At Valentino on Tuesday, March 10, the house’s creative directors, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli sent out lavish ladies-who-lunch fashion despite the recessionary winds. Where Paris catwalks have featured lots of working women and sexy power CEO’s, Chiuri and Piccioli opted in their ready-to-wear debut for a more languid femme.

The silhouette was lean, the shapes compact, but throughout there was an permanent air of a grand dame descending to instruct her servants and not a dynamic woman going out to confront the world. Jackets with arm-impeding cape sides did not seem to allow much space for actually shuffling papers across a desk.

That’s not to suggest that Chiuri and Piccioli are not adept tailors, whose opening cocktail looks had a refined gentility and pizzazz worthy of the house’s founder; in particular the sinful look sported by Russian model Sasha Piovarova. And with their hand painted, graffiti-like print, fabrics took the Valentino girl to a newer, artier world than the one designed by the house’s founder.

Valentino announced his retirement from the company in September 2007, seven weeks after celebrating his 45th anniversary in fashion with a sumptuous weekend in Rome. His departure came three months after equity fund Permira won a takeover battle to acquire the Valentino Fashion Group, in a deal that valued the designer’s fashion house at $380 million.

Chiuri and Piccioli, two former assistants of Valentino, replaced the founder’s initial successor, Alessandra Facchinetti, last October after the new owners decided she had strayed too far from the master’s original oeuvre.

The new design duo had a savvy sense of the staging of this show, held in the Palais de Tokyo’s Galerie des Moulages, a truly magnificent, soaring space with models of Gothic arches, flying buttresses and pinnacles. The smart and intriguing casting of mega stars and new faces strutted out on a silver mirrored runway, reflecting the Eiffel Tower through the giant windows of giant curved hall.

In their program notes, the pair called for a “more relaxed dimension” to elegance, but these clothes were formal with a capital F.

Chiuri and Piccioli delivered the goods when it came to accessories with frosted snakeskin platforms and some eye-catching rosette encrusted snakeskin bags. They also scattered crystals all over the collection, edging black bobtail boleros, as trim on scalloped back yellow satin dresses or even as a circuit board pattern on dashing mink coats.

The soundtrack was a mix of a dub version of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” and Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown,” which left most members of the audience smiling ironically because West, who has attended nearly every big show in New York, London, Milan and Paris this season, was not at the Valentino show when they boomed the rapper’s music over the catwalk.

Though the collection had plenty of chic ideas, the design duo seemed too locked into to the founder’s concept of fashion at the very moment when all the signs suggest a fundamentally new era.