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PARIS — When it was announced, back in July, that the design team of Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, whose vision of Valentino-after-Valentino had propelled the brand to billion-dollar status, was breaking up, and that Mr. Piccioli was going to be in sole charge of the house, there were a number of raised eyebrows. Industry watchers immediately began to play the guessing game of “who did what,” and wonder how things may change as a result.

On Sunday, with Mr. Piccioli’s first solo collection, they got their answer. “This is my aesthetic truth,” Mr. Piccioli said backstage before the show.

And guess what? It turned out his truth was not that different from the truth that had come before.

The back story was baroque and involved (as usual) and connected Brancusi and portraits of London youth from the 1970s, Giotto and Bianca Jagger, the Gutenberg printing press and social media. Not that it mattered, necessarily, since — once blended together — the signature attitude (high romance mixed with no-fuss urbanity overlaid with grace) was still there.

So was the familiar silhouette (round-necked, elongated, with narrow shoulders and sleeves), albeit a little looser and more fluid than it has been in the past. The elaborate embroidery — ditto, though this time around it was often abstracted into simple stitching, like etchings on silk, or transformed into a print: Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” as reimagined by Zandra Rhodes (Mr. Piccioli enlisted her as a collaborator); fish evolving into birds from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” either way often suspended from a velvet yolk.

Also, red, the original Valentino shade, now mutated into pink and fuchsia and burgundy. And leather peacoats and a terrific white leather dress suspended from spaghetti straps, with the skirt made from only two rectangles of fabric, their edges left to fall in rivulets down the front and back.

Indeed, if there was a notably pure Piccioli difference, it may have involved a softening of the line and the mood; a reduction of the strict puritanical edge that had provided the label some tension in the past. Many dresses simply floated around the body, like haute peasant smocks, with drawstrings at the waist and sides so they could be shaped at will.

But the effect was subtle. The most startling thing on the runway was a little portable lipstick case on a gold chain slung across a shoulder, a surreptitious announcement of the brand’s first cosmetic. Loyal Valentino customers may not even notice a difference.

This makes sense: Mr. Piccioli did, after all, help craft the previous Valentino aesthetic. To a certain extent it was always an expression of him. And he is, if you accept his metaphor, just at the beginning of his metamorphosis.

Which raises some interesting possibilities around the shape — Animal? Mythic? Mineral? — of things to come.