It takes less than a minute for Pierpaolo Piccioli to steer a conversation about fashion into one about philosophy. More than a year into his tenure as creative director of Balenciaga, during an interview on the day after he showed his first couture collection for the house in July, Piccioli explains how he has navigated a role that is both familiar and foreign to him by first quoting Friedrich Nietzsche and the concept of oblivion—oblio in Piccioli’s native Italian.
“Oblio is a moment when you are aware of your past, but you kind of forget everything for a moment and you see everything with new eyes,” says Piccioli, seated at a large conference table in his office suite on Avenue George V, in Paris. “And that’s what actually happened to me.”
For most of his career, over a quarter century, Piccioli was associated with one designer: Valentino Garavani, who made a lasting impression on his life and his eye. Starting in 1999, Piccioli, then in his early 30s, and his longtime collaborator, Maria Grazia Chiuri, rose through the ranks at Valentino, becoming co–creative directors in 2008, a year after Valentino announced his retirement. Then Piccioli led the Roman house solo from 2016 to 2024, while Chiuri served as creative director at Dior. He knew the seamstresses by their names, their skills, their peculiarities, and their very Italian way of working, and he adopted the rhythms and rituals, if not the formality, of Valentino himself. This would have been a lot to leave behind for a designer taking on the mantle of another legendary brand—let alone that of Cristóbal Balenciaga. That house’s own rich history includes two wildly successful modern interpretations, first under Nicolas Ghesquière, then under the now mononymous Demna. But in the words of Nietzsche, “Man will desire oblivion rather than not desire at all.” “I didn’t want to come here to find the same people with the same experiences,” Piccioli says. “I wanted to face something new.”
At his couture show the day before, under the blazing sun in a garden on the outskirts of Paris, Piccioli showed 52 looks that were captivating in their strange beauty. Some of them were outrageously glamorous in the bold style that Piccioli had once championed at Valentino: He opened with a cloud-shaped jacket trimmed with a flock of intense red feathers, worn over a white oversize silk duchesse satin T-shirt and voluminous beige trousers; another look consisted of a dark red shirt styled with big pink pants. But many others represented new territory for the designer, like a floor-length coat the color of a yellow highlighter, which he showed backward, slung over matching pants. There was a fluorescent pink silk “balloon bolero” dress trimmed with feathers made of tiny strips of curled organza. The designs seemed to demand close inspection to be fully understood.
“It felt like a real celebration of artistry,” said the actor Lily Collins, who has known Piccioli for more than a decade, since they first attended a Met Gala together. “Pierpaolo and Balenciaga are the perfect mix.” Naomi Watts headed backstage, where she raved about a tailored black dress adorned with a white ribbon scarf. “That’s the sort of dress I look forward to wearing in my 50s, 60s, 70s, and then some,” she said. Demi Moore, who wore a Piccioli-designed Balenciaga couture ensemble at Cannes in May, circled the boards showing photographs of the models in each of their looks, while Hudson Williams, who appeared in one of Piccioli’s first Balenciaga advertising campaigns, stood nearby, waiting to offer his congratulations.
“This collection is the result of a feeling,” Piccioli wrote in a printed program composed of 20 narrowly spaced pages, including detailed descriptions of all the looks, along with the names of the members of his atelier who helped realize them—Victor, Thomas, Léa, Margherite, etc. “We worked while getting to know each other, learning to understand one another,” Piccioli wrote. It was part of his broad effort to humanize the couture-making experience, which can feel cold and anonymous to anyone living outside that bubble.
The week before the show, Balenciaga wiped its social media history and then posted portraits of some 40 members of its atelier, all dressed in their white Balenciaga Couture work coats. Many of them appeared to be quite young, though a few were established hands and familiar faces, including Bruno Sialelli, formerly the creative director at Lanvin. Philip Treacy, the milliner, was also credited in the couture program for contributions that included a pink ostrich-feather headpiece that spiraled from the crown and around the torso, turning the model who wore it into a swan.
This meeting of minds, among Piccioli, his seasoned collaborators, and his younger team, has become as much a part of his vision for Balenciaga as the clothes seen on his runway. “When you don’t know the rules, you are more open to experiment,” he says. “And that is the key for me to interpret Balenciaga. I didn’t want to go back to any of the old shapes but to try to invent a new shape that could have been that of Cristóbal.”
The day after the show, the couture salon is packed with visitors examining the looks. Patti Wilson, the stylist, has been there for more than an hour. Amal Clooney is spotted among the mannequins. When he arrives, Piccioli, who is 59, is dressed in his usual uniform of a black T-shirt and trousers, with a necklace of coral amulets worn as protection from bad energy. He has a pack of cigarettes in hand and is still very much the picture of a Roman designer who cooks his own pasta most nights, now at his new home just across the Seine. “I’ve got my Roman ways in Paris,” he says. “It’s a sort of effortless approach that is maybe less formal than expected, more direct and more human.”
On his first day at Balenciaga last year, Piccioli traveled to Getaria, the tiny fishing village in the Basque region of Spain where Cristóbal Balenciaga was born in 1895, and where a museum dedicated to the master’s work today offers access to an enormous array of designs collected by his staff and clients. As Piccioli immersed himself in Balenciaga’s world, he began to understand that designs he had perceived through images as austere or strictly linear were, in fact, quite light. That would be his starting point for Balenciaga couture. “In every one of his silhouettes, the body was the protagonist,” he said.
