Valentino Couture SS25 by Alessandro Michele

Bonjour fashion lovers.

Paris Couture Week has come to an end, and I'm feeling a bit lost without it. I know it sounds dramatic, but after Christmas and my birthday (which is just around the corner), Paris Haute Couture is my absolute favorite time of the year. It's when style, creativity, beauty, elegance, luxury, and exquisite craftsmanship all come together in perfect harmony, giving us breathtaking dresses and accessories. But even though it's over, I'm sure that not only I, but other fashion lovers and industry insiders will continue to discuss it for a long time to come.

So, let's dive in and talk about the most anticipated show of the week. Let's talk about the Valentino Couture SS25 collection designed by Alessandro Michele.

The collection is called "Vertigineux," which in French means "dizzying," a collection that was a true sensory journey, an explosion of colors, volumes, and details.

Michele began his journey into Valentino's couture by drawing from the Maison's archives, revisiting its codes and reinterpreting them in a contemporary and futuristic key.

A collection in which colors and volumes exploded: the color palette is extremely rich, with an abundant use of bright and contrasting colors. The volumes are exaggerated, with dresses that seem to come out of a dream.

Every detail, from the choice of fabrics to the embroidery, is the result of meticulous selection and work.

The show was held at the Palais Brongniart, a historic and evocative place in my beloved Paris, where models of different ages and backgrounds (let's not forget that for Alessandro Michele inclusivity is a key element of his work) walked on a long catwalk, almost in the dark, surrounded by an immersive sense of beauty made even more powerful by the choice of soundtrack.

Everything started from Umberto Eco's book "The Infinity of Lists," in which the author explores the concept of the list as a tool to understand infinity and give order to chaos.

Michele used the list as a metaphor for his collection, creating a series of looks that are like chapters of a fashion encyclopedia, each with its specific references. Each garment in the collection can be seen as a list of details, fabrics, colors, and shapes, which together create a unique work of art.

But not only that, Alessandro Michele was inspired by many other writers, such as Lewis Carroll and William Shakespeare, he drew from Surrealism to Futurism, passing through Art Nouveau. There are clear references to the Victorian era, Art Deco, and the Renaissance. But he didn't stop there, Alessandro Michele drew from the world of theater, just think of the Harlequin dress that recalls the masks of the Commedia dell'Arte (it took a good 1600 hours of work to create it and is inspired by the Valentino Couture dress of 1992 worn by the supermodel Yasmeen Ghauri)

Some dresses seem to come directly from fairy tales, with details such as crowns, capes, and embroidery that recall characters like Alice in Wonderland.

Other dresses feature prints and patterns inspired by famous works of art, such as Arcimboldo's paintings.

All this was made possible thanks to the artisan knowledge of the Maison's craftsmen who worked under Michele's direction using a wide range of fabrics, from the lightest and most fluid to the most rigid and structured. Jacquard silks, printed silks, embroidered silks, and hand-painted silks were used, lace that was used both traditionally and experimentally, brocades with their rich and complex patterns, velvet in its various forms, and cotton to create more casual and sporty garments, contrasting with the elegance of the most precious fabrics.

But that's not enough!!! We have hand-made embroideries that have been used extensively, with floral, geometric, and abstract patterns. Different types of embroidery were used, from cross-stitch to shawl embroidery (I was helped by my mother Filomena to understand the details well), pleating with their fluid and light movements, draping that emphasized the large volumes and sculptural shapes of the dresses, inlays that allowed to create three-dimensional effects and enrich the surfaces of the fabrics, and finally the digital and manual prints that contributed to making each garment unique and unrepeatable.

It's wonderful to see the buttons made of gold and silver, and decorated with precious stones and enamels, or the bows and feathers that give the garments a light and romantic touch, the masks, inspired by the theater of the absurd, which have become a distinctive element of the collection.

All this has contributed to creating a sensual and opulent atmosphere, but divisive at the same time. Yes, because if there are those who love Michele's originality and creativity madly, others find the collection excessive and difficult to interpret and too similar to his creations when he was creative director of Gucci.

And it is on this point that I would like to dwell for a moment, my fashion lovers, surely there are points of contact with the prêt-à-porter collections presented previously for Gucci and the collections signed for Valentino, after all there are distinctive and recognizable elements of his style, such as the use of bright colors, exaggerated volumes, and references to art history and the dreamlike world, but if with Gucci he revolutionized the world of luxury, with Valentino he seems to want to write a new chapter, more focused on tradition and craftsmanship, a chapter that also looks to the future, proposing a vision of fashion that is both classic and contemporary.

A vision that we like!