Alessandro Michele’s Valentino Vision

ROME — I would love to sit with Valentino Garavani and his new standard bearer Alessandro Michele and listen to them talk for however long it takes them to establish common ground: Valentino the immaculate, perma-tanned Sheik of Chic; Michele his shaggy, bearded, baseball-capped opposite.

Even though there are four decades between them, I’m imagining a mentor-acolyte relationship. There is, after all, already a shared vocabulary: words like “beauty,” “dream,” “chic” and “crazy” (as in “crazy for beauty”) are common to them both. There’s just one hitch. Michele claims he feels like an impostor as he assumes the role of creative director in the company that Valentino founded 65 years ago because, he reasons, “I’m not Valentino.”

That might seem to be stating the obvious, but it’s actually the words “creative director” which are the issue. “I’ve never sat in the chair of a real couturier, what we called for years and years a fashion designer,” Michele explains. “Valentino is a fashion designer. I’m a creative director. I like to build a story; I like to work on the pieces. But I could never be a real fashion designer because I didn’t grow up in a world that puts you in that position. The world of my job was a creative director. That, for me, is really different.”

Still, after some days spent with him in Rome this summer, I would suggest that Michele is coming to grips with the fact that the longer he sits in that chair, in charge of Italy’s finest maison de couture, with a legacy for the ages, and a 90-strong atelier of peerless craftspeople on call, the easier it will be to stop feeling like he doesn’t belong there. “It’s going to happen in a very natural way,” he predicts. “I’m discovering the relation between life and fashion, and also the idea that all these amazing fabrics, paints, embroideries, silhouettes, colours, jewels are about the arc that we have in life. When you are in such a specific environment, you’re gonna change. Like, if you move to Italy, you’re gonna start to speak Italian.”

Embodying Valentino

There’s no fashion story more imposingly Italian than Valentino’s. “We had the Pope, the President and Valentino,” says Michele when he thinks about growing up in Rome. “Valentino’s palace was one of the centres of power. Everybody knew about it. The Palazzo Mignanelli was a very specific place on the map of the city.” And when Valentino walked among the people, it was like a visitation.

Michele remembers when McDonald’s first opened in Rome, in March 1986, in the Piazza di Spagna just round the corner from the palazzo. He was hanging out there as usual, playing guitar, when Valentino and his partner Giancarlo Giammetti appeared in the street, two incongruously elegant figures amongst all the scruffy teens who congregated in the piazza every day. “I don’t want to say they went into the McDonald’s,” Michele says, laughing, “but it was pretty new and they were curious, maybe. I mean, can you imagine a McDonald’s opening up alongside such a chic palace?”

So now it’s the Pope, the President and Alessandro Michele? “I don’t have that perception of myself, ever,” he’s quick to counter. “I walk here from home, 10 minutes. Today it’s sunny, so I’ve got my straw hat on, and I feel just like an ordinary guy going to work… and sometimes I forget what a privilege this is.” His first day in the archive, Michele came across a dress Valentino made for Audrey Hepburn to wear at a party thrown by the Rothschilds in Paris in the early 70s. “It was superlight, embroidered with white strass, but when it was laid out, I saw the body, not the dress. Her arms were reaching out, like I was getting in touch with her. The dress was completely connected with the life, with the friendship, with the conversations she would have had that night. That’s what I saw in the archive, the way clothes amplified life. And I was in contact with every single detail of this life.”

The connection is real. Michele comes back to it time and again. Hundreds of thousands of pieces are archived in Valdagno in the northeast of Italy. “A vortex of beauty,” he calls it. “You can’t imagine one person created so much. The way Mr Valentino approached the dresses was about beauty and life. Everything was surrounded by a strange kind of power, like there was a spell on it. I touched dresses that were 45 years old, and there was an aura around them. There was not one dress that you thought could be for day. I was going through and thinking, ‘Which one could be for 9am? I don’t know.’ He was always thinking fabulous because life is so precious that you must celebrate it. He dressed queens, empresses, aristocrats, movie stars. That life doesn’t exist anymore at all. But I think the connection between me and him is that we loved our lives.”

