Every unread book and every unworn dress holds a profusion of other lives. Each offers the quiet, happy comfort of dwelling in a luminous ignorance, the very springboard for projection of what might have been or might yet be. Literature and fashion share that power. For Valentino Spring-Summer 2027, creative director Alessandro Michele describes a show as a visual antilibrary. The term was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who saw in the thirty thousand books of the novelist Umberto Eco a library where the unread volumes are worth far more than the read ones, holding infinite potential. Michele applies that logic to fashion itself, a repertoire of latent gestures.
Michele stages his collection in the majestic Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, a temple of knowledge with book-packed, towering shelves, and sends women and men down its red aisle in joyful, mismatched splendour. A green gingham shirt slips beneath a sheer skirt embroidered with sequins and beads and edged with aubergine feathers, its checks glimmering through the motifs. Another shirt, in burgundy plaid, meets an olive knit threaded with columns of glittering gold, likewise hemmed in feathers, mustard this time, above fuchsia moiré boots. A violet bustier of crisp ruffles, belted with a turquoise satin bow and paired with long glossy magenta gloves, tops a matte chartreuse skirt, finely rippled.
Menswear mixes registers as freely as patterns. A veil of fine tulle, exquisitely fragile, shields a dusty rose double-breasted jacket from neck to hips, a Valentino label stitched on its edge like the bookplate of a brand-new book. Elsewhere, silky boxers climb above the belt. A lilac cardigan of open, downy knit, its stitches forming tiny Vs, parts over a medallion-print scarf and a pale blue oxford. Caps read Villain Teen, the persona unveiled in June with the Resort 2027 collection. The show closes on a strapless raspberry gown. Its hips release a train of radiating pleats, gathered into a round petal centred on a sculpted black bow, a couture gesture at oversize scale.
Fashion and literature have long borrowed each other’s tools. In Time Regained, the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s narrator plans to make his book like a dress, pinning page to page as his servant Françoise sews. In 1874, Mallarmé went further still and wrote a fashion magazine, La Dernière Mode, under invented names. A wardrobe already resembles a library, clothes on their hangers standing like books shown by the spine, each hiding a story it could open. That promise, which lasts until a body puts the clothes on, is what interests Michele, and this show gives it a stage, each look assembled from garments that never matched, like pages pinned side by side as Proust’s Françoise would.
A House is a library too. Its first volumes were written by Valentino Garavani, who founded it in Rome in 1960 and built an empire of excellence at the crossroads of Italian and French fashion, in red, bows, ruffles and lace. Alessandra Facchinetti, then Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli each added chapters of their own. Garavani passed away in January 2026. Michele, at the House since 2024, wraps that legacy in his own ongoing fantasy, at once learned and amused. For this show, guests were invited to bring a book, now bound for public libraries in Paris and beyond, so that the evening ends as it began, among books waiting to be opened.
