There is something both irritating and magnificent in the idea that a couturier could, on a July afternoon, transform a university campus into a cathedral. I have always believed that fashion, like literature, is only worthwhile when it possesses the rare ability to tell the right kind of lie: to invent a truth more bearable than the one imposed upon us.

By taking Haute Couture out of its velvet-lined salons and into the uncompromising daylight of the Cité Universitaire, Pierpaolo Piccioli commits what I would call a salutary act of immodesty. He rejects the easy mystique of drawn curtains and whispered invitations, choosing instead to offer clothing what few designers dare to grant it: broad daylight, without indulgence, without shadows to conceal poorly executed blanket stitches or imperfect craftsmanship.

At Valentino, Piccioli sought to reconcile tailoring with volume, discipline with surrender, the woman who is sculpted with the woman who breathes. It was the ambition of an architect, I once wrote, but perhaps, above all, it was the ambition of a humanist. For there is no greater elegance than the kind that demands nothing of us, that does not require us to become statues in order to deserve it.

The spirit of the collection, with its monumental volumes, omnipresent shades of black, and sculptural silhouettes, is an unmistakable nod to Cristóbal Balenciaga. For this collection, Pierpaolo Piccioli chose to explore freedom and the celebration of the human body, allowing couture to move beyond ornament and become an expression of vitality itself.

When Haute Couture steps into the street in broad daylight, it ceases to be a privilege and becomes a proposition: the proposition of a beauty that no longer hides, that accepts being looked at directly, with all its imperfections and its irreverent lightness. If this is what fashion has become today, then I gladly forgive its excesses. Like great literature, it has at least retained the power to make us feel a little more alive.

FM