“The reality is also that I love the time that he worked in fashion in Italy,” Michele continues. “And I grew up in that era. So it’s natural when I’m thinking about the stuff that I’m doing. There is a similarity in the way that I look at things. But I also have another perspective, because I was born in 1972 and I grew up with pop music, rock music, the 80s and I was a young guy so I am more about the jet set being outside in the street. I feel more that life is outside. I’m gonna use the dresses to enjoy the idea that you can be chic in the street. I am thinking about the freedom to be beautiful and dress up.”

Michele believes another connection between Valentino and himself is that their private lives are the raw material for their work. “Inside the world of Valentino dresses, there is a hidden world of culture, travel, art. Looking at the couture in the archive, I saw little embroidered jackets with a base in Chinese carpets from the 19th century. I saw Aubusson tapestries. And he did so many dresses with Delft tiles. That made me think he probably had an amazing collection of those things. There was no space for the bad things in life. I think he understood that to be in this life, you had to really enjoy who you are.”

Giancarlo Giammetti confirms as much when I ask him what he would most like to see from Valentino now. “I would like to acknowledge it as a serious and modern reinterpretation of the essence of our work,” he says. “And I say ‘our’ because we are talking not only about the dresses, but about an unmistakable style.”

Like Valentino, like Giammetti, Michele is an OCC, an obsessive, compulsive collector. “We have the same disease. They were obsessed with buying beautiful things. I’m the same. I feel free to say that I sometimes live for objects. The connection between me and the concrete things that surround me is very deep.”

He’s not exaggerating. Michele’s magnificent apartment in Rome is like a series of remarkable wunderkammers, from the Delft-tiled kitchen to the cavernous salon lined ceiling to floor with ancient paintings. Every surface is crowded with objets, clusters of collections. It’s the den of a mage, dustier, more eccentric than the museum-quality majesty of a Valentino interior, where the walls would be hung with some of the greatest names in art history, but you can easily recognise the same acquisitive impulse at work, the same desire to drown yourself in beauty.

In the space that used to be Valentino’s office in Palazzo Mignanelli, Michele has begun his own customisation by propping huge Renaissance canvases around the room. Valentino once hung Renaissance master Bronzino’s portrait of Eleonora di Toledo on those same walls. “I had to have that painting at any cost,” he said at the time. “I was crazy about it.”

Michele’s Next Chapter

The fashion industry rumour mill went into overdrive when Michele left Gucci in 2022, eight years of unprecedented success crumbling into recriminations about falling sales, inflexible aesthetics. “The day after, I started many conversations,” he says cryptically. “LVMH came to me. I started out with Fendi, so it would be amazing to work at Fendi. Also, Chanel is amazing. Everything is amazing!” But he was burned out. “I was thinking, ‘I’m gonna wait, I need to live my life now.’ And I was living really well, three-hour breakfasts, reading the newspaper, chatting with friends, organising my lunch in a beautiful square in Rome, just with my book, maybe alone sometimes. I went to the countryside whenever I wanted. I didn’t travel. That was really a privilege. No more New York or LA or Tokyo, just the countryside. I kept my driver for the first six months, then I felt I wanted to be free. I wanted to drive my own car again” — a Mercedes SUV, if you’re wondering. And all the while, he was happily back at home, in Rome.

And then the itch kicked in. “Maybe I’m gonna do a movie, maybe I’m gonna do a book, which I did. But for the last three or four months, I was missing this job. I was wondering why I’d stopped. Fashion is really me. I was thinking if I have to start this job again, I would love to do it with the right person in the right place. I didn’t want to lose myself struggling with a crazy situation and business issues.” Michele insists geography wasn’t important. “Maybe I go back and forth to Paris. Or if it was in LA, I didn’t care. I really respect my job, and my job is not that I want to be comfortable.” Still, it was 16 months since Gucci — 16 months of furious conjecture, including speculation about a Michele-led revival of the much-loved Walter Albini label — before he read about Valentino parting ways with creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli. CEO Jacopo Venturini called him a few days later to offer him the job.

