For his second haute couture collection for Valentino, Alessandro Michele transformed the Tennis Club de Paris into a voyeuristic theatre, staging a peepshow-inspired meditation on glamour and eroticism.
Leave it to Alessandro Michele to pull off a layered fashion experience. For his second haute couture show for Valentino, he fitted the Tennis Club de Paris with round viewing stations known as ‘Kaiserpanoramas”, which were invented in the late 19th century as a stereoscopic precursor to film. Back then, audience members would sit around the igloo-like structures watching glass slides through peepholes. At Valentino, Michele replaced the slides with a traditionally less polite form of entertainment: the peepshow. Men clad in black tailcoats opened guests’ shutters from within as Shostakovich’s decadent Russian Waltz No. 2 from 1938 kicked off the show.
With its burlesque-like undertones—and debauched Eyes Wide Shut connotations—the waltz was the perfect fanfare for what followed: a collection of spectacular silhouettes that mastered the art of eroticism without explicitness. Backstage, Michele attributed his ideas to the house’s bond with Hollywood. In homage to Valentino Garavani, who died on January 19, the show opened with a recording of the founder recounting how the silver screen inspired him to become a designer. “Maybe I came from the same place. I grew up with a mom who worked in that business,” Michele said. (His mother was an assistant to a film executive.)
The collection felt more rooted in underground Hollywood than its traditional glamour: fabulous old-world ideas of naughtiness, expressed in nods to the fantastically.
ANDERS CHRISTIAN MADSEN
Through the peephole, however, the collection felt more rooted in underground Hollywood than its traditional glamour: fabulous old-world ideas of naughtiness, expressed in nods to the fantastically feathered costumes of cabaret, burlesque, and girlie films. Through an haute couture lens, those elements became larger than life: theatrically embroidered capes, showgirl bustier tops, a laced and embellished bodysuit that appeared to come with an integrated merkin. Michele merged those ideas with his own Valentino world, with all the cinematic and painterly colors, club kid sensibilities, and sensual cutting it entails.
I was trying to say that we need to go back and look at things and not just watch them so quickly. Couture is a good way to take your time and think about how fantastic human beings can be with their hands. I was trying to oblige people to see things.
alessandro michele
“People from fashion are voyeurs, too,” he said, referring to the peep show format. “I was trying to say that we need to go back and look at things and not just watch them so quickly. Couture is a good way to take your time and think about how fantastic human beings can be with their hands. I was trying to oblige people to see things.” Haute couture works better when you’re seeing it up close. When it comes to Michele’s work, where every look is a hyper-detailed sensory overload, that proved particularly true. The experience gave you a totally different perspective on the character and singularity that go into every look he creates.
It’s a tribute to imagination and humanity and the things we are capable of doing that are incredible.
alessandro michele
The collage of glamour and sex was embodied by a soundtrack that jumped between classical music and techno. “I like techno. Techno is like life,” Michele said. “I think it’s what we’re living: noises; wild animals trying to attack us. It’s trying to push us to do something else.” He likened haute couture—so driven by the human hand and its mind-blowing abilities—to a sense of creating life in a time when life feels increasingly fragile: “It’s a tribute to imagination and humanity and the things we are capable of doing that are incredible. I think we should make dresses instead of guns… because we need life. This is life. Clothes are life.”
That might sound silly to someone who isn’t in fashion, but it isn’t. Fashion—and especially couture—is about creation and self-expression. We dress ourselves to enhance ourselves: to become better rather than worse. In a January of fashion weeks set to the tune of real-world violence—ICE killings, Russian bombings in Ukraine, brutality against protesters in Iran, American threats against peaceful Greenlanders—it’s important to make the statement Michele made. Frankly, it’s weird when nobody does. It added poignant weight to his already-terrific Valentino haute couture, which provided both escapism and depth—dreams and thought-provocation—to a fashion moment in time that feels like it needs it. This was Michele at his best.
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