During the last couple of months of award shows I've been having a look at red carpet dresses via British Vogue's twitter. One of my favourite design labels has always been Valentino, and during a recent trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum I was reminded of how their collections tend to make extensive use of lace. Coincidentally, this May saw the designer's 80th birthday.
I spend a lot of time looking through the catwalk photographs on the British Vogue website and ended up going through all the couture and ready-to-wear collections back to 2008 whilst looking for the specific dresses I wanted! I came to the conclusion that though there's some things I'd prefer, there's nothing in these collections I wouldn't want to wear, and I don't often say that about many designers. The classic 'Valentino red' (like a Pantone 199C mixed with a Pantone 185C), which is included in many collections, is one of my favourite colours and it seems that pretty much every celebrity has worn the classic shade at one point. I visited the Valentino website, where I downloaded the Valentino 'virtual museum', which has beautiful films and examples of the collections.
At the V&A I wound up in the British galleries looking at old lacework and embroidery, which I'm now determined to learn how to do. You can tell the difference between handmade lace and modern machine lace from a mile off, and the galleries really showed this. The time and effort which must have gone into making these pieces is incredible!
Image two, three & four: (Valentino) advertising campaigns & catwalk photograph
Image five, six & seven: my own images (Laura Blair), V&A British galleries
This is such a beautiful post! Love Valentino xx
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