Valentino’s Fall/Winter 2025 Haute Couture took a dramatic turn—where dark romance, sculptural silhouettes, and radical softness rewrote the couture playbook for a daring new generation.
Beneath the poorly lit salone packed to the rafters with atmosphere, Pierpaolo Piccioli introduced a new Valentino attitude: bold, uncompromising, and steeped in couture mystery. His Fall/Winter 2025 Haute Couture was a spectacle: a night-time hymn to beauty that wedded gothic sophistication to an indefinably modern attitude.
Farewell to the heavenly pastels and easy prettiness of seasons prior. In their place: dark velvets, undulating silks, sumptuous blood-reds, and black violets—colours that whispered secrets and seduced with restraint. The shapes were strong but never aggressive: plunging shoulders fell away into narrow waists, and dramatic opera coats wrapped around gossamer sheers and chiselled corsets.
Piccioli disrupted conventional beauty codes by laying romance against rebellion. What caught our eye? A black velvet ball gown incised with architectural cut-outs, hand-embellished with crystal petal hand-sewn that sparkled like dew in moonlight. Another, a high-necked, floor-length cape in lacquered plum, left a whirlwind of hand-dyed silk roses behind it. Each piece weighed intensity and intimacy—such as poetry on the body.
Models wore streamlined, raven-black hair with smudged garnet lips and minimal accessories, letting the clothes speak. It was a collection for the next generation of Valentino muse: fearless, introverted, and quietly subversive.
This wasn’t trend-dressing nostalgia. This was fashion-forward for the young elite—who crave depth, detail, and emotion into every thread. Valentino didn’t just jump on the trend with FW25—it created the platform for an edgier, more mature luxury era.
