Alessandro Michele’s Spring 2025 Couture debut at Valentino, titled “Vertigineux,” invited guests into a realm where encyclopedic references collided with meticulous craftsmanship. The show opened with that name blazing in red on a curtained stage, foreshadowing a free-flowing blend of Freud, William Morris, Cleopatra, and beyond. Each attendee was handed a hefty bundle of paper—pages of unfettered lists capturing Michele’s influences and obsessions.
The crowd, perched on stadium-style seating, witnessed a collection that stretched from Cleopatra-style metallic accents to painterly interpretations reminiscent of pointillism.
Michele also tipped his hat to the house’s founder. Valentino Garavani’s longtime partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, watched on as a pale lace column dress and an updated scarlet gown with voluminous layers floated down the runway. Both pieces served as subtle tributes to the brand’s DNA, while propelling it into new territory.
Michele credited Umberto Eco as his muse this season, drawn to the concept of enumerations and how they structure our perceptions of both art and the everyday.
In those notes, Michele wrote:
“These two dimensions often coexist, arranging secret rendezvous. As Bernard Sève reminds us: ‘the list is bringing order and inciting to dispersion at the same time; the list is indifferently closed and open, static and dynamic, finite and infinite, ordered and disordered, without ever ceasing to be a list.’ Because of that duplicity, being both an instrument for order and a source of disorientation, the list generates rapture and daze.”
He continued:
“As if every dress evoked, through association, a plurality of interconnected worlds: a feverish and incessant stratification of references that makes its uniqueness explode… It’s the journey into the vertigo of an unfinished multiplicity.”
This season’s forty-eight looks embodied that sense of perpetual expansion: layers of botanical motifs, embroidered cultural symbols, and cinematic flourishes were pieced together as if they were elements of an ever-evolving puzzle. Valentino, fresh from refining its atelier in Rome and unveiling new boutique concepts worldwide, appears poised to embrace Michele’s never-ending exploration of couture’s possibilities.
By the end, the audience sensed the message: couture, as Michele envisions it, can be both systematic and unpredictable, a way to impose structure on infinite imagination. In true Valentino spirit, it’s a nod to the past woven into a bold leap forward—still unfolding, never fully contained.
