Simplicity and Alessandro Michele are strangers in the same room. For Michele, traveling from point A to point B usually involves a scenic detour, meandering through countless possibilities along the way. His take on the house of Valentino has been as controversial and it has been compelling; he’s been criticized for injecting too much of himself, and the pastiche-laden Gucci sensibility he once championed, into a brand whose reputation for pristine, haute-bourgeois chic was near sacrosanct. “But the word ‘elegance’… it holds little meaning for me,” he ruminated during a Zoom call previewing the pre-fall collection. “I’ve never been an ‘elegant’ designer in the canonical sense. In the eyes of many I’m probably the least elegant person around. And yet I’m fascinated by this almost mythological word that has shaped generations, including my own.”
The lookbook, and the collection it introduced, feels like a deliberate detour from the flourishes and flamboyance that have at times muddled his message. Though it was shot in a palazzo, the whole setup is unusually restrained. The cast is pared down, the makeup soft, the styling far more tame than the fireworks of previous seasons. “I kept it dry,” he said, a word no one expects to hear from Michele.
The look mines Valentino’s ’80s and ’90s heyday: boxy shoulders carved to perfection holding down sleek minidresses in bold color-blocks; a pointed silence on prints and métissages, but plenty of matelassé textures and velvet trimmings; and a flirtation with proper, almost bourgeois daywear, promptly upended by Michele’s irrepressible mischief. Lace lingerie brazenly peeks out beneath plush-leather bombers or under slender shearling coats whose décolleté is edged in V-shaped fluffy collars. Miniskirts so micro they’re practically belts skim over their built-in knickers, and are worn under razor-sharp, boxy cropped Spencer jackets topped with contrasting pussy bows. The jacket is pure archival Valentino; the pussy bow, pure undiluted Michele. He calls his approach “manipulation.”
Menswear, too, has been dialed down compared to Michele’s usual operatics. Gone is the baroque impulse to decorate anything that holds still for more than a second. In its place comes a sensible, refined restraint: ’80s-inflected soft-tailored, narrow suits in muted tones run the show, their fluid proportions exuding a Roman Dolce Vita debonair swagger. Only the occasional robe-jacket and a glinting diamanté brooch on a neat-tailored cape in gray wool nudge the composure off balance, joined by a pair of black Rockstud flip-flops worn as an irreverent footnote.
Rockstuds found themselves in the eye of a pop-cultural storm when a pair strutted into the trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2, with Meryl Streep teetering around in studded Valentino-red pumps. Michele, who had been toiling away on his own updated version (metal-tipped, ankle-strapped, sharper, sexier, and perched on a pin-thin heel) set to debut for pre-fall, was taken aback. “I’d been working on a new Rockstud for quite some time, and then this trailer drops, with her wearing those shoes. I jumped out of my chair,” he said. “The funniest part is that the shoe she’s wearing isn’t even one of the bestsellers. There are iconic Rockstuds everyone recognizes, but that pair?”
Ever the good sport, Michele resisted calls to remove his version from the lookbook. “Absolutely not. I made them for a reason, so they stay. And honestly, it’s hilarious that someone, somewhere, in some parallel universe, had the same idea at the exact same moment. Truly bizarre. Anyway, they’re out there now. So this one is mine.”
Michele has undertaken a fair amount of soul-searching to refine, recalibrate, and occasionally course-correct his creative path at Valentino, a house he calls “very complex and very challenging.” He’s reflecting between “the too much and the too little,” and this inquiry isn’t some abstract philosophical whim; it’s deeply personal. “When I left Gucci,” he recalled, “I started reading poetry again, something I hadn’t done in ages. I was enthralled by the beauty of a few sparse words floating in the empty space of the page. Now I’m in a phase where I’m drawn to the emptiness around those words. I like what surrounds it, what’s missing, the absence itself feels like a form of ornamentation. Repeating certain shapes now feels baroque to me; it’s as if I were creating the negative image of my own maximalism”
Michele is learning to find beauty in that absence. “At this moment, it’s as though I’ve said to myself: all right, I want to undertake the exercise of looking at the void. Something I had never done before: to look at what I remove in order to see more clearly what remains, and what it can speak to.” He said that he’s gradually trying to create “a sort of cleansing” in his relationship with the brand. “I approach the legacy of this fabulous house in my own way, even if, for many, I’m something of an unsettling presence because my hand is so strong.” He believes this lookbook represents “a happy meeting point between me and the brand, a place where I feel far more comfortable. It’s irreverent and uncomfortable in just the right measure. I suppose I’ve ‘disrespected’ it just enough to now let it breathe.”
Void isn’t devoid of pulse though. Michele’s instinct for exuberance and expression can’t be entirely domesticated. The eternal tug-of-war between Apollo and Dionysus inside him isn’t going anywhere. “What I adore about Mr. Valentino is his audacity,” he said. “His courage to be happy, to live beautifully without torment. The way he sent women out into the Roman sun dressed in bold colors, in lightness, in elegance, completely unafraid of beauty. That fearless joy is extraordinary.”
