Shelf life: Alessandro Michele expands his Valentino library
For Spring-Summer 2027, Alessandro Michele used the idea of the antibiblioteca to frame fashion as something larger than product: a repository of fantasy and lives not yet lived. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
Alessandro Michele called his Valentino collection Antibiblioteca: anti-library. He borrowed the idea from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan, and his interpretation of the philosopher Umberto Eco’s famously vast library. Eco saw value not only in the books he had read, but in the thousands he hadn’t: all that unrealised knowledge sitting there, waiting to be discovered. On Sunday afternoon in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Michele applied the same logic to fashion. “It’s my way of saying that a dress is a possibility; it’s a book,” he explained after the show. What he meant was that a dress doesn’t have to be worn to matter; that sometimes its value lies in the possibility it represents, the fantasy of a life you could live in it, or simply the fact that it expands your idea of what fashion can be.
Applying his theory to the collection, this season Michele was offering a possibility of glamour. His signature sensory silhouettes took on a 1980s sensibility expressed in sexy, lean dresses and skirts and broad-shouldered tailoring. Bouclé jackets and voluminous trousers set an opulent mood for the show, enhanced by the designer’s cinematic colour language and love of rich surface textures and decoration. Caps were embroidered with the words “Villain Teen”, a play on the word Valentino. “In Italian, it’s a chic way of saying that you’re outside of the rules. It’s an elegant way of doing something wrong in a place where everything is perfect,” Michele explained. His library rebels traversed the aisles of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève to a soundtrack that techno-fied Troye Sivan’s new song Party with Anyma’s Siren.
“If you have to work in fashion, you have to be a fetishist. I’m a fetishist with fashion and with books. It’s the power of my job; of a dress. It’s something that’s still keeping its power and it’s always on its way to becoming something else and to transforming the body. I like, always, to talk about the process of things because what I’m trying to do here is to deliver my idea of Valentino in this time,” he said. Michele is an image-maker with a defined aesthetic that evolves very slowly from season to season. He is not terribly interested in talking about clothes, but rather about what his overall vision represents. Because the meaning he imbues his clothes with – his firm values of freedom, beauty and individuality – remains unchanging, that message stays the same.
In his work, Michele creates an idealised fantasy of the world he wants to live in and invites you to join him. It doesn’t feel like an imaginary journey but something he’s manifested, and which has materialised in his own real life. From his own wardrobe to the visual worlds he’s created in his houses in Italy, he is living that dream. This collection embodied the fetishistic approach he talked about: a fixation on expanding, perfecting and immersing yourself in the same rigid obsession until it becomes a reality. In the process, he injected it with a message about knowledge: that even in a shopping-centric season like this one, where every runway proposal feels pragmatic and retail-driven, fashion has a responsibility to do more than sell clothes; to reflect and affect the times we live in.
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