“After a year and a half of other conversations, I signed the contract in three days,” recalls Michele. “I didn’t choose Valentino because it was in Piazza Mignanelli. I was just thinking that Valentino is amazing. I was looking for a beautiful place full of beautiful things to make new. And Jacopo and I worked together for five years at Gucci and he is such a great partner in crime, because he loves the brand, he has a specific sensibility with creative things, and he lets me work in a very free way. It’s not easy to find a person like him, a CEO who has this passion. So it was good to start again.” Venturini shares the sentiment wholeheartedly: “It all happened suddenly but at a very precise moment in fashion: we both felt the urgent need to return to creating desire and emotions, with a great care for people.”

But Venturini isn’t the only connection with Gucci in Michele’s new position. It brings him back into the orbit of French luxury conglomerate Kering, which acquired a 30 percent stake in Valentino last year. “Perhaps it’s karma, because I was thinking to maybe go to LVMH, but I am back again in the family.” And Pinault père et fils, the tycoons who control Kering, are, he says, very happy with the new arrangement. No wonder. During Michele’s peak years at Gucci, from 2015 to 2019, annual revenues roughly tripled, reaching almost €10 billion, a rapid expansion the likes of which the luxury sector had never seen.

He was at Gucci for almost 22 years so it was no wonder it felt like a home. Tom Ford was in charge when he arrived. “He and Domenico built a beautiful company with another culture, very well-organised, like an office… very American because Tom was from Texas. I mean, it was a company with a boss. So when I came here after a year and a half, this was not just a new job, it was a new life, completely. I instantly connected with a place that was the invention of a single person, the place where he dreamed, where he spent time with his friends. I felt I was in Valentino’s house. I forgot the idea of an office forever. I was inside the life of someone else.”

“When I left, I felt that most of the people who contacted me were looking at me like King Midas,” Michele muses. “Someone who touches things and they become gold. I think they saw me as some kind of crazy creative who could make money easily. But I was thinking more about me. Gucci was big, and it wasn’t easy. The more money it made, the more people wanted to be in your things, to understand what you did so they could steal something in your job, do the same thing in their way. That was pretty funny. I mean, it’s a mystery to me what I’m doing. I can’t explain it.”

“But when I came here to Valentino, I felt like it was a safe place.” Last year, Valentino generated €1.35 billion in sales. “I don’t think the vocation of this brand is to be a multi-billion euro place,” Michele says. “That’s too big. You’re gonna destroy the beauty, because it’s as fragile as the dresses Mr Valentino made in the past. It’s a place you need to protect. It’s the most beautiful wardrobe ever.”

Just as Valentino the brand couldn’t have wished for a more emblematic helmsman than Valentino the man, Michele became the perfect figurehead for his re-vision of Gucci. How inclined is he to do it all over again for “crazy, chic” Valentino? “I don’t think that I’m chic,” he answers. “I’m wrong. I’m a wrong person. I grew up as someone who is always off. But I think that you need to be a little bit off to work in this brand, because you need to look at things from another perspective to do exactly what Valentino was in a contemporary way. You need to look at things like a director, as a person who has so much material. Every day, I’m making a movie in my mind. I was just shooting the campaign in an amazing Roman palace and I was thinking, ‘This is what I did at Gucci, but here it’s so easy.”

I get what Michele means about easy, and what he means about off. Ultimately, it’s all about Rome, hot but not bothered, slightly twisted, and historically inclined to excess of all kinds: imperial orgies, la dolce vita, the bacchanal that opened La Grande Bellezza, Paolo Sorrentino’s love/hate letter to the city. Fellini defined it. Valentino refined it, even though he was born up north. “He arrived at such a beautiful moment,” says Michele, “when Rome was at the centre of so much in terms of cinema and art, and all the socialites were here because of the place and the climate. And Valentino loved Rome as a decadent place where you can do what you want, dream what you want, no rules. His own life was metaphysical, like a life of gods. It’s a life that’s impossible to reproduce now. All that Rome, all that richness. That’s so Fellini. Every time I enter this world, I feel like a kid, having fun in his room. We say in Italian frivolo.”

