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Valentino Garavani wanted to make beautiful clothes for the women who could afford them. The perpetually tanned designer, whose vision of jet set glamour was matched only by his own yacht-and-pug lifestyle, died in January. So there was an obvious logic in taking the first proper catwalk show since his death off the fashion week schedule and back to Rome, where he lived, worked, and died. Milan and Paris may be the capitals of European style, but Rome looks better.
Garavani left his own brand almost 20 years ago. But his singular approach to beauty has not been without its 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 me and the brand, a beauty I’m trying to translate.”
As a designer known for putting 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, stir up political change or even set trends. As he once told the New York Times: “It is very, very simple. I try to make my girls look sensational.”
So Michele did what any good Italian boy would, and instead made his autumn/winter show partly about 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 body”, it was a collection defined by clashing jewel tones, big shoulders and draped tunics cinched in with satin sash belts. Jeans were spray-on tight with lace-dipped hems, and the tights were sheer and lilac.
Michele studied at the Academy of Costume and Fashion in Rome, known for producing costume designers rather than fashion ones. Here, some wonderfully outsized jewellery and cuffs were testament to him never seeing a difference between the two practices. It’s also, like most of his work, a good deterrent for high street copycats. The final look, a long, low-back dress in the well-known Valentino red, brought it back to Valentino himself.
But there was another timely twist to the location. Rome has been a beacon for film stars since the 1950s. It’s where Garavani met Elizabeth Taylor filming Cleopatra and persuaded her to wear a dress for the premiere, and where he began a lifelong friendship with fellow Roman, Sophia Loren, who wore Valentino when she won her honorary Oscar in 1991.
Not only did he help establish the sartorial pipeline between Via Condotti and Hollywood’s red carpet, along with Armani, they dressed more female Oscar winners than any other designers. Valentino was also one of the first designers to put a vintage gown on an Oscar winner when he dressed Julia Roberts in a Y-cut black couture dress from 1992, for the 2001 ceremony in which she won for Erin Brockovich.
Michele took over Valentino having turned Gucci into a treasure trove of cluttered, retro eccentricity worth £7.5bn. Kering, the parent group that owns Gucci, is now in the process of buying Valentino. The hope is that Michele would do the same for Valentino, forever in the shadow of Dior and Saint Laurent.
“It’s a strange moment, working in fashion, when there is a war outside, it’s not easy,” he concluded backstage. “But I can do this, and nothing else.”
