In an age saturated with visual noise and endless scrolling, Maison Valentino invites us to pause, breathe… and truly look. Under the bold new creative direction of Alessandro Michele, the Italian house unveils its highly anticipated Fall 2025 campaign, delivered with a cinematic sensitivity that feels fresh and nostalgic. This time, the grand marble staircases and baroque gardens are left behind. Instead, the clothes take centre stage in front of a small-town ice cream parlour. A nostalgic diner as the backdrop, with sky-blue curtains and red chairs, the kind you’d find in any ordinary café, and yet, they pair seamlessly with one of the standout designs that screams Valentino, worn effortlessly by Amelia Gray.
There’s nothing ostentatious here. Nothing artificial. Michele returns to what he does best: finding beauty where no one else thinks to look. This isn't haute couture surrounded by distant glamour, but lace dresses, animal-print capes, floral embroidery, sequins, flowing layers… It’s elegance, simplicity, and intricacy all at once. Each piece plays with volume, texture, and pattern assembled with such bold precision that the result is pure harmony, a visual pleasure of the highest order. Each look is a whispered poem, lowercase and delicate, staged along an ordinary street.
Shot by the unmistakable Glen Luchford, the campaign unfolds like a series of frozen scenes in time. And it does so alongside a cast of young talents playing characters suspended somewhere between reality and reverie. A parade of curious, charming figures: Kai Schreiber twirling on the sidewalk or fiddling with a Rubik’s cube, Amelia Gray with a yo-yo, Sophie Thatcher walking a dog, and Lorenzo Zurzolo cycling past. Michele’s world has always been eccentric, but here there’s a carefully measured restraint. It’s not extravagance for spectacle’s sake; it’s the construction of a new kind of everyday ritual. A yo-yo, a Rubik’s cube, a motorcycle, a horse, and a melting ice cream: symbols of the trivial, the playful, and the seemingly insignificant. But within those gestures lies something magical. As if fashion had finally stepped off the runway and into real life. The extraordinary, as Michele promised, is hidden within the utterly ordinary.
But don’t be mistaken: this isn’t minimalism. It’s auteur romanticism. Michele hasn’t abandoned his baroque spirit; he’s simply channelled it into a new kind of poetry: one rooted in the domestic, the intimate, and the quietly mundane. Each image doesn’t just sell clothes, but it tells an untold story. And that’s where its power lies. There are subtle gestures, still glances, textures you can almost touch.
In a world driven by urgency and instant gratification, Valentino offers us a visual pause. An ode to the everyday. To forgotten details and objects that shouldn’t belong but do. It’s a quiet act of resistance: to dress not as a statement of power, but as a way of inhabiting the world with grace, attention, and presence. As Alessandro himself wrote: “To re-enchant the everyday, to attempt to inhabit it poetically, is no easy task. It requires an anomaly, an interruption in the frantic race of doing.” And here it is, with a name, a vision, and 171 soulful looks: Valentino Fall 2025. A new chapter begins, and it promises to be as beautiful as it is unexpectedly human.
