What we expect from Alessandro Michele's Valentino Elevation, new shows and, above all, the ever-present Haute Couture

Amid great anticipation, Paris Fashion Week will welcome Alessandro Michele's debut for Valentino on September 29, 2024, at 3:00 PM, where his first SS25 collection will be unveiled to the public. And if last June we got a first and varied taste of the style the Roman designer would adopt during his new creative tenure, it is the show, its setup, and its presentation style that keep curiosity at an all-time high. In addition to this highly anticipated show, Michele will also bring a new perspective to Valentino's Haute Couture, which will be presented annually in a single show, a novelty compared to the past. Expectations are sky-high, especially after some clues about the new looks were recently seen. During the Venice Film Festival, Lorenzo Zurzolo and Alessandro Borghi wore outfits designed by Michele for Valentino, which clearly recalled his past creations. The looks included pussy bow shirts, wide pants, and, in Zurzolo's case, a suit inspired by a judogi with the traditional belt replaced by a sort of silk scarf from the Resort 2025 collection, an expression of the culturally eclectic (if not omnivorous) fashion that has characterized Michele's approach to menswear. These elements also echo the designer's past, who introduced similar silhouettes during his years at Gucci, confirming his commitment to unconventional and innovative menswear. But what will be the main difference from the past?

Last June, Michele had already surprised the fashion world with Valentino's Resort 2025 collection, which featured 171 looks inspired by the brand's '60s and '70s archives, blurring the lines between historical memory and the personal style of the new creative director. The outfits ranged from luxurious wool coats with faux fur collars to '70s-style men's suits with ruffles, bows, and floral embroidery. While maintaining his distinctive touch, Michele showed greater restraint, not by reducing eccentricity but by channeling it into an elegant and sophisticated reinterpretation, unmistakably postmodern, of a 1960s wardrobe that could have belonged to Peggy Guggenheim. Michele, after all, was one of the pioneers of the archival fashion mania that swept the industry shortly after his departure from Gucci, and as a designer deeply rooted in his Roman identity, it was inevitable that he would draw inspiration from that era of Valentino. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, CEO Jacopo Venturini, who has already worked with Michele for several years during their time at Gucci, said he wanted Valentino to be «positioned in the world of couture houses where it was born in 1960, and where it still deserves to be». The decision to reduce physical shows to two annual co-ed shows, therefore, stems from a desire to give more creative space to Michele, who, we assume, will continue to produce Resort and Pre-Fall collections presented through lookbooks.

In his interview, Venturini also stated that elements like the Rockstud studs should remain, at least in the carry-over collections, while the rest of the strategy seems to focus on the elevation playbook already followed by several brands and which, at first glance, also seems to include a reduction in annual shows, certainly due to a desire to distance from several LVMH flagship brands that, between fashion weeks and shows around the world, average one show every two months. And so, while from Couture we might expect quite intense pyrotechnics (the comparisons that come to mind are Gucci's SS17 and Resort 2023 shows), the bet is that in ready-to-wear we might see the classic mix with an additional touch of granny-core that should erase the sportswear vibes that, given the times he operated in, Michele inserted here and there at Gucci. In the new lookbook, indeed, the only concessions to old streetwear seem to be a branded t-shirt, a cap, and a pair of low-top canvas sneakers that look like the next hero product the brand will want to push.

Another important detail, also derived from the lookbook, is the absence of exposed skin, a sort of modesty that remains exuberant but without the sheer negligees, visible breasts, occasional latex, and fetish touches that often made an appearance in Gucci's various shows. The same applies to a greater focus on references that in Valentino's Resort collection seems more controlled than in Michele's shows we know, which recently shifted from a cheerfully kitsch eclecticism to a carousel of suggestions increasingly less unified by a central theme. We must also consider the change in context: when Michele took the helm of Gucci, the brand needed to regain its luster after nearly a decade of Frida Giannini having made it a bit too vanilla, injecting modernity but also a narrative that went beyond the flat notion of jet-set clothing prevalent in the early 2000s and already outdated in the very early 2010s. Now Michele has entered a well-established brand but one that wants to elevate itself, and his efforts will likely be less oriented towards anarchism and more towards that anti-conformism, romanticism, and intellectuality that has always been his signature.