When in Rome: Inside Alessandro Michele’s new vision for Valentino
When Alessandro Michele grew up in Rome in the 1970s, one of his favorite hobbies was to search his mother’s closet and pass her hands on the rustling taffeta, shiny glitter and other parornes of time pass. Michele’s mother worked as an assistant of a framework in a film production company, a career that called for a glamorous self-presentation, and a dress particularly captured the imagination of the young Michele. Filacée of Chinese pancake in Valentino’s style, it was full length and with high collar, falling directly in a way that reminded Michele a candle. The front of the dress was entirely black, which Michele’s mother considered reliably. However, embroidered on his reverse was a huge pink and lilac butterfly – an elegant but subversive gesture, suggesting a metamorphosis and transient beauty. Michele’s mother explained that she had bought the dress for a first; It seemed to her, he remembers later: “As she said to me:” I worn her in a world that no longer exists. “”
Four decades after these explorations of cupboards, Michele last year came into possession of another clothing treasure: the archives of the Valentino Chamber, to which he was appointed creative director in the spring of 2024. During his first day Offices of Valentino, in Palazzo from the end of the Renaissance on Piazza Mignanelli in Rome, Michele immersed himself in an extraordinary warehouse of clothes, shoes and other objects, all built with exquisite lightness that has denied a rigor almost architectural. In his former role as creative director of Gucci, a position he held for almost eight years until the end of 2022, Michele had established himself as an accomplished curator, remodeling this brand with his taste as a magpie for vintage and The Bohemian and dress his aficionados in clothes it seemed that they had been found in the sales of English churches, or came from the cabinets of the Italian nobility. Being elegant in the archives of Valentino – and have access to qualified technicians whose know -how has supported its remarkable content – has earned Michele an unprecedented opportunity: nourishing your own imagination by manipulating, weighing and using the material inheritance of his praised predecessor.
At the end of Saturday afternoon in September, a little less than six months after this first day in the archives, Michele was in Paris, in the offices of Valentino on Place Vendôme, where he put the final touch to what would be his First ready-to-use the presentation of the track for the label, to display the following afternoon. There are still some decisions to make on accessories and shoes, as well as last minute settings with lengths or in necklines of the hem. Michele sits on a chair at one end of what had been a large reception room, with high ceilings and golden plaster. The long tables were loaded with accessories: turbans, glasses and bags, including a selection of clutches that looked like porcelain ornaments in the shape of a kitten. Members of his team were seated by his side; His partner, Giovanni Attili, hovered in the background. At the bottom of the room, positioned in front of a huge framed mirror, was an even more enormous mirror. While each model went to him, Michele could simultaneously see the outfit of the front and back, in order to study its internal coherence and its subversiveness – the dialogue between, so to speak, a high black neckline and a embroidered butterfly lively.
The atmosphere was calm. “It’s a mess,” joked Michele, when I joined him and his team for the first time. “We can relax a bit, because it’s almost done.” Michele, who was 52 years old in November, was dressed in blue jeans, a black watch checkered shirt and a pair of red and white vans. His hair tumbled on his shoulders, like Christ as painted by Caravaggio, only retained by a loose braid on each side. His wrists were so heavy with bracelets – bound came up, sparkling diamonds, multiple bracelets – that he searched each time he made an adjustment. The models were also decorated according to the aesthetics of the eccentric abundance of Michele. “Try to walk with your hands in the pockets,” he said one, dressed in a brown nut skirt, the length of calf and blouse with high collar, all made from the same fabric with patterns in Motif silk of the Valentino archive; She also wore a pair of John Lennon sunglasses from which the gold glitter hung, and a gold chain necklace with a sparkling pendant, like a trophy of a rapper combined with the precious heritage of a dowager duchess . “Is it difficult to stand straight?” Michele asked another model, which switched to black and gold straps shoes worn with white lace tights, a sequined teddy bear and a neglected of Georgette -Credon – the type of outfit adapted to the hotel Beverly Hills. “It is better to continue walking,” said Michele with sympathy.
Another model emerged with an outfit that flirted with conservatism: high -waisted gray pants and custom with a square cream polka jacket. The jacket was fixed with a satin arc in the shade of red that Valentino Garavani, who designed the clothes that wore his name for 45 years before retiring in 2008, made his own decades; It was accessorized with gloves built with a delicate black net punctuated with embroidered white dots. The Detroit cosplay was however undermined by punkish jewelry: a substantial diamond nose ring, as if it was shaped for an imperial bull, as well as a form of a single jewel crescent of the lower lip – S&M for vision. There was a hubbub and a gust of Google around the model when someone pointed out that with his heart -shaped face and her long brown hair, she looked like Isabelle Adjani. The girl blushes to comparison and smiles so much that her lip jewelry fell.
For several hours, the team worked regularly, Michele supported by a plate of thin prosciutto slices at the start. “Are you tired?” He asked a woman wearing a Valentino yellow sweater with a measuring ribbon around his neck – the head of the seamstresses, who worked on one floor adjustments. The quality of the work that Valentino Garavani had ordered, told me Michele, had been a revelation. He showed me a strapless dress, the length of the floor, in silk in cerulean blue with patterns with peas; He had a horizontally rucked bodice, with an explosion of flywheels at the waist, below which fell a column skirt of narrow folds, with more flying cascades swirling under the knee. “They are SO complicated, ”said Michele, variable folds. “It’s like an origami. It’s amazing. It had this very specific way of being an engineer. I was perplexed about the reason why Michele used the third person: was the dress a narrow reproduction of something of the archives, or something new? Was it Valentino Garavani, or Alessandro Michele?
“It’s him, with Me, ”replied Michele. “It is almost him. I tried to make it a little different. Sometimes I try to reproduce the same thing, because it is so fascinating. But I think we are both in the same dress. The dress looked like nothing that I only saw anyone carrying for decades; This could have come from the wardrobe in the early 80s of Princess Diana. “I like it because it seems very old now, but things that seem old and old -fashioned are, like the best,” said Michele. “In addition, in a month, they will be super fashionable.”
