Valentino Couture Is Sublimely Transportive
Few people currently working in fashion have brains like Alessandro Michele’s. He has an almost unnatural ability to conjure prismatic worlds through the shape or decoration of a garment and the staging of a runway show. One thing is always many things, and two things are never the same, whether in the context of clothes, people, places, or time. That's why his designs, most recently as creative director at Valentino, are so damn magical.
This week, particularly in America, we needed Michele’s wizardry more than ever. Watching his debut couture collection come down the runway in Paris this morning was a much-needed distraction from the mess of our current political situation—a momentary balm in the form of strange, enigmatic beauty.
The collection was titled “Vertigineux,” which translates to “dizzy” in French, and it recalled the Italian semiologist Umberto Eco’s study of lists. Eco writes about the list’s infinite qualities and ability to create culture and order (sometimes, not always). As Michele articulated in his collection notes, for him, lists represent “the journey into the vertigo of an unfinished multiplicity.” He said that Eco’s texts “pushed me to imagine every unique, finite, and unrepeatable dress as an uninterrupted and potentially infinite catalog of words.”
In other words, every dress and look was meant to make our minds wander down a glamorous little rabbit hole. There was multiplicity in Michele’s references, pulled at once from the Valentino archives, from literature, fantasy, and long-ago histories of art. His non-linear approach to making clothes once again rendered infinite possibilities in the finished products.
The show space was set stadium-style as models walked one by one out to a green “X” on the floor, where they’d stand momentarily in stillness, facing the audience. Behind them on a screen, a red ticker flashed a list of unconnected words describing the look, like “juxtaposition,” “vision,” “references,” or “constellation.,” Each look in the collection had a corresponding number, which also flashed on the screen when the models stood on the green “X,” and which were referenced in the collection notes that were nearly 200 pages long and comprised of those words flowing in two straight lines across the screen like they were stock indexes.
Michele’s most entrancing pieces included gowns with woven strips of fabric that formed triangular shapes, skirts made stiff with old-school crinoline, one floral dress that was made entirely from needlepoint tapestry, and another crafted entirely with crochet. There were Victorian collars paired with skirt suits and cascading ruffles juxtaposed with embellished masks, some that looked like those worn by Lucha Libre wrestlers and others that were like delicate veils for a gothic princess bride. Valentino Garavani’s legacy came through in the ruffles, the red, the accordion pleating, and the polka-dots, but never in a way that felt too derivative.
These models of varying ages were Alessandro’s aliens, looking like they might blast off at any minute to some far-flung planet with no dress code. It was remarkable that 80 percent of the showpieces were custom-designed to fit certain models’ bodies, a reminder that while Michele seems to hover above reality, he is deeply connected to the humanity of fashion. You could see the precision and passion in the handiwork throughout, in the way two front panels of a jacket fit together like a puzzle piece when it was buttoned or the multi-colored fringe brushes that were embroidered together in a stack to make a kooky cape. It was in the extravagant, elegant beadwork and also in the simplicity of certain pieces, like a sleek black column dress given volume with blue panniers or a pleated purple cape with crinoline peaking out from underneath, tied at the neck with a bow in Valentino red.
At the end of the show, models trudged out on the runway all together in a group, fighting a gust of wind as strobe lights flickered and fuzz blipped on the screen. Maybe they were running towards an imaginary spaceship, ready to board and hightail it out of here. That’s at least how it felt to watch Michele’s foray into couture, like there were no limits to imagining, to creating, to getting dressed.
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