Valentino Garavani wanted to make beautiful clothes for women who could afford them. The perpetually tanned designer, whose vision of jet-setting glamor was rivaled only by his own yacht-and-pug lifestyle, died in January. So there was obvious logic in removing the first proper show since his death from the Fashion Week calendar and returning it to Rome, where he lived, worked and died. Milan and Paris may be the capitals of European style, but Rome looks better.
Garavani made his own mark almost 20 years ago. But his singular approach to beauty hasn’t been without obstacles for his most recent successor, Alessandro Michele, who took over the fashion house in 2024. “It’s a complicated DNA because beauty is always changing,” he said after the show, which took place in the 17th-century Palazzo Barberini. “This collection is about Valentino. It’s about beauty. But it’s (also) about the tension between the brand and me, a beauty that I’m trying to translate.”
As a designer known for dressing Harry Styles in pearls at Gucci and using the Pasolinian leitmotif of fireflies to represent anti-fascism in his first show for Valentino, Michele’s idea of beautiful clothes is less straightforward. By contrast, Garavani did not use fashion to incite gender equality, provoke political change, or even set trends. As she once told the New York Times: “It’s very, very simple. I try to make my girls look sensational.”
So Michele did what any good Italian boy would do and instead made his fall/winter show focus in part on his mother. Set in the 1980s, which Michele describes as a “time of positivity and shiny things,” when women were suddenly “in control of their presence and their bodies,” it was a collection defined by contrasting jewel tones, broad shoulders, and draped tunics cinched with satin belts. The jeans were tight with lace hem and the stockings were sheer and lilac.
Michele studied at the Academy of Costume and Fashion in Rome, known for training costume designers rather than fashion designers. Here, some wonderfully outsize jewelry and cuffs were testament to the fact that he never saw the difference between the two practices. It is also, like most of his work, a good deterrent to street copycats. The final look, a long dress with a low back in the well-known Valentino red, brought it back to Valentino himself.
But there was another timely twist in the location. Rome has been a beacon for movie stars since the 1950s. It’s where Garavani met Elizabeth Taylor filming Cleopatra and convinced her to wear a dress to the premiere, and where he began a lifelong friendship with his fellow Roman, Sophia Loren, who wore Valentino when she won her honorary Oscar in 1991.
Not only did he help establish the sartorial line between Via Condotti and the Hollywood red carpet, but he and Armani dressed more Oscar-winning women than any other designer. Valentino was also one of the first designers to put a vintage dress on an Oscar winner when he dressed Julia Roberts in a 1992 black Y-cut couture dress for the 2001 ceremony where she won for Erin Brockovich.
Michele took over Valentino having turned Gucci into a £7.5bn treasure trove of messy, retro eccentricity. Kering, the parent group that owns Gucci, is now in the process of buying Valentino. The hope is that Michele will do the same with Valentino, always in the shadow of Dior and Saint Laurent.
“It’s a strange time to work in fashion, when there’s a war outside, it’s not easy,” he concluded backstage. “But I can do this and nothing else.”