A few days before we meet, Michele’s therapist let him know how impressed she was by his progress. He’s been seeing her for eight years, sometimes as often as three times a week, ever since the pressures of Gucci made him realise he needed a small, safe space just for himself. “I always go deep inside things I hate, things I love, things that make me happy or mad, the past, the present, the faces,” he told me years ago. “It’s not just a beautiful colour. It’s an obsession I go to sleep with and wake up with.” But everything is different now. “I’m feeling in control,” Michele says. “I’m telling myself I don’t have to complicate things. I think I know what my job is. Gucci was so big that I got anxious sometimes worrying about the work, the awards, all the people I had to meet. I was protected by so many people but there was something that didn’t connect well. First of all, everything started like a huge explosion, it happened so fast and it’s really hard to deal with those kinds of things, and I lost my way a little bit. Thank God I was almost 40. If I was 25, I’d have been completely out of my head. But now I’m more conscious about everything, and I’m really enjoying what I’m doing in a deep and easy way.”

Which begs the question: what happens if that same bomb goes off at Valentino?

“If it’s something that’s never happened to you, you don’t know how to deal with it. But when you know it, you understand that it’s all hype, it’s nothing. The way they talk about me just makes me laugh now. The big thing that happened at Gucci was that I wasn’t really ready. I mean, you’re never ready. But here, it’s more me. I don’t know what people are gonna expect from me. There is always a lot of gossip around what I’m doing. When the pre-collection went out during the week of the men’s collections, they were talking like crazy about Valentino.”

But of course everybody gossiped, because the massive 177-look pre-collection was released at the same time as the Gucci show, and that kicked a hornet’s nest. Michele was accused of regurgitating his Gucci at Valentino. “It’s such a big confusion. I know. Some of them will say Alessandro, others will say it’s Gucci. But it was me. And it’s a compliment for me because if they’re saying, ‘Oh that’s Gucci,’ it means what I did was so strong. It’s like when they confused Gucci with Tom. It was Tom, not Gucci. Gucci is like an empty box, you can put into it what you want.”

“The reality was that I was planning to launch in September,” Michele continues. “I did the pre-collection because I thought we needed clothes for the shops. I was thinking just to start, because you need to start somewhere. I wasn’t planning on showing it, those pictures were just for internal use. We shot them in a room in Milan. But it’s very hard to keep a secret. They leaked, I don’t know how. They tried to crack my laptop, the same with Instagram. So I thought, ‘OK, we need to go out.’ But, as you saw in the pictures, I was already thinking about a world. Valentino is such a specific world, full of ruffles and pleats and jewels and turbans and headpieces, you can’t believe it.”

And I thought all of that pointed to something a lot more provocative than the kneejerk criticisms. What if Michele had actually been doing Valentino all those years at Gucci, rather than the other way round as his critics assumed? “Yeah, because I got inspired so many times by the things from Valentino,” he agrees. “Also, in terms of aesthetic, he was the strongest image of that Italian style during the 70s. He invented most of the other designers’ look. I mean, all the Italian ladies, they identified themselves with the Valentino style, glamour and chic every hour. Mr Valentino did so many things that, in a very subtle way, pushed so many other designers to manipulate that aesthetic. I know it’s a strong thing to say, but without Valentino, Prada wouldn’t exist, because Miuccia was resisting and manipulating that bourgeois aesthetic.”

As a Communist activist in her youth, Miuccia might even appreciate Karl Marx’s original dialectic at work in Michele’s version of Italian fashion history. If Valentino Garavani was the thesis, and Miuccia Prada was the antithesis, would that make Alessandro Michele the synthesis? “Kind of a lady but in a wrong way,” is his succinct distillation. “I mean, that’s me. That’s my world, and it’s wrong. But Mr Valentino was doing it in his time in the right way, with the beautiful houses, the boats, the vernissage, the nightclub, no regrets. And that’s why it’s so shining and beautiful. He put a big emphasis on that kind of Italian aesthetic, which is why I think Italian women are much closer to Valentino than other brands. You know, I still recognize in every single Italian lady some contact with the aesthetic of Valentino.”

On a more pragmatic note, Michele isn’t giving much away about his debut runway show on September 29th. There will be some Valentino red, although Michele points out that he also has some history with red, given that the red pussy-bow blouse in his first collection for Gucci generated transports of both joy and confusion. There will also be some Valentino white, because Michele marvelled at the “40 to 50″ shades of white he found in the archive, and how could you not acknowledge the 1966 all-white collection that turned the fashion world on its head?

