Pierpaolo Piccioli is one of the few top designers still talking about — and thinking deeply about — body diversity.
It led him to the intriguing concept of “unsized” fashions for his compelling and slyly cool spring 2027 collection for Balenciaga, in which techno taffeta and cotton poplin stand elegantly away from the body — as much or as little as the wearer likes.
(According to the house, unsized connotes a light architecture, and some garments can be adjusted with drawstrings or ribbons.)
Back when he was at Valentino, Piccioli did an haute experiment dressing women with a variety of body frames in haute couture, breaking the norm of fitting collections on a single-fit model and embracing a broader spectrum of humanity in terms of age and body shape.
Now nearly a year into his tenure at Balenciaga, he described “unsized” as a way to “address people who love fashion and have different kinds of bodies.”
The clothes “can adapt to different bodies and that for me was key,” he said, describing dressing professional basketball player Steph Curry for the 2026 Met Gala as a recent eye-opener.
Indeed, Piccioli makes a convincing case for wearing couture silhouettes in offhand ways, tossing jeans under a gorgeously draped evening gown, a leather shirt with a long train, or a jersey T-shirt with a long protrusion for draping around the body. Robin Galiegue photographed the look book in and around the couture house on Avenue George V, melding grounded with grandeur.
Retailers will surely rejoice that Piccioli sought to create nearly weightless garments by employing lots of featherlight taffeta and glove-weight nappa leather. The designer even put some outfits on the scale to prove his point – and perhaps to delight precision packers.
His techno taffeta bomber jacket and skirt, the latter embroidered with feather-like strips of the same fabric, weighs in at a mere 607 grams. Even a five-layer men’s ensemble — which includes a couple of coats — comes in at only two kilograms.
This diverse collection also reflects Piccioli’s deep thinking about menswear, which has pinged quickly from streetwear to classic tailoring, compelling him to explore some intriguing middle grounds. Consider a tracksuit in black leather, a tailored jacket morphed with a windbreaker, or a new suede footwear style that falls somewhere between a sneaker and a suede boot.
“I like hybrids that you can’t define; it means they’re kind of new,” he remarked with a grin.
Indeed, this ranks as one of Piccioli’s newsiest and most sure-handed Balenciaga collections yet, riffing on archival jewelry, and the entire canon of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s illustrious career, which he has compiled in slim gray volumes and shelved like an encyclopedia set.
The Italian designer noted that most of the Spansih couturier’s peers built their fashion houses on a signature silhouette, whereas Balenciaga explored myriad shapes — cocoons, balloons, sacks and babydolls among them — while always prioritizing lightness and ease of movement.
“He invented the way we see fashion today,” Piccioli said. “All of these silhouettes that Cristóbal studied were close and far from the body at the same time, allowing movement. So for me, that was the key to get the lightness, the easiness of the movement, the body at the center of the conversation.”
Piccioli has taken the founder’s methods to heart, imbuing his pre-collection with “the idea of couture: You work with shapes and with volumes, but you engineer the cut. You don’t give any structure inside to achieve the shape.”
He’s set up some interesting talking points for Paris Couture Week next month, when Piccioli will present his first high-fashion collection for Balenciaga.
