See Thebe Magugu and Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli Gloriously Transform Each Other’s Work

When South Africa’s fashion wunderkind Thebe Magugu first opened the mystery crate from Rome containing Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Valentino haute couture garment, he recognized it at once as the dress that Tracee Ellis Ross wore to grace the 2018 Emmy Awards. This was the garment chosen by Piccioli that Magugu would be tasked with reimagining as the second chapter of Vogue’s dress-swap initiative (see last September’s issue for what Tomo Koizumi and Maison Margiela’s John Galliano came up with): two designers working their individual alchemy to transform a fellow creator’s work. For Piccioli, the project has special resonance. “I love the idea of reinterpreting,” he explains, “but I love even more the idea of creating a moment between two identities, two cultures—this conversation creates a new energy.”

In Magugu’s Johannesburg studio, conversation began with the miracle of Piccioli’s full-bloom fuchsia-pink ball gown, which soon revealed itself to be buoyed by underskirts of filmy net and stiff crin, erupting in puff-ball ruffles at the bodice and elaborately pinch-pleated into a tiny waist. Small wonder that Ross later declared that her appearance in it was “what you call a fashion moment…. I have never felt prettier in my life.”

Magugu’s first instinct was to try the dress on, “which I immediately regretted—it was a very harsh reminder that I’m no longer sample-sized,” he says, playfully. Laying it on a cutting table but then dressing it on a mannequin instead, Magugu was “really arrested by its beauty. There are a few lessons that I can take from Pierpaolo’s career and work: his dedication to women, and celebrating them; and the idea of family—that’s the same thing with me. I always feel revitalized and reinvigorated when I get to go back home to Kimberley [his hometown in South Africa] and interact with my mom, my uncles, my aunts, because it powers my work in a lot of ways. There’s something so joyful and freeing about Pierpaolo’s work, and it’s something we need now more than ever.”

This opportunity to examine an haute couture garment up close also helped him to understand and appreciate for the first time “the level of work and craftsmanship that has gone into this—it really is a work of art.”

Still, he wanted to move this masterwork “into my context, and my way of working—to translate this really special piece into something that a lot of people could wear and see themselves in.” This would involve, as Magugu notes, “essentially deconstructing the dress and restitching it, almost Frankenstein-like, into a very elevated trench coat from my universe.”