Neon pink as far as the eye can see. This was the theme of Valentino’s autumn/winter 2022 collection, which debuted at Paris Fashion Week yesterday. Everything – including the show’s set, the chairs that the attendees perched themselves on and the collection itself – featured a single shade of vibrant fuchsia. The hue was specifically selected by the house’s creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli and is set to be added to Pantone’s official colour scale under the name “Pink PP”. 

And while the clothes themselves were as striking as we have come to expect from Valentino, another refreshing element of the debut was the fashion house’s choice in model casting. Valentino selected models whose ages spanned various decades, with older models storming the catwalk in elaborate fuchsia-hued wares and monochromatic black ensembles. 

57-year-old model Kristen Mcmenamy offered up a particularly show-stopping moment as she closed the show in a floor-length pink gown featuring a long train that billowed in the wind as she walked. 

Of course, this is not the first time the fashion house has chosen to make a point of age inclusivity. Earlier this year, Valentino hosted its spring/summer couture show and also made headlines for its inclusion of age-diverse models.

“When you do couture, you have the house model. And you apply the body of the house model to 50 or 60 models on the runway. I wanted to break these rules and embrace the idea of different proportions of body, different sizes, different ages,” Pierpaolo Piccioli told Vogue at the time, explaining his choice to use not only age-diverse but also size-diverse models on a couture catwalk. “It was impossible to do this with just one house model. So, I broke the rules and got 10 house models with differently proportioned bodies,” he continued.      

Valentino is certainly proving that high fashion is for everyone, changing the industry one runway at a time, and we could not be happier about it. 

Images: Getty