Dear Shaded Viewers,
Alessandro Michele staged his lookbook inside Villa Gaia Gandini, a fifteenth-century house on the banks of Milan’s Navigli, and the frescoed interiors give every shot a kind of inherited authority that no amount of styling could fake. “Villain Teen” is stamped across leotards and baseball caps, sitting next to the cheekier “You Can Come to My Villa” patches on the house’s red padded jackets. It’s a pun on Valentino itself, and Michele has been candid about the joke being partly self-portrait — he’s called himself “a gentle villain,” someone who does as he pleases.
Michele isn’t pretending Valentino’s history doesn’t exist; he’s needling it. The pieces lean hard into prep school iconography — pleated tartan skirts, collegiate stripes, Aran knits, crisp striped shirts under front-slit denim maxi skirts — and then undercut the primness by throwing embroidered evening jackets over tracksuits, or pairing sequins with sportswear. Hoodies sit next to crepon blouses tied in lavish bows. The intent is to mirror how people actually dress now: not according to occasion, but according to whatever combination of “exceptional and practical” feels right that morning. He calls it Valentino 2.0, a wardrobe built for a generation that doesn’t organize its closet around vernissages and ocean liners the way the house’s original clientele did.
The “promiscuity of wardrobes,” as he puts it, is real — many people do mix a $40 hoodie with something that cost ten times that, and there’s something honest about a couture house admitting it rather than pretending its customers are still dressing for a 1970s yacht. The garments are fairly safe: good blazers, good knitwear, the kind of tailoring you’d expect from a house with this level of craft. The friction, the “Saltburn on the Navigli” energy that makes the lookbook fun to scroll through.
The “you can come to my villa” line is generous in theory and a little ironic in practice — an invitation extended from inside a palace. I don’t think this makes the collection cynical, exactly. I think it’s the same contradiction every legacy house runs into when a new designer tries to graft youth and irreverence onto a hundred-year-old trunk: you can talk about democratizing glamour, but the show is still happening behind a gate.
Resort 2027 reads like a designer thinking out loud more than a fully resolved vision. There’s real craft in the embellishment, real wit in the slogans, and a genuine question worth asking about what aristocratic glamour means when nobody’s dressing for rituals anymore. I Michaele has identified the right problem. The clothes, for now, are still catching up to the theory.
Later,
Diane
