierpaolo’s creations, which celebrate the daily search for love, the broken light behind each day.” Mustafa The Poet explained that he “took the magic” of his discussion with Pierpaolo “and wrote about our shared interest in love that’s boundless.”

Montgomery and Daley-Ward both wrote about love in the context of healing and the human condition. The set for the show featured a giant stanza from Montgomery’s piece, and all of the poets’ words were incorporated onto the actual garments in the collection, embroidered onto outerwear and shirting and printed onto accessories. Lines include, “You thought I was too dark until I stretched into a galaxy” and “There’s a forever beyond the sky / I think we should go there tonight.” These patterns and graphics, some of which showed people kissing and cut-out-style florals, were created in collaboration with Undercover designer Jun Takahashi, whom Piccioli worked with on the Fall 2019 Valentino menswear collection.

Read more at Vogue.