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Pierpaolo Piccioli made a stunning comeback to fashion with his debut at Balenciaga—literally at Balenciaga headquarters, that is. For those who knew and loved him during his tenure at Valentino (where he solely designed all the collections between 2016 and 2024, after Maria Grazia Chiuri left) it was cause for wild celebration—because Piccioli has brought his whole self with him to his new job—the couture volumes, the color, the tailoring. The lot.

As he explained in a long conversation with me before the show, Piccioli was inspired by a single Cristobal Balenciaga couture dress: the Sack Dress of 1957. If this sounds stuffy and obscure, that would be getting him wrong. The reason he chose it was because its radical straight-up-and-down simplicity was an outrage at a time when most women were stuck in the corseted Christian Dior New Look style of 10 years earlier. “He freed women to live in their own space. His method was body, fabric, and air. I want to put the human at the center of everything.”

And so there was look one: his homage to the Sack, a long black V-neck evening dress, unfitted through the top, with white opera gloves, and a huge pair of batgirl-meets showgirl sunglasses. With said headpiece, Piccioli was giving a salute to Demna and his penchant for extreme shades. “It would be stupid to deny who has been here before: Demna, Nicolas Ghesquière, and Cristobal,” he declared.

Radical simplicity: what Piccioli identifies with in the founder of the house is how Cristobal was “a maximalist and minimalist at the same time.” Piccioli’s spring runway was populated with luscious shape and volume, balloon skirts, an interpretation of the famous cocoon coat in vivid absinthe green, a magenta trapeze dress with a puffed ruffle hem, and a vivid red one-shouldered draped dress fluidly trailing a spiraling asymmetric scarf.

An homage to Nicolas Ghesquière came through the incidence of the conceptual riding hats, one topping a double breasted A-line navy peacoat over khaki shorts with the roominess of a skirt. Fashion buffs will know that Ghesquière delighted the world with his reinterpretation of that original Cristobal look in his spring 2008 show.

He is also championing the return of the Balenciaga tunic—shown over narrow black pants, plain at the front, but cut with a graceful opening at the back of the neck. This is a novel introduction for the season, though something of the same shape has also cropped up at The Row and Alaïa. It’s also as simple as a white t-shirt, but with extra presence.

Piccioli’s excellence at permutations of eveningwear is long established and a sense of it ran throughout the collection. It is a call to a more sophisticated customer, one who has had nowhere much to go for a long time. Or perhaps she is the same Balenciaga customer, who’s growing up? It might be a bit premature to declare streetwear dead, but perhaps that’s the way it’s going in high fashion. There were no oversized Demna-like hoodies, but Piccioli’s appreciation of his predecessor took another form, giving chinos a couture-cut treatment, turning a bomber jacket into a leather bubble, and making the oversized white shirt so big it now has a train.

There was enormous hoopla around the show, what with Meghan Markle in the house, and Kristen Scott Thomas and Isabelle Huppert topping the roster of actors in attendance. Sometimes the presence of celebrities overwhelms the importance of the clothes on the runway. This definitely was not the case with the promise of what Piccioli showed, with not a gimmick or a meme-worthy joke in sight, just beautiful and realistic fashion showing an optimistic way forward.