PARIS — The couture shows ended on July 4, fittingly enough, with a declaration of independence.

“I was not at all interested in what is modern couture,” Pierpaolo Piccioli said backstage before his Valentino show, in one sentence rejecting the struggle that had defined many of the collections thus far.

“I didn’t want to think about it,” he continued. “I wanted to be very instinctual in how I approached fabric, color, volumes.” Then he name-checked Molly Bloom. “When she talks about herself, she doesn’t talk about her job,” he said, standing in front of a mood board that also included a photograph of a copy of Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” and Pier Paolo Pasolini and Maria Callas during the filming of “Medea.” “There’s no chronological time. It’s all interior time. For me, couture is the same.”