On Tuesday, January 26th, 2021 at 3 pm, the Valentino Haute Couture SS21 CODE TEMPORAL collection was presented with a digital show, with the creative direction of Pierpaolo Piccioli and the music of Robert Del Naja (3D – Massive Attack), at Palazzo Colonna in Rome. A re-coding of the codes of the Roman fashion house through the values and new rituals of the time in which we live. 

“CODE TEMPORAL” is a larger project that, in addition to the presentation of the runway show on the 26th, saw Bristol-born musician and artist Robert Del Naja create new audiovisual artwork. A film artwork that is a response to the dialogue between Valentino Creative Director Pierpaolo Piccioli and Del Naja.  

Del Naja worked together with neural artist Mario Klingemann “to teach” an artificial intelligence the process of working in Haute Couture. The work explores the very process of the collection by playing with symmetries between learned systems and human transgression, and the spontaneity of machine learning.

With a script made of pieces assembled as a collage, the work was filmed and observed by machine learning algorithms spontaneously assembled by neural networks trained by Klingemann to “learn” the work behind Haute Couture. For 3 months the artificial intelligence was “fed” with a video of the making of made in the Valentino Ateliers in Rome. 

It is precisely through the synthetic filter of AI that the emotional aspect of Couture emerges, the celebration and enhancement of human quality: a code that is endlessly regenerated and remains timeless.

The images shot during the meticulous creation of the new Valentino Haute Couture SS21 collection in Rome, all become algorithmic sequences processed and scanned by a new music thanks to the machine. The time code of this process of Couture becomes a digital narrative in the collaboration with Del Naja: a complete and stand-alone document of the long process of the Atelier, culminating in the fashion show in Rome, at Galleria Colonna, Sala Grande.