With his past collection as the new creative director of Valentino, Alessandro Michele has made it very clear what the direction of his tenure will be. With his S/S 2025 show, we discovered how aligned the archives of the Italian maison are with the vision of Michele; they may differ from the recent image we had of the brand, but in reality, the eclecticism, extravagance, and flamboyance that seem like a novelty now were always there. His Haute Couture debut, one of the most awaited of the season, was nothing short of a spectacle and a theatrical experience where words are not enough to describe it, nor here nor in the 100-page press release, that just like the collection, at first feels overwhelming and like it's too much, but upon a closer look, it makes perfect sense.
The key word of Vertigineux was “lists.” That seemingly infinite but controlled gathering of words that usually helps us to describe chaos with a certain order was a highly attractive concept for Michele this season, and he made sure to make it clear in theory and in practice. At the show, the models appeared one after the other in an unconventional setting for a fashion show that resembled more a theatre distribution than a usual runway. Behind the stage, a big black screen showed nonstop all sorts of words in red, descriptions, adjectives, ideas, and data: a stock market vision of fashion. When every model walked on the stage, the number of the look appeared behind them, forty-eight in total, which in the paper, in the show notes, translated into forty-eight different lists.
The length and thickness of the press release suddenly are explained, describing each look with dozens of individual concepts in a vertical way, just how lists are made, signifying that each garment had approximately two pages of description. “Measurable proportions, emotional threads, pictorial references, commodity notes, biographical quilts, cinematic weaves, chromatic geometries, philosophical seams, musical marks, symbolic warps, linguistic embroideries, botanical fragments, visual archetypes, historic fabrics, narrative intarsia, relational knots, etcetera,” the lists are a gift for those obsessed with moodboards, references, and brainstorming, not a peek but a clear guided tour around Alessandro Michele's brain.
There is a sense of haute couture behind a concept where this much work was put, not even minding yet the actual garments, but the notes and the content of them feel expensive and rich; it is easy to imagine how the collision of so many ideas in a singular piece can result in a fashion piece of the highest standard. The first garment already told us everything we should know about the collection, a breathtakingly immense four-coloured grid dress, the product of 1300 hours of work described with words like “dramaturgy, mediaeval mysteries, harlequin, Valentino Garavani,” and it is in this last part where all the magic that Alessandro brought back to life was born.
This first dress and many others from the collection may surprise us—us as in younger generations—for their grandiosity and how visually striking they are; they may ignite a thought similar to, “Wow, this is something I’ve never seen before,” and we are sort of right; we haven’t seen this recently. Going back to Mr. Garavini’s archives, we can discover how an almost exact dress as the first look of Vertigineux was presented in the Alta Moda Valentino show in 1992, and this repeats with many other pieces, all of course infused, reimagined, and amplified with Michele’s creative mind and his very own touch, where proportions have been altered, masks and all sorts of details have been added, and the overall feeling is as reminiscent of the past as it is contemporary.
As is usual with his creations, the opinions are divided among the ones who love and the ones who hate. In this last category, the most frequent comments go something along the lines of, “Alessandro always does the same; this is not Valentino; he’s ruining the brand; Garavani must be disappointed in what he’s doing with his house,” or something similar to it. Well, worry not about Valentino’s opinion; he most likely won't hate on something he himself created, and the fact that we can't yet separate a creative director from his previous brand is not Alessadro’s fault. What he’s shown us so far is that he’s very aware of the legacy of the house he’s currently at; he’s handling it with care and love, and he’s giving us the fashion, the moments, the references, and the spectacle we’ve been so eagerly asking for in the last years.
