Valentino: Facchinetti's Thoroughly Modern Moment (Fashion Wire Daily)

Paris - Theres a telling, and frequently cruel moment, seconds after the debut of a designer at a famous house, when the audience either turns on its heels and marches out silently, or everyone races backstage, clamoring to embrace the new talent, keen to be "the first" to acclaim their genius.

Its always a dramatic denouncement and the big news today in Paris is that the fashion decision makers practically walked all over each other in their rush to compliment Alessandra Facchinetti after her stylish and elegant debut for Valentino, a collection that looked enough like this houses oeuvre to assure his traditional customers and sufficiently original to indicate thats this newcomers tenure at the Roman house will not be a short one.

In the most striking example of the collective imprimatur, fashions most powerful editor, American Vogue editrix Anna Wintour, a woman who very rarely comes backstage post show, waited patiently in the madding crowd to congratulate Facchinetti.

Opening with smartly cut suits with angled jackets and ever so curvy skirts cut above the knee in a gray lilac hue, a silhouette and sensibility that recalled the days when Sir Val used to dress Jackie O. Following with striking ruffled chiffon blouses in navy blue or mauve, worn over indented woolen skirts and centered with strict belts – one outfit on Chinese uber babe Mo Wandan was the best look for day. They all looked, well, rather Valentino, but with that soupcon of modernity that made the ensemble a tad more approachable.

There have been few designers as classy as Valentino Garavani, maybe too much so. At times, the original Valentino gal was so well heeled, any guy who didnt own a private plane probably felt intimidated, wondering how he would fund this sort of beauty. Facchinetti, by comparison, turned up the heat and down the haute – making clothes that had class, but maybe more mass appeal.

That said, while comfortably negotiating her first test, the collection was not quite a great one – a series of somewhat flimsy and frilly dresses underlined that there remains work to be done for evening. However, the shows penultimate passage – one of only two in Vals signature sinful red – was a true stunner. Worn by Midwestern Valkyrie Angela Lindvall, cut with a mega open back and ruffled trim, it would have been perfectly at home in Vals brilliant recent retrospective in Rome.

The collection received long and sustained applause, led by its cool front row of Ines Sastre, Rebecca Romijn, Vahina Giocante, Winona Ryder, the by now ubiquitous Kanye West and Vals long-time partner Giancarlo Giammetti.

Most importantly, though no one was blunt enough to say it out loud, the odds seemed stacked against Facchinetti today before the show. Rumors of weak pre-collection sales, her dramatic departure from a previous job as Gucci designer and the inevitable difficulty of replacing an icon like Valentino, meant that the betting was on a set back and rather than an achievement. So it is to Alessandras considerable credit that she, essentially, proved the doubters wrong. We call that passing fashions trickiest test with aplomb.