Alessandro Michele closed his first Valentino show in Rome in a full-length red dress with a V-shaped cutout in the back from the shoulders to the sacrum. It was a salute to the late founder and a chance to take a breather after a complex exercise.
Speaking afterwards, Michelle said: “I let the color go, because it has a presence. Red is very difficult to handle… here it’s a symbol that makes you feel cold when you look at it.”
Now nearly two years into his time in the house, Michel said he sees himself as an “interventionist” in the aesthetic building that its founder created. “Valentino perfected those lessons, and I’m always a little perverse,” she said. That’s why Intervention was the name of the collection, and the tension—whether harmonic, visual, or emotional—was what Michel wanted to create.
The immediacy of his eclectic tastes is indicated far more strongly in the forms that precede this last. A strong, rounded shoulder line evoked 1980s excess: from it Michael hung multiple versions of his Glitch Valentino woman, sometimes accented with butterfly-shaped hardware that suggested the metamorphosis he sought.
Full-length fur or cropped wraparound leather coats with bow-tied belts and broad action shoulders. Satin sash belts are cut over lace hemmed jeans with color block pleated tunics and rock stud pumps. Whipped twists of double-faced taffeta swirled beneath a V-cutout deeper than the hip, this time framed in front and lace. The sequined full-sleeve jacket features a pink and ivory zigzag graphic with black edges depicting Ka-Pau punching Michael.
Men’s clothing was less elaborate, but not strained. A double-breasted gray jacket from the front looked almost modest in five, but at the back there was a harmonious vortex swirling like water through a propeller. “I’m always standing with two feet in two different places,” Michelle said. “You have to stop, you have to let go.”
The shape of the full-legged trousers was deliberately made of meshed pleating which may have been pressed by design or negligence. That seemed to be the point of ambiguity. There was an abundance of almost ecclesiastical drapes and folds that echoed Cortona’s painted robes on the ceiling above us in the Palazzo Barberini.
In one of his notes (Michel revels in rhetorical content as much as he does fabric) he asserts that the collection “celebrates order while simultaneously revealing its structural vulnerability”: the classic rise and fall. Surrounded by so much artistic and architectural history, and charged with carrying the torch for such a traditional emperor in the city’s fashion world, Michele Valentino teases and interjects to keep Valentino in the moment.
