Show Notes: Valentino Spring Summer 2025 Haute Couture
Alessandro Michele created a fantastical trove of characters for his debut couture outing at Valentino.
When: Jan 29, 2025
The venue: Alessandro Michele's first couture show for Valentino was held at the historic Palais Brongniart, which formerly housed the Paris Stock Exchange, and was the centre of French financial activity for nearly 150 years.
Glancing at the images, you might get the initial impression that it was a digital film – so pronounced was the backdrop: a massive black screen that took up the entire stage with arbitrary groups of words like "eccentricity, gothic, occultism, Madame Butterfly, existentialism" zooming by, with each runway look commanding a different set of text.
The Vertigineux marks Alessandro Michele couture debut.
The takeaway: You see, there's a reason for all this seeming randomness. Michele's debut couture collection is titled Vertigineux, or dizzying in English - in a nod to the heady rush he understandably experienced upon accessing the Roman house's rich archives and couture prowess.
The resulting collection was inspired by the idea of lists as explored by the great Italian philosopher Umberto Eco – how they can create order but also suggest something endless and open to interpretation. Each of the 48 looks is designed like a "list" of influences, mixing history, art, and emotion into layered, intricate designs – hence the different words that accompanied each look in a stream-of-consciousness style on the screen.
"Each dress is not just an object, it’s rather the knot of a net of significance: a living cartography that keeps traces of visual and symbolic memories. It’s a narrative archive where improbable combinations find harmony, recalls cross eras, cultures and echoes of past stories resonate with the present," wrote the designer in the show notes.
In other words, it's Michele's signature magic of weaving together references from wildly different periods of time, cultures and worlds (real and otherwise), and it manifested as such in the collection; think alienish gimps worn with bridal dresses to enormous prairie-meets-harlequin ballgowns (according to online reports, couture clients can choose to remove the inner crinolines), all worn by women of varying ages.
The items we're eyeing: The crocheted dress (look 3); the marigold yellow ballgown (look 4); the hot pink skirt (look 5); the '80s skirt suit (look 24); the royal purple cape (look 28) and the grass green Elizabeth gown (look 29).
The looks:
Look 1
Look 2
Look 3
Look 4
Look 5
Look 6
Look 7
Look 8
Look 9
Look 10
Look 11
Look 12
Look 13
Look 14
Look 15
Look 16
Look 17
Look 18
Look 19
Look 20
Look 21
Look 22
Look 23
Look 24
Look 25
Look 26
Look 27
Look 28
Look 29
Look 30
Look 31
Look 32
Look 33
Look 34
Look 35
Look 36
Look 37
Look 38
Look 39
Look 40
Look 41
Look 42
Look 43
Look 44
Look 45
Look 46
Look 47
Look 48