Alessandro Michele brings Valentino to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris and builds the Spring/Summer 2027 collection around a precise title: “Antibiblioteca”, the anti-library. The reference comes from the concept developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, inspired by Umberto Eco’s extraordinary personal library of tens of thousands of volumes. The idea is simple and fascinating: a library does not only tell us what we have read and know, but above all what is still left to discover. It is no coincidence that guests at the show had been asked to bring a book with them.
Michele starts from here to build a collection in which even the dress seems to evade a definitive definition. Corsets, lace, feathers, transparencies, embroidery and large jewels coexist with structured jackets, wide trousers, hats, glasses and decidedly more everyday incursions. The masculine enters the feminine and the feminine the masculine; day meets evening, the formal blends with sportswear, while apparently distant elements end up in the same wardrobe.
It is the language of Alessandro Michele, by now instantly recognizable: accumulation, contamination, memory, quotations and freedom of association. But inside Valentino this vocabulary inevitably takes on a different weight. The Maison carries with it a history built on elegance, femininity, color, couture and a very precise idea of beauty. Michele does not erase this heritage; rather, he continually puts it into question, opening it up to different possibilities.
And it is perhaps precisely here that “Antibiblioteca” stops being merely the title of the collection and becomes its key to interpretation. Like the books we own but have not yet read, these clothes too seem to leave different possibilities open: they do not necessarily belong to an occasion, a gender or a single way of understanding elegance.
Valentino SS27 thus becomes a deliberately rich wardrobe, at times even excessive, in which memory and transformation coexist. Elegance does not disappear: it simply no longer has a single code.
GALLERY
