My Sunday morning was spent on a Zoom call with Alessandro Michele. After just a couple of months as the creative director of Valentino, today he’s releasing a resort collection of absolutely prodigious proportions. At 171 ready-to-wear looks and 93 detail shots, it’s some kind of record, the work of a man thoroughly possessed. Describing his first weeks at the house as “a cathartic, almost religious encounter,” he said, “I’ve been seduced by that place. I’m in love with it.”
Michele spoke at length about the Valentino archives, referring to the designer’s landmark White Collection of 1968, his hippy-chic 1970s, and the ’80s, when he bucked the hedonism of the moment in favor of extreme softness and sophistication. “There’s a sort of obsession with what I would call hyper-beauty, as if this life was not enough for him, so that it had to be amplified. He’s an amplifier of beauty,” Michele reflected. But as fluent as he is in Valentino Garavani-isms, no one will mistake these clothes—or the way they’ve been so exuberantly styled—as anything but Alessandro Michele’s own. He’s quite an amplifier of beauty himself. He gave the collection a name: “Avant les Débuts.” As for his actual runway debut, there’s an official date: September 29, 2024.
