When Alessandro Michele was growing up in Rome in the 1970s, one of his favorite pastimes was to rummage through his mother’s closet and to run his hands over the rustling taffeta, glinting sequins, and other adornments of time past. Michele’s mother worked as an assistant to an executive at a film-production company, a career that called for a glamorous self-presentation, and one gown particularly captured the young Michele’s imagination. Fashioned from crepe de chine in the style of Valentino, it was full-length and high-necked, falling straight down in a manner that reminded Michele of a candle. The front of the dress was entirely black, which Michele’s mother considered reliably chic. Embroidered on its reverse, however, was an enormous pink and lilac butterfly—an elegant yet subversive gesture, suggesting metamorphosis and transient beauty. Michele’s mother explained that she had bought the gown for a premiere; it seemed to him, he later recollected, “like she was telling me: ‘I wore it in a world that now no longer exists.’ ”
Four decades after those closet explorations, Michele last year came into possession of another sartorial treasure trove: the archive of the house of Valentino, to which he was appointed creative director in the spring of 2024. On his first day at the Valentino offices, in a late-Renaissance palazzo on the Piazza Mignanelli in Rome, Michele immersed himself in an extraordinary storehouse of garments, shoes, and other objects, all of them constructed with an exquisite lightness that belied an almost architectural rigor. In his former role as creative director of Gucci, a position he held for almost eight years until late 2022, Michele had established himself as a consummate curator, reshaping that brand with his magpie taste for the vintage and the bohemian and dressing his aficionados in garments that looked like they’d been found in English church-hall sales, or had been sourced from the cast-off wardrobes of Italian nobility. Being loosed into the Valentino archive—and being granted access to the skilled technicians whose know-how underpinned its remarkable contents—gave Michele an unprecedented opportunity: to feed his own imagination by handling, weighing, and reconceiving the material legacy of his vaunted predecessor.
On a late Saturday afternoon in September, just under six months after that first day in the archive, Michele was in Paris, at the Valentino offices on the Place Vendôme, where he was putting the finishing touches on what would be his first ready-to-wear runway presentation for the label, to be shown the following afternoon. A few decisions remained to be made about accessories and footwear, and last-minute adjustments to hem lengths or necklines. Michele sat on a chair at one end of what had once been a grand reception room, with high ceilings and gilded plasterwork. Long tables were laden with accessories: turbans, eyeglasses, and bags, including a selection of clutches that looked like porcelain ornaments in the shape of a kitten. Members of his team sat alongside him; his partner, Giovanni Attili, hovered in the background. At the far end of the room, positioned in front of a huge, framed mirror, was an even more enormous mirror. As each model walked toward him, Michele could simultaneously see the outfit from the front and the back, so as to survey its internal consistency and subversiveness—the dialogue between, as it were, high black neckline and vivid embroidered butterfly.
The atmosphere was calm. “It’s a mess,” Michele joked, when I first joined him and his team. “We can relax a little, because it’s almost done.” Michele, who turned 52 in November, was dressed in blue jeans, a Black Watch plaid shirt, and a pair of red-and-white Vans. His hair tumbled about his shoulders, like Christ as painted by Caravaggio, restrained only by a loose braid on each side. His wrists were so heavy with bracelets—linked cameos, glittering diamanté, multiple bangles—that he jingled every time he made an adjustment. The models, too, were adorned according to Michele’s aesthetic of quirky abundance. “Try to walk with the hands in the pockets,” he instructed one, dressed in a nut brown, calf-length skirt, high-neck blouse, and fur-trimmed jacket, all made from the same patterned silk-cloque fabric from the Valentino archive; she also wore a pair of John Lennon sunglasses from which dangled gold sequins, and a weighty gold chain necklace with a glittering pendant, like a rapper’s trophy combined with the prized heirloom of a dowager duchess. “Is it difficult to stand up straight?” Michele asked another model, who teetered in black-and-gold strappy shoes worn with white lacy tights, a sequined teddy, and a ruffled georgette-crepon negligee—the kind of outfit suitable for ordering late-afternoon room service of caviar and oysters from the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Better to keep walking,” Michele told her, sympathetically.
Another model emerged wearing an outfit that flirted with conservatism: high-waist, tailored gray pants with a boxy cream-colored polka-dot jacket. The jacket was fastened with a satin bow in the shade of red that Valentino Garavani, who designed the clothes that bore his name for 45 years before retiring in 2008, made his own decades ago; it was accessorized with gloves constructed with delicate black netting punctuated by embroidered white dots. The straitlaced cosplay was, however, undermined by punkish jewelry: a substantial diamanté nose ring, as if fashioned for an imperial bull, as well as a jeweled crescent shape suspended from the lower lip—S&M for the visage. There was a hubbub and a flurry of googling around the model when someone pointed out that, with her heart-shaped face and her long brown hair, she resembled Isabelle Adjani. The girl blushed at the comparison, and smiled so much that her lip jewelry fell off.