To achieve similar results in new ways became an obsession for Piccioli, and this is where having a younger atelier was an advantage—the team was willing to experiment with techniques that break with the strict traditions of couture. Perhaps the biggest change was replacing standard Stockman mannequins with custom forms created from 3D scans of models’ bodies. Those ghostly plastic forms were used to shape fabrics through a complex process of layering cashmere upon leather that had been washed, stretched, and allowed to dry in place to hold its shape. Each mold took as long as a month to create, but eliminated the need for darts or seams. Piccioli also wanted to play with new fabrics and materials, using a lab-grown silk called AMSilk that purports to be fossil fuel–free and stronger than steel.
Despite these technical innovations, Piccioli believes in the classic model of couture as the pinnacle of fashion. “When you talk about couture, you talk about an approach in which there are no maps. A 3D conversation with the body can then apply to denim, T-shirts, and tailored jackets from prêt-à-porter. To me, a T-shirt has to be a T-shirt, as much as a pair of jeans has to be a pair of jeans. But if you meld couture and industrialization, you can make a more modern garment.”
Like most designers of his generation, Piccioli was raised to worship at the altar of the great Cristóbal Balenciaga, who worked in Paris from 1937 until his retirement, in 1968. The first image Piccioli posted on his personal Instagram account, in 2018, was of a 1967 Balenciaga wedding ensemble that had been included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibition “Heavenly Bodies” that year. “Simplicity is a solved complexity,” Piccioli wrote in his caption, paraphrasing the sculptor Constantin Brâncusi. It did not escape Piccioli’s attention that the wedding dress had been designed by Balenciaga the same year Piccioli was born. And although his reverence for Balenciaga is rooted in the maestro’s innovations, Piccioli made clear upon his arrival at the house that he respected the label’s more recent history as a modern luxury brand as well. Balenciaga is now a commercial behemoth that has been redefined by other famous designers. Ghesquière gave Balenciaga heat in the new millennium; Demna brought the house to the street over the past decade, and his flair for disruption ultimately drove Balenciaga well past $1 billion in sales. Both are difficult acts to follow.
With his initial ready-to-wear shows, Piccioli laid some of the groundwork. His spring 2026 collection was based on Balenciaga’s 1957 sack dress, which had a lightweight and unrestrictive shape that was revolutionary at the time; the following season was an ode to “finding lightness in the dark,” as illustrated by inky black skirts and coats, a few pieces rendered with imagery from Sam Levinson’s Euphoria. Piccioli also alluded to his personal love of sports with a techwear-meets-couture pre-fall collection, and with the introduction of a collaboration with the NBA in January that included four-figure varsity jackets, as well as hoodies and sweatpants that would not have looked out of place in the luxury streetwear oeuvre of his predecessor.
As Piccioli steers the future of Balenciaga while learning to embrace his own, he is facing change on a personal level. Valentino Garavani, to whom Piccioli remained close long after his retirement, died in January at the age of 93. Piccioli’s former design partner, Chiuri, has since left Dior and returned to Rome, where she made her couture debut for Fendi the same week Piccioli was presenting his for Balenciaga. His children, Benedetta, Pietro, and Stella, are all now adults and starting their own lives. Just as before, he returns to Italy to spend his holidays with his wife, Simona, and their family at their seaside home in the small beach town of Nettuno, near Rome, but their days there are more limited than they were before.
In Piccioli’s loose interpretation of Nietzsche, a designer might be able to forget his history out of necessity for a moment, but the past remains around him all the same. Acknowledging as much, Piccioli has kept the office he inherited mostly untouched. Its decor is aggressively gray, just as Demna left it last year when he was tasked with righting the ship at Gucci, which, like Balenciaga, is owned by the luxury goods conglomerate Kering. Piccioli layered some brightly colored rugs on the floor and retrieved from his own storage a three-person desk designed by Gio Ponti. Against the far wall is a billboard-size poster of a famous photograph of the same Balenciaga 1967 wedding ensemble Piccioli posted on Instagram, which shows the dress in such stark black and white contrast that its sharp silhouette forms an almost perfect triangle. Leaned against the photo is a bright pink surfboard designed by Piccioli for Zara’s 50th anniversary last year.
“I’ve added some elements and taken out others, but this is kind of metaphorical of what I’m doing here at Balenciaga,” Piccioli says of the office. “They are contradictory in the space, but in a way I feel that they have found their own harmony. I didn’t want to deny what has been done before me. I’d rather layer on top of that and create a bridge so that Balenciaga can go somewhere else.”
Hair by Benjamin Muller at MA+ Talent; makeup by Lucy Bridge at Streeters; manicure by Fanny Santa Rita for Essie at Call My Agent. Model: Lydia Hall at Ford Models Barcelona. Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting. Set design by Rafael Medeiros at the Wall Group.
Produced By Holmes Production; Photo Assistants: Will Grundy, Estelle Chauffour, Felix Borrelli; Retouching: Lever Post; Fashion Assistants: John Handford, Sam Belbeoch; Production Assistants: Brandon Marras, Famory Dembele; Hair Assistant: Mills Mouchopeda; Makeup Assistant: Jana Reininger; Set Assistants: Xavier Madden, Vincent Wolff.