And more. “I was working on some jewels, because Mr Valentino loved jewels and bijoux and costume jewels. And I am always asking myself, ‘Would he love this? Is it too much? Or could it be a nice thing to do in 2025 for Valentino?’ Because I was trying to translate him now. But I also did many things from his archive, trying to be literal, trying to be very Valentino. Being very close to his idea of fashion seems to me very revolutionary. I was looking at some shoes and they’re so chic, so crazy, they’re amazing. It was like, let’s do them almost exactly the same. There is my touch, obviously, because it’s crazy. But he was crazy too. I think we’re both sick about fashion.”

“The space is always my way to show a landscape in fashion,” he says of the staging. “It’s a space that doesn’t exist, a space that is in your memory, in your dreams, in the past and in the time in between. He is peopling this “real, unreal space” with a co-ed collection, maybe 15 men’s looks, 75 women’s. “Because it’s my way to work,” he explains. “I think that it’s easy. It was interesting to do just a men’s show when I was at Gucci but now, I think it makes sense to put them together, giving more space to the woman because I want to try to start as Mr Valentino did, thinking more about the woman because he was the man. When I think about the men’s aesthetic here, I usually look at him in the 70s, that picture of him with Jackie O in Capri, with the printed shirt and the big belt, the big hair, the tan, the shoes, the costume jewels. Really sophisticated, but also eccentric. He invented himself 100 percent. I think that young people are gonna love what I’m trying to tell them. They need to reinvent themselves as fabulous.”

So don’t expect quiet luxury. Michele snorts at the very idea. “I really respect every point of view, but it’s not me. Please, I can’t! I’m blessed by the planet that I’m here, I’m alive. We’re born, and that’s amazing. We’re gonna die, and that’s fine. But in the middle, I want to be a peacock. I can totally agree with the richness of minimalism. That’s Baroque. That’s a peacock. I’m very proud to be light and superficial as a ruffle, because I’ve really found the way to be happy and alive. In Italian, we call it frou frou. I think that fashion needs this injection again. Because fashion now is about nothing, being like a monk. Is that better than the ruffles? I don’t think so. I think that’s just nothing, like a kind of death.”

Life Against Death

Life and death are actually, classically intertwined in Michele’s Renaissance-inclined thinking. Earlier this year, he and philosopher Emanuele Coccia published a book called The Life of Forms – Theory of the Re-enchantment (rather more prosaically retitled The Philosophy of Fashion for its English translation). It bears repeating that, for Michele, the notion of something magical hangs heavy over Valentino. “He lived in a spell,” Michele says dreamily. “You don’t know if this spell is gonna stay forever.”

But you do know what breaks the spell. Death! It preyed on Valentino’s mind. It drove his retreat from the world during the pandemic. “I feel the same,” Michele says. “I don’t know if I’m terrified, but I do know that I live constantly with the idea that I have to die. I like the idea that I’m gonna die because it makes my life light, because there is no reason I have to preserve myself for the next 1000 years. I like the idea that this lady is always with me. She’s between the paintings I have in my house, the jewels that I collect, the pieces of fabric… she can create you and she can destroy you whenever she wants.” Michele’s cherished aunt died when he was very young. He says she was obsessed with fashion. Beauty was her medicine. “The closer you are to things that belong to death, the more you feel alive,” he told me years ago. Contro morte, against death.

So the proximity of annihilation, personal or planetary, is an inspiration for Michele. “We can go on saying that the world is full of wars, and the planet’s gonna collapse and it’s the end of the world, but till then, I want to live. We are in between these two energies, the heart that is beating and the idea that we could die any single moment. So I think that the ruffles really save my life, because I’m inside those ruffles, I’m inside that pleat, I’m inside that strass, I’m inside that bangle, I’m inside that shoe, that dress. Because it’s here that we are living our life. There is no other space. It’s like a lullaby.” (Listen for that lullaby, because Michele says it will apparently be playing on the soundtrack of the show.)

