Alessandro Michele’s Couture Manifesto

We waited for this — and it happened. Alessandro Michele finally made his breakthrough with the new Valentino couture SS2025 collection, which was named Vertigineux. The name is fitting as the collection was truly dizzying, astonishing, and quite unexpected.

The wall, along which the models walked, was transformed into a news ticker featuring a flurry of epithets, titles, names, and numbers. It was either a press release, ironically broken down into separate components — Words, words, words — or the list of references for this collection, which were more than enough for the 20-odd minutes of the show itself:

bustier

guipure

georgette

vitruvius

taffeta

ethology

vivaldi

white goddess

lewis carroll

tudor era

john bettes the younger

And much more from which this beauty grows. The depth of the cultural stratum on which Michele builds his collection is truly astounding. It captivates the imagination not only in itself and in the form of words running along the wall but also in the form of dresses floating against its backdrop. All these words have found their embodiment in the dresses. The Tudor era and John Bettes the Younger, an Elizabethan portraitist, were represented through lush collars up to the chin, lace cuffs, and giant decorated hoop skirts. Guipure, lace fabric, is generally one of Alessandro Michele's favorite types of material, along with taffeta and georgette. Vivaldi (and his Venetian background) was referenced by the masks on the models' faces. The white dress with small black polka dots with a Scarlett O’Hara hoop skirt paired with a Spiderman mask was a definite witty nod to the Venetian carnival.

The show opened with an Arlecchino dress featuring a massive crinoline. The number of fashion history episodes that this look referenced is seemingly endless, so we'll mentiong just one: Christian Dior AH2007 haute couture by John Galliano. The lemon-yellow skirt, paired with a turquoise spencer jacket and a purple belt-bow, creates a quintessential Yves Saint Laurent color combination that is instantly recognizable. And, of course, there is Valentino Garavani himself, as seen in look #11, a straight black dress with straps and panniers the color of a pale blue spring sky –– an item of dizzyingly elegant simplicity that the maestro himself mastered so brilliantly.

Farthingales, crinolines, and panniers — nearly half of the dresses in the collection feature these elements. This is a true tour de force for Alessandro Michele as he takes the main couture clichés, pushes them almost to the brink of absurdity, and transforms them into a sensation. We have not seen such silhouettes from him before, and this collection should put an end to comparisons between his past and current places of work: this is the same Michele, but he’s crafting a new aesthetic for a new fashion house.

This aesthetic is, of course, a triumph of historicism — but a very unique one, distinct, for example, from the memorable historicism of the aforementioned John Galliano. One could add numerous historical references to those we have already mentioned, but all of them, when filtered through the prism of Alessandro Michele's imagination, gain a specific fairytale dimension. Thus, the name of Lewis Carroll appears on the wall for a reason as all of Michele’s princesses seem to emerge from that strange enchanted forest of Alice’s Wonderland.

Courtesy: Valentino

Text: Elena Stafyeva