Yahoo Lifestyle Alessandro Michele Soars With Debut Valentino Couture Show
Tradition has it that haute couture collections come with detailed notes describing the materials and techniques used to create each handmade garment. They are typically dense inventories filled with technical fabric names like duchesse satin, moiré and faille.
Some designers do it with a sense of humor, by christening each look with a tongue-in-cheek name. Others add a dash of sentiment, crediting the people who worked on the outfits, which typically require hundreds of hours to complete.
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For his first haute couture collection for Valentino, Alessandro Michele dropped a stack of paper the size of a dissertation on each seat. Held together by a metal paper fastener were pages and pages of stream-of-consciousness lists. A random sampling: the description for look 37 included the sequence “petticoat, tundra, eschatology.”
What did it all mean?
In a preview, Michele confessed that having access to the Roman house’s archives and couture capabilities made him giddy, hence the title of the collection: “Vertigineux.”
“It’s the highest level, so I went through many of my obsessions, and I went through a huge quantity of references,” he said. “We made a list of the materials. We tried to put some kind of order into that mess, but it’s also a philosophical reflection and thoughts about what it’s about when you’re doing a dress, in my brain, in my imagination.”
Give a designer with his magpie sensibilities and voracious appetite for culture a workshop stacked with 80 of the industry’s most skilled artisans — some of whom have been working with the house for 50 years — and you got a breathtaking symphony of historical references, archival nods and Michele’s own vision of 21st century beauty.
The presentation was designed to induce the sense of vertigo he described, starting with the stadium-style bleachers in the darkened venue. Editors were placed in the fifth row, above a block of celebrities and couture clients. A soundtrack mixing the Oxford Camerata chamber choir and the static electronica of Alva Noto added to the sensory overload.
A gathered black stage curtain rose to reveal a giant screen with words scrolling past, ticker-style, as the first model emerged in a huge crinoline skirt covered in a tufted tulle harlequin motif. A sweeping dark taffeta gown with a black velvet bodice was almost disconcerting in its apparent simplicity (“860 hours of handwork” – ha!).
This was couture for the metaverse era. Historical references like pannier skirts, ruff collars, tapestry florals and billowing sleeves were mashed up with precious embroideries that conjured a mix of samurai armor, flapper dresses and commedia dell’arte characters.
“Each dress is not just an object, it’s rather the knot of a net of significance: a living cartography that keeps traces of visual and symbolic memories,” the designer wrote in his collection notes.
Michele told WWD that working with the members of the atelier helped him to realize that their craft is a living, breathing thing, and not a relic from another age.
“Now it’s all about scrolling and living through social media, the web, artificial intelligence. Here, you have just a contact with something that seems to be more powerful in 2025. It’s the tri-dimensional experience of something, and you can’t scroll. This job needs your time, your body, your brain, your passion,” he said.
He paid tribute to founder Valentino Garavani — whose partner Giancarlo Giammetti was in attendance — with looks including a tiered ivory lace and chiffon column dress, and a ruffled evening gown in signature Valentino red with a childishly expansive skirt.
Michele was thinking about taking up space, both literally and metaphorically. “How a dress can occupy a space in the room, and how the dress can change the way you look in a very deep way, and how it’s beautiful when it’s sometimes so massive and invasive. You can be invasive also without that big dress,” he mused.
It was a potent idea, brilliantly conveyed by his cast of women of all ages with plain, center-parted hair and minimal makeup. “Here I am,” their faces seemed to say, as they turned to face the cameras in outfits that commanded attention.
In a thrilling finale, Michele cranked up the wind machine and the strobe lights and sent his models streaking across the stage like Brontë heroines to the dramatic strains of the “Dance of the Knights” from Sergei Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Vertiginous, indeed.
Launch Gallery: Valentino Spring 2025 Couture
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