He drifts into a free-associative reverie about the Renaissance basilica of Sant’Agostino, which is just behind his apartment in Rome. It boasts a glorious Caravaggio, La Madonna dei Pellegrini, which Michele can visit every day whenever he wants. “It’s not a painting, it’s a masterpiece of cinema, like the beginning of Neo-Realismo in the movies.” The beauty of the carved marble façade of the basilica sends him into similar rhapsodies. What makes someone spend months carving a delicate marble feather on the outside of a church?

One of the restorers who works on Michele’s own collection also restored the Caravaggio, so he was able to examine it, to see the painting on the back of the canvas. “It’s like the entire universe,” he enthuses. Through the same connection, he also got to see the back of the Michelangelo Pieta in St Peter’s. “You could see the real stone, I was saying to my therapist you could see the life inside it. And that is almost what I get from being here, it’s the idea that I need to live, and to celebrate life. I can’t do it any other way. We are so concentrated on being powerful, on being rich, on ‘I want to be the first.’ I don’t want to be the first. I want to be that stone. I want to be that painting. I want to be that piece of carving that maybe five men made on the outside of a church. I want to be a ruffle! If I’m a ruffle, I know I won’t die.” You could imagine top model Karen Elson feeling the same way about the glorious confection Michele created for her wedding at the beginning of September. Posterity should note this dress as his first piece of couture.

Haute couture was the very essence of Valentino, so it will be Michele’s next great adventure when he shows his first couture collection in January. He brought a dozen people with him from his past — “We are like a family,” he says. “We’ve been working together for more than 20 years.” — but it’s that prodigious 90-person atelier where the real gold is buried. “When I was working at Gucci, I did so many crazy things that looked a little bit like couture,” Michele says, “and it was very hard because I didn’t have a real salon, like here. Now, it’s a dream. It’s like being in the Narnia movie. When you go through that door, you’re in the beating heart of Valentino. It’s the most interesting laboratory because it makes it possible to think about time in fashion. I’m thinking about couture as no season, no time.” He plans to show couture once a year.

Reflecting on Valentino’s methods, Michele feels that couture was so fundamental to him that he never really thought about replication. “He was just very concentrated on the dress that he was working on.” And yet, the brand has pret-a-porter production facilities in Turin that have blown Michele’s mind. “The way they work is unbelievable. The level is super high. So you can make an amazing gown in the atelier here in Rome, but you can do an amazing gown there in Turin. For me, it’s about making a connection between the two of them, because that’s the legacy. I would love to make that kind of richness in the pret-a-porter, because I think there was a link when Mr Valentino was working on the couture. It would be amazing to build a bridge.”

For all that Michele is a classicist, it’s his natural streak of iconoclasm which makes the immediate future, September 29 and beyond, so tantalising. “Sometimes I need to be respectful but also not,” he acknowledges. “It’s like a chic lady also needs to do a crazy dance. But I promise you there’s nothing I’m doing that didn’t come from Mr Valentino. Nothing. I mean, 100 percent. And sometimes when I’m working, I’m saying, ‘Would Mr Valentino like this longer or shorter or maybe here because it’s chic?’ I’m trying to work with him. But it’s probably gonna be so different. I’m not trying to change myself. I’m just trying to experiment because that’s me. I like the idea to be excited and nervous. I feel like a horse in a box, kicking against the stall.”

And now, the clincher. What will Valentino himself think? Via email, I asked him how difficult it was for him to see his legacy in the hands of others. “It’s a feeling we’ve grown accustomed to,” he wrote. I imagined his voice, him answering me in his typically tight-lipped droll way. “It’s a mix of admiration and sometimes disappointment, of joy and at times discontent, of laughter from happiness, and also from disbelief.” That’s an entire gamut of expectations for Michele to meet. Will he feel brokenhearted, should Valentino not like what he does? Maybe he’s managing those expectations when he replies, “I think that he’s probably not gonna like it. It could be possible. He can say what he wants. I don’t care. He’s the boss. He’s almost 93. I’m just trying to make this place alive again with Jacopo, and I think that is very respectful because Mr Valentino’s work was about celebrating life, and these places must talk the language of now. It must be now again.”