Exploring the Valentino logo

The Valentino Garavani VLogo Signature artbook, commissioned by creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli, explores the logo of the historical fashion house through the reinterpretation of 16 magazines.

When Valentino returned to show in Italy during Milan Fashion Week last September, the brand’s creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli spoke of a “re-signification” of the brand’s codes which, for the occasion, showed for the first time in the industrial space of the former Macchi foundry in the Bovisa area, definitely a different area, in terms of use and architectural style, from the Parisian buildings that Valentino has inhabited in recent history. That work on codes is something that particularly interests Piccioli who, in his path, has committed to rewriting the brand through the lens of contemporaneity, starting with the concepts, both controversial and not easy to interpret, of exclusivity and inclusiveness. The exploration of models of beauty that for a long time have been considered “different” or have been systematically ignored, for example, has allowed the creative director to demonstrate how the heritage of a brand such as Valentino can adapt with the lightness of the classics to new faces, new bodies and new identities.

The Valentino Garavani VLogo Signature artbook, of which we share some preview images here on Rivista Studio, moves in the same direction, that of the rewriting, or rather, the resemanticization of one of the most iconic elements that characterise a fashion brand, namely its logo. Compendium of clean lines, seventies modernist essentiality and praise of the purity of forms and volumes, the Valentino logo is thus reinterpreted in a special collector’s book through the vision of 16 different magazines from all over the world – including 032c, AnOther, Antidote, Cactus, Commons & Sense, Dapper Dan, Dazed China, Dazed Korea, Dust and Purple – who have given a new meaning to the commercial function of the logo in an iconoclastic way, using free visual associations and with total photographic and artistic freedom. Piccioli took care of the book’s creativity, «intervening on the pages, in a syncretic universe of images, photographs, signs, drawings, characters, writings, words, erasures, corrections, overwriting, scribbles, brush strokes, cuts, repetitions and everything related to the process of transforming ideas into clear and narrable concepts», as we read in the official statement. In this way, the creative director wanted to show the layering of possible meanings that usually escape us because we are too concentrated on the uniqueness of the logo, the product or the campaign. And it does so with a project that is “uncensored” and encourages maximum creative freedom.

The immediacy of the logo and its unique reduction thus explode into a myriad of different interpretations and possibilities, as it has already happened in the September fashion show, where fluffy and romantic dresses alternated with jeans and the new Valentino Garavani Roman Stud. For the launch of Valentino Garavani VLogo Signature, Maison Valentino has planned a series of activations all over the world, from Tokyo to New York. The Valentino Garavani VLogo Signature book will also be available for purchase in selected Valentino boutiques around the world and distributed online on IDEA Books.