“Opulent and Rich”: Alessandro Michele Looks Back at Valentino’s Past

Drawn to Valentino of the Eighties and early Nineties, Michele, who was then a teenager, remembers first-hand the drifting hazes of ball gowns, the embroidered chiffons and broad shouldered, gold-buttoned tailoring of then, reinventing them for today

Alessandro Michele is particularly enamoured with the echoes of the style of Valentino Garavani from, arguably, the least predictable source – the Eighties, a decade taste was having too much of a good time to remember. In the Sixties and Seventies, Valentino was still the new kid on the block in Roman haute couture, proposing youthful pieces – his Florentine Sala Bianca collection, drifting hazes of floral prints and ruffled organza ballgowns. But Michele is drawn to Valentino in the Eighties and early Nineties, when his ruffles were biggest and embroidery heaviest, pumping up the visual volume of a particularly obnoxious breed of look-at-me moneyed glamour. It is out of step with where fashion is, mostly, and exactly the opposite of the ragtag, oddball and (ideologically) warm clothes Michele has always made.

“Opulent and rich,” were the words Michele used to describe that moment, at a preview five days before his Spring/Summer 2027 show. He’s in the grand salon of Valentino’s Parisian headquarters, a mansion house on the corner of Place Vendôme of the kind of scale and magnificence no one has anymore. Two and half years into the job, Michele still looks a little out of place there, in a good way, in his scruffy sweatshirts with a long braid of hair. The collection – a Bonfire of the Vanities of firework-coloured satin laid out in photographs on the table before him – is more expected. 

Michele became a teenager in the Eighties, so remembers Valentino of that era first hand. “They’re not copies,” he says, of his rich ball gowns, embroidered chiffons and broad shouldered, gold-buttoned tailoring. “They’re memories.” They were certainly fleeting as the models bombed their way at speed around the reading tables of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève – where a library has sat since the 6th century.

Michele, however, called this collection Antibiblioteca – and not because of the very un-librarial teeth-rattling volume of his show music. The idea, rather, comes from the philosopher Umberto Eco, who justified the hoarder in all of us by citing the revelatory prospects of books obtained, collected, but not yet read. Michele, of course, has plenty of those – it’s difficult to find much down-time when you’re creative director of a major fashion house. And he projected that same prospect of discovery to clothes loved, bought, yet still to be worn. 

Conspicuous consumption has a deep root in the 1980s, albeit without the philosophical cant. In their blousy, overblown dresses fattened up with ruffles and great knotted bows, Valentino’s women once again resembled the slender ladies-who-never-lunch that Women’s Wear Daily dubbed “social cyclones”, seemingly ricocheting about in their raiments of finery in search of a benefit to support. But there were other snippets of Valentino’s past too – Garavani was a designer with a somewhat promiscuous aesthetic, shifting with the moods of the moment, so Michele showed sleek lace bustiers and narrow skirts and fragile dresses striped with ruffles that recalled a valiant attempt to ally the maximalism of Val’s Gals with Nineties Minimalism. Some of the models wore baseball caps with the phrase ‘Villain Teen’ embroidered on them – obviously, a pun on Valentino, and Michele has always loved toying with words. They mean something to him. “I like Mr Valentino’s alphabet,” he said, of the styles he showed. 

This show was, indeed, very Valentino but obviously these clothes – these memories – mean something different to Michele than to Garavani, and something different in 2026 than in 1986. If Sontag was against interpretation, Michele is all for it – his style is about transposition rather than transformation, shifting the context of things to transforming their meaning, our reading of them. It means that an evening gown can be pulled from the past and reactivated for now as a symbol not of social conformity, but of rebellion. It’s incredibly clever in the context of Valentino, because it means style can still cleave to the label’s recognisable aesthetic, without being weighted down into the past. That was the feeling of this entire dynamic, energetic and convincing Valentino show – in short, that you can’t judge a book by its cover.