VALENTINO’s Pre-Fall 2026 campaign takes shape within this constellation of echoes and presences. Cy Twombly’s palazzo is more than a backdrop; it functions as an intentional gesture, reactivating a specific genealogy of the gaze. The project unfolds along a broader trajectory rooted in the history of Maison Valentino.
In 1968, Henry Clarke photographed Valentino Garavani’s White Collection inside Cy Twombly and Tatia Franchetti’s Roman apartment for Vogue US. Today, the campaign inhabits another of the artist’s homes, rendering both distance and continuity visible at once. This is not a return to a familiar visual archive, but an attempt to intercept a deeper vibration and allow it to resurface in unexpected forms.
Valentino Pre-Fall 2026 Campaign
Valentino Pre-Fall 2026 Campaign
It is an exploration of persistence: not as static permanence, but as a trace that cuts through time and transforms: a line that breaks, deviates, and refracts into the present, generating shifts, slippages, and new possibilities of meaning.
In the 1968 images, the figures are staged, composed, and contained within a pre-existing geometry. Their white garments become a form of discipline, establishing an equilibrium in which fashion leans into space, extending its stability. By contrast, the Pre-Fall 2026 campaign introduces a fracture, or rather, an opening. Space is no longer a container but a sensitive surface; the body does not settle within it, but moves through it—disrupting it and setting it back in motion.
Valentino Pre-Fall 2026 Campaign
Untamed hair, an elusive gaze, and the vibration of fabric introduce an unstable, almost atmospheric dimension. Colour erupts, shattering that unity: where there was once an immobilising pose, there is now a gesture that escapes fixity. The narrative revolves around a figure charged with energy, momentum, and instability – no longer a presence neatly situated within space, but a body that questions and pulls taut an environment still inhabited, where the work of Cy Twombly and the visual memory of Valentino Garavani continue to resonate.
The Pre-Fall 2026 campaign video makes this mechanism explicit and pushes it further. It stages the relationship between body and space as a continuous flow in which presence, memory, and movement interweave without settling into a fixed form. Temporalities unfold at different speeds and along divergent trajectories.
Valentino Pre-Fall 2026 Campaign
The dialogue feels intimate, rarefied, almost surreal. It seeks no explanation; instead, it opens a threshold: as if space itself begins to speak, or perhaps as if Twombly’s voice were echoing. Through hesitations, deviations, and suspensions, a quiet dissonance emerges: the sense of not fully coinciding with one’s own gestures.
It does not resolve this fracture; it embraces it, allowing something else to surface. Not the reassembly of identity, but its loosening: the interruption of the need to explain oneself, and an acceptance that the subject can exist as a shifting field, traversed by multiple states.
by Chidozie Obasi