Dear Shaded Viewers,
Alessandro Michele’s Spring/Summer 2026 show for Valentino stages a luminous confrontation with darkness, weaving poetic references and cultural memory through the legendary couture house’s codes. Michele—newly appointed creative director—renders the collection as both a reverie and a resistance: a swarm of fireflies, inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, flickering defiantly in times when conformity threatens nuance and imagination.
Michele, long enthralled by vintage, romance, and rebellious subversion, draws from the archives of Valentino Garavani while infusing the brand with erratic luminescence—each look a fragment of embodied poetry. His debut brings together ruched Valentino-red minidresses, brocade waistcoats, bows, and whisper-pale evening gowns, composing a constellation of nostalgic gestures layered with contemporary irreverence. The collection’s theatrical contrasts—beds of satin and suspicions of scandal, ruffled innocence and bold accessories—unfold as a dreamscape where fashion reveals shy signs of the future rather than merely celebrating the past.
At the heart of the show is Michele’s poetic proposition: fashion as a “precious ally” against darkness and mass cultural standardization. Like Pasolini’s fireflies, Valentino’s garments become glimmers of enchantment, constantly moving, never static—profoundly political and insistently personal. Michele invokes the need to “reawaken the gaze,” challenging the fatalism that claims beauty and originality are extinct. Instead, through delicate details, radiant embellishments, and Parisian references to student protests, he invites the audience to nurture imagination, compassion, and hope.
Steeped in the grandeur and eccentricity of his Roman roots, Michele approaches Valentino as a repository of infinite beauty and humanist values. His artistic tenure is framed not as an erasure of legacy, but as its radiant evolution—continuing to “shine forth the brand’s unique values, heritage, and couture codes,” now refracted through his incomparable sensibility. Michele’s work celebrates the tension between fragility and exuberance, intimacy and spectacle, as well as the transformative power of storytelling.
Alessandro Michele’s Valentino SS26 marks the return of maximalism as more than decoration; it is a poetic act of survival and of vision. Like Pasolini’s fireflies, the collection pulses with fleeting sparks—glimmers that construct new worlds and reconnect us with our most human yearnings. In Michele’s hands, Valentino does not just resist the night; it conjures a dawn.
Later,
Diane
