Valentino’s new campaign resists the noise, inviting us to slow down.
Valentino’s Fall 2025 images land with a whisper, not a blast. Alessandro Michele, who took the helm at Valentino last year, opens the project with The Poetics of Everyday letter, calling ours an “era of violent uproar, of shouting images, of words chasing after other words without ever taking root. Such overblown turmoil oversaturates our gaze, producing a solid crisis of perception.” His answer: slow down, pay attention, and treat routine like ritual.
Outside an old‑fashioned ice‑cream shop, a model steadies a Rubik’s Cube, another one works on a soft‑serve swirl. Photographer Glen Luchford freezes each gesture long enough for silhouettes and texture to register, turning casual errands into still‑life studies. Minimal-sunglass frames appear now and then, quietly asking for attention — echoing Spring’s 2025 Sunglasses trends.
Michele’s own words guide the frame: “Re‑enchanting the everyday, trying to inhabit it poetically is not an easy task. An anomaly is needed, a disruption in the frantic rush to do. We need to slow down and stop. That’s why I imagined a static point of view that may scan the poetical density of what nestles in the ordinary.” He adds a technical note that doubles as philosophy: “A fixed camera focused on life, as it happens. A door opens, a street, a bar. And then: ancient and minute gestures within mornings that seem to be all alike.”
Casting follows the same logic of quiet familiarity. Kai Schreiber, Scarlett White, and Amelia Gray share the frame with actor Sophie Thatcher, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Marie Sophie Wilson, Yuri Fukuhara, and others—faces that feel like neighbours converging rather than models summoned to a set.
“What I’m proposing,” Michele writes, “is to overcome the anesthetization of the gaze, dwelling in the silent twist and turns of the days, welcoming the magic of the existing with kindness, choosing to stay in touch with what is alive.” The clothes echo that plea: structured coats and soft tailoring designed for morning errands that still carry the precision the Roman house is known for.
He closes on a credo that hovers over each frame: “The everyday is not a backdrop that animates only when the extraordinary steps in. Rather, it’s the secret architecture that supports our presence in the world: a frame of glows and joyful epiphanies enshrined in the little or nothing of our ordinariness.”
