You can’t buff down Alessandro Michele’s eccentricities and expect him to emerge a minimalist. Quirk is not a detachable accessory in the Michele wardrobe; it’s stitched into every seam. His Valentino carries that off-kilter charge. To be fair, this is how creative directors now operate when parachuted into grand old houses. They arrive fully formed, then attempt an act of horticultural surgery: grafting their vision onto the founder’s decades-old trunk, hoping something rare blooms from the splice. Whether the resulting hybrids will yield fabulous new species or evolutionary cul-de-sacs remains, for many of them, an open question.
The experiment Michele is conducting involves reconciling the lofty spirit of couture with the mundane demands of everyday dressing, a task that, as the Italians would say, is like mixing the devil with holy water. Yet improbable pairings have always been his forte, as have the reactions they tend to provoke. Unfazed by the periodic storms of online indignation that accompany his work, he continues to operate as he sees fit, captivated by “the sartorial intrigues” of the Roman house. For resort, preppy blazers, collegiate stripes, and earnest schoolboy-and-schoolgirl references were in the mix. Shot in a grand Lombard villa, the collection images conjure a vision that feels like a sort of Saltburn transplanted to the banks of the Navigli River: decadent, blasé, and suggestive of a slightly irritating teenage debauchery.
There are plenty of wearable clothes in the offering. As is often the case with Michele, the oddities reside less in the garments themselves than in the way they are styled. Strip away the layers and the deliberately perverse pairings, and what remains is surprisingly cautious. From logo-splashed tracksuits emblazoned with the words You Can Come To My Villa or Villain Teen, to preppy blazers, pleated tartan skirts, reassuring Aran knit ensembles, and front-slit denim maxi skirts worn with crisp striped shirts, the collection cast a wide net, reflecting luxury brands’ growing preference for plurality over prescription. Whether that expansive approach is the right strategy for a time in which consumers treat labels much like endless-scroll streaming platforms remains to be seen.
Michele described the collection as an attempt to build a “Valentino 2.0” wardrobe: one that acknowledges the house’s elitist heritage without becoming trapped by it. Embroidered evening jackets were thrown over sportswear, tracksuits mingled with sequins, and hoodies and baseball caps coexisted with crepon blouses tied in lavish bows. “This is how some of my friends actually dress,” he said. “It’s beautiful to see that freedom.” Michele’s point is less about dressing up than about liberating elegance from its prescribed occasions. The women and men he imagines wear lavishly embroidered clothes at the wrong time of day, in the wrong combinations, and with the right amount of insouciant provocation. It’s a kind of generational remix of Valentino’s aristocratic glamour, “no longer rarefied, but inhabited rather than performed,” he said. “I’m fascinated by the growing promiscuity of wardrobes: the coexistence of the exceptional and the practical.”
Michele conceded that contextualizing an idea of beauty like Valentino’s is exceedingly complex today. The house’s past feels almost geological, while the present shifts at a speed that borders on the volatile, changing not just day to day, but almost hour to hour. We live, Michele argued, in a fractured reality: parts of the world move forward in apparent continuity, while others are marked by brutality and rupture. In between, what’s the role of authorship? Creatives continue to produce, often without quite knowing for whom, suspended in what he described as an “island of light.”
His response is to translate this condition into a kind of film script, staging fictions as he did in childhood, creating to anticipate what might one day become real. Fashion’s growing urge to conjure worlds and meanings beyond clothes is perhaps no accident: “It becomes a sort of necessary trip, both for the audience and for the author himself,” he observed. “Without it, one risks sinking into nothing more than a sea of rags.”
