How should we make sense of Alessandro Michele’s enormous Tudor-style pyramid dresses and eighteenth-century pannier skirts at his first couture show for Valentino? It didn’t look like anything we’ve seen worn at the Oscars or the Bal des Débutantes. Collection notes—industry speak for a concise brief summarizing seasonal inspirations in a few paragraphs—are usually a helpful starting point. But this season the Rome-based house’s new creative director left a document on every seat so thick it required the sort of heavy-duty prong paper fasteners I haven’t seen since my days as an English lit major.
Titled “Vertigineux: a poetics of the list,” the 100-page document opened with an epigraph from Umberto Eco, the late Italian scholar in the arcane field of semiotics who became a best-selling mystery novelist despite his often impenetrable prose. It offered a fascinating window into the mind of one of fashion’s most intellectual hitmakers. Here’s the SparkNotes version: Michele proposes that each of the spring 2025 collection’s 48 looks should be understood as an “uninterrupted and potentially infinite catalogue of words,” a list of magpie references that only he would think to mood board together, like the 16th-century commedia dell’arte actor Francesco Andreini, the swirly orange-and-blue striped Mandarin fish, and a checkerboard, which came together with 73 other references—and 1,600 hours of handwork—to make the opening harlequin gown.
One of Michele’s most frequently cited sources is Orlando, the time-traveling Virginia Woolf protagonist who swaps centuries and genders—it’s a helpful way of thinking about a collection that can’t be pinned down. Whether one’s vibe is more Marie Antoinette candy pastel side hoops with ornate embellishment or Marlene Deitrich garçon tailoring, there is something for everybody to dress up in. For the fan of truly esoteric references, there’s an almost monastic brown ball skirt that takes cues from Hildegard of Bingen, a Benedictine abbess, writer, poet, and composer who lived in 12th-century Germany. One thing is certain: whatever archetype a Valentino client leans into this season, with silhouettes this extra, she is going to require a sprinter van.
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