Another day, another palazzo carpeted in greenery, bringing the outside in. Bizarrely, the Valentino catwalk was the fourth such example in a week, after Hermès, Louis Vuitton and Miu Miu. Except Alessandro Michele’s iteration was astroturf, with the blatant unreality of Guy Bourdin, and was carpeting the very real 17th century Palazzo Barberini in Rome. For Michele, that place is one of “unresolved tension”, between Apollonian principle and Dionysian impulse. There’s maybe a parallel there in his own creative directorship of Valentino, a fashion palazzo of placid, even frigid beauty under its recently-departed founder, now taken over by Michele’s spontaneous and uninhibited creativity.
Backstage, after this Autumn/Winter 2026 show – the very last, in a very long month of shows – Michele was talking about just that. “It’s almost my job to create a tension and a dialogue,” he said quietly. “It’s about beauty, it’s about the tensions, the conversations, between me and the brand.”
Michele’s conversations have often been between past and present. History has always fascinated him – take, for example, the invite for this show, a marble looky-likey button ‘taken’ from the 17th century bust of a cardinal by Bernini. In the real example, that button is hidden in the folds of fabric rendered by magically malleable marble. Now it’s ours to keep. In Michele’s hands, the past becomes equally malleable: this collection riffed on references from the 1980s, to the 1580s, right back to 80 BC.
Of course, Valentino was only present for the first of those periods, and the collection’s wide shoulders, ruched silks and draped tailoring all wound up back there. “It’s a moment no-one tried to discover in the brand,” said Michele. “And in the 1980s, nothing was too foggy.” Meaning that fashion identities were clearly defined. “It was a time of positivity, of shining things.” Perhaps – but also a time of bull markets and bullshit, of wide shoulders and high hemlines and ostentatious, excessive consumption that came crashing down. Dancing on the lip of a very fashionable Vesuvius. Maybe why it feels right right now. Richness was a word that came up again in Michele’s conversation and on his mind, his models drifting by in ballgowns, swathed in furs (a full-length coat opened the show), in pin-thin taffeta suits, in huge glistening gems. Even skinny jeans – both 2006 and 1986 – were dipped at the hem with Chantilly lace. “A Roman aesthetic,” said Michele. He’s right.
Valentino is about richness. The brand has its own palazzo for Pete’s sake, and for a while its founder, Valentino Garavani, sketched his willowy, wealthy women under a Bronzino masterpiece, his 1545 Portrait of Eleanor of Toledo, laden with brocade and bedecked with pearls (Eleanor, not Mr Valentino). This show’s elaborate fabrics, embroideries and fur stoles seemed immutable examples of beauty and luxury. Michele didn’t mute them, but he did mutate them, to girls in blousy evening dresses and boys in big girls’ blouses. Those were inspired, he said, by photographs of Mr Valentino draping in his studio, gestures in cloth which Michele translated to twists in back of men’s tailoring and panels of cloth in free-fall. “He was building the idea of the goddess,” Michele said, linking them right back to ancient Rome.
Michele’s shows are a Dionysian onslaught that defy categorisation, or even criticism. They’re fashion conceived in a different way – especially different to Mr Valentino, who themed collections tightly, even restrictively, around stuff like the work of Josef Hoffmann, Baccarat crystal, Delft porcelain (all very expensive) or “a hymn to the décolleté.” Yet there was plenty here that, you feel, Mr Valentino could have loved. The long tailored men’s coats, in fine fabrics, shoulders gently curved, their belts knotted with a persnickety perfection. The swathed taffeta ball skirts, undulating lobes slung low under deep Valentino-Vs of lace. The bow-knotted furs, the plissé chiffons, the lyrical, liturgical renaissance colour. And a final column of reverential, Cardinal Valentino red. “It’s like a code. It’s like the GG when I was at Gucci,” Michele said. “Every brand has its own language.” With this collection, perhaps more than any other before it, he’s speaking Valentino’s.
