A Valentino show staged in a public toilet? As far brand resets go, Alessandro Michele’s for this august Roman couture house is pretty radical. Then again, the toilet was tiled in Valentino red, and Michele applied his passion for philosophy to the space, imagining the public toilet (bear with us here) as a space of duality and contradiction. Well, it’s kind of in the name – a public space for the most intimate and private of acts. Both of them.
Duality and contradiction are precisely what come to mind when a fashion designer quotes Michel Foucault when talking about bathroom stalls. But Alessandro Michele has never shied away from those ideas in his work. While his staging may seem to rattle Valentino to its elegant foundations, the clothes themselves in his Autumn/Winter 2025 collection had a new sense of refinement. Actually, it was an old sense, harking back to Valentino past, to the elegance that became synonymous with the name over the years.
As for the salacious elements, for Michele, sex and Valentino aren’t the unexpected bedfellows they may be for the rest of the world. “Valentino had a very sensual idea of women,” Michele said, pre-show. “I don’t want to say sexy because it was a kind of a sexiness, in his way. But I’m more pornographic ... I’m pagan, I like the body. I’m like Dionysus.”
Dionysus was the Roman god of – amongst other things – ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre, which all kind of relate to fashion. His dances freed his followers from self-conscious fear, and subverted the restraints of the powerful. That’s also very Michele – and while there were no draped togas or garlanded grapes in Michele’s Autumn/Winter 2025 show, he did stick close to another kind of ancient Roman uniform – the style of Valentino in the 1980s, with slick tailoring and razor-narrow evening dresses with built-out shoulders.
Indeed, those shoulders barely fitted through the narrow toilet cubicles – the theatre of Michele’s Valentino show saw models emerging from bathroom stalls, cruising around the show space and then vanishing back into their origin points.
Powerful women, dressed to dominate, semaphor sex to some people. And sex is an intimate act. All this stuff was knotted up together in this, Michele’s third show and second ready-to-wear outing for Valentino, which was probably the sexiest ever staged under the label. Models’ breasts were barely-veiled in transparent Chantilly lace; bodies were snapped open at the crotch, worn over transparent tights; necklines of evening gowns were carved out low to show skin. And, of course, red is the colour not only of Valentino, but of sin.
Yet, intimacy is what stuck. For Michele, Valentino is an intimate house – his own office is the one Valentino Garanvani used to design from, and the whole palazzo is forged in the founder’s lavish and innately personal image. Valentino is like a home, rather than just a fashion house. And there’s an intimacy to Michele’s reiterations of Valentino’s codes, a deep-seated affection for and knowledge of the house’s history, half-remembered, being rediscovered for the first time. His intimacy here is loving and caring – he’s making love when he’s making these clothes. Fittingly, the final black velvet column-dress turned – to re-enter a toilet stall – and revealed a cut-out heart in the back.
“I’m discovering also this other soul of the brand,” Michele said – of his archive investigations, his new-found intimacies with the house of Valentino. “There is this sensuality that it’s interesting. That you can be sensual with a colour, with something strange being not exactly sexy, but sexy because you are doing something that I don’t expect.” Certainly, the only thing we can expect with his Valentino is the unexpected.
