VALENTINO SS26

There’s something elusive about Alessandro Michele. His collections can’t be explained, they’re experienced. Each release is a story that exists between past and invention, memory and vision. He doesn’t inherit a brand, he rewrites it. And he does so with a narrative that has the same intensity as a novel: full of signs, irony, and silences.

“It is fashion’s task to illuminate what loves to hide, bringing timid hints of the future to the surface,” writes Michele in the letter accompanying the collection. For him, desecrating the existing doesn’t mean destroying, but liberating. Giving fashion back the ability to think, not just to please.

The reference to Pasolini and his “fireflies that made thickets of fire” isn’t nostalgia but resistance: those lights haven’t gone out, says Michele, it’s the gaze that has become accustomed to the darkness. “We need to disarm our eyes and rekindle our gaze.” It is, as in Gurdjieff and Ouspensky—I say—an invitation to awaken our consciousness, to be present in what we look at and in what we create.

The show opens with an image that encapsulates its entire poetics: an indecipherable garment, halfway between a dress and a jacket, in baby blue. The densely gathered fabric creates a soft yet architectural volume; a small bow closes the high, almost monastic collar. It’s a short dress, or perhaps a distorted shirt, worn as if it were the top of a suit. Underneath, a pair of deep yellow trousers—halfway between lemon and saffron—fits close to the ankle, ending in a thin gaiter that wraps around the foot. The contrast between the two colors, cold and warm, static and vital, immediately establishes the tension of the collection: discipline and freedom, construction and desire.

From there, the narrative picks up pace. White organza shirts with black trim, lace skirts, double-breasted jackets worn with embroidered microshorts. Long, almost sculptural beige mesh dresses, and others in silver sequins that catch the light like water. Turquoise, orange, and mint green silk shirts bring color back as an emotional language. The ruffles, bows, puffed sleeves, and flared hems clearly come from the Valentino archive, but Michele reinterprets them with his own personal grammar: not quotation, but reincarnation.

Fabrics—silk, georgette, velvet, light brocade—are interwoven with metallic inserts and sparkling highlights. Accessories continue the dialogue: monumental pendants, gold chains, glasses with thin chains, small bags worn like amulets. Everything is balanced, nothing is superfluous. Beauty here doesn’t explode: it vibrates.

Backstage, Michele says: “I’m reviewing the colors and nostalgic pieces of the past. We need to do things that are more precise, more thoughtful, less crazy.” It’s a declaration of intent: the desire for cleanliness after excess, the search for meaning after noise.

Each of his shows is a curtain that opens onto a world, but he doesn’t forget that that world must return to life in stores, in real life, on people’s skin. It is in this tension between dream and reality that Michele’s fashion finds its deepest truth: to excite before convincing.
And as long as there are eyes willing to look without cynicism, hands capable of creating without calculation, and souls ready to disarm the gaze, the fireflies’ lights will continue to shine.

GALLERY