WHEN Alessandro Michele is on form, he can perk up throngs to no end. Channelling his considerable experience as a skilful realm maker and ready-to-wear designer, Michele produces paths that are nicely poised between daintiness and romance – namely crafting time-travelling offerings and overblown runway fantasies.
Now at Valentino, after seven years at Gucci, something hit differently.
His spring-summer 2025 collection was triggered, he notes, by the “anguish that arises from the ephemeral and undetermined nature of our destiny,” leaning to a poignant, fragile portrayal of beauty that references Valentino’s archive.
No doubt that’s why he chose to show his latest outing in the intimate surroundings on Avenue de la Porte Châtillon; a location that recalls a house forgotten in time, made of old furniture covered in sheer fabrics. The crush of admirers—and this Italian designer has many—made for slightly challenging visibility conditions, but in the end, it was worth the inconvenience.
Michele said he was inspired by the house’s archives, leaning, as he details, on the “unique capability to feel and connect with something that unveils a new universe of meaning: an epiphany in which the connections between us, things and living beings, become immediately visible”.
That puzzling, philosophical, and historically-driven thinking produced a collection of current shapes and cuts making space for an intriguing dichotomy: Is this outing a Guccified version of Valentino, or vice versa?
In a succession of creative shifts, Michele keeps prickling the sense of the familiar by toying with his vocabulary in a more romanticised way at Valentino, and all the while more eccentric during his tenure at Gucci. It reveals how far Michele has come with gaining clarity of direction, both in terms of form and technique.
And, to me, that’s because the technicality of many of his spring looks come very close to expressing a personal ideal of Italian heritage. Part of the charm of the customary, grown-up clothes that Michele designs season after season is the immediacy of what he does. His followers expect a romantic seasonal shortcut into the sort of classic style that looks elegant (but opulent) at any time.
Some of that came over in his signature bows, placed atop models’ double-breasted lapels and blazers trimmed with sharp hems. That motif continued for an evening with ruffled, fitted toppers embroidered in lavish beaded details. And that’s where his very strengths lie: his touches are evident that he’s one keen to focus on his dressmaking roots and the quirky tailoring for which he’s known.
Way before the recession had everyone in fashion thinking about the resonance and relevance of timelessness, Michele’s classics had always embodied a fixation on maximalism. This certainly wasn’t a trove of novelty—as his oeuvre has a far greater seat on fashion’s seasonal tapestry of trends—but his grasp of nowness is simply his own and one has to respect that.
I appreciated that Michele, in his deliberate choice of lavish ease and flamboyant shapes, takes a point of view and sticks with it.
Best of all, though, was the finale: a fragmented flooring that, in contrast to other set designs seen across the Paris shows over the past week, perhaps mirrored an equally fragmented reality that reflects the troubled state of our times, in which—as the showtrack’s conclusive chiasmus says on repeat, with a languid voice—we humans are eventually bound to die.
by Chidozie Obasi