The newfound sobriety of Valentino's SS26 show Alessandro Michele rediscovers the beauty of (relative) simplicity

What is the job of a creative director? That of an author or that of an interpreter? The answer to this question is never simple and is more dictated by circumstances than by a fixed rule. It was the case yesterday with the Valentino SS26 collection, where Alessandro Michele finally took a step back and subdued his most theatrical instincts. The result was a collection of healthy compromise: recognizably Michele in style but without the frills and baroque excesses declining into the bizarre of the initial seasons. Limits, after all, do good to creatives, discipline is a stimulus towards concentration and the purity of aesthetics that does not mean minimalism but clarity and precision, without distractions or smoke and mirrors.

With such a crowded and fatigued market, ornamentation immediately betrays its own futility, and the public itself can reserve attention only for serious and sensible proposals. No less, in an era where creative directors rotate and move, rewriting the identities of each brand at every turn, overhauling already well-defined brands is a high-risk operation and it is therefore good to curb instincts and strive to seek a rational compromise between the two aspects of the job, namely between the author and the interpreter. A message that was evident also in the show notes provided by Michele to accompany the presentation.

What did Valentino's show notes mean?

The change of gear was also seen in the show notes of the collection, which abandon the mystifying and often pretentious treatise of the past, for four clean paragraphs in which Michele's spirit emerges with the usual taste for literary meditation: starting from a letter by Pasolini written in the height of the fascist era, Michele reflects on the image of fireflies in post-war literature, a metaphor for a rural and romantic world that fades in the face of modernity. In addition to Pasolini and Calvino, both cited in the text, we could add poets like Rebora, Trilussa, Montale in minor form, Bertolucci as well as the novel Luciérnagas by Ana María Matute.

In the era when the ancient peasant world clashed with the modernity of radars and tanks, the firefly was a symbol of nature, of the wonder that derives from it and of its own transience. In the show notes, fireflies become «signals of hope» and therefore we must «understand how the darkness of our present is actually interwoven with subtle swarms of fireflies: clues that announce other worlds to come, traces of a beauty that resists homogenization, sensitive epiphanies capable of reconnecting us to the human». The firefly is thus the moment of revelation in which we understand that there is still beauty in the world and that it is worth fighting for it.

And what did they have to do with the collection?

The fact that instead of talking about hyperuranians and meta-theaters Michele cited the glimmers of beauty in the real meant, between the lines, that the collection would concern less another world (theatrical or dreamlike as it may be) and more ours. Now, setting aside for a second the rose-tinted glasses of poetry, the reasons behind this sobriety are perhaps more cynical: the brand's general command, which needs good economic results more than ever, will have made it clear that the time for games and round dances was over. A collection was needed that was always beautiful and romantic, but that people in the real world could wear without looking like Anastasia Romanoff's grandmother or the extras in a fin-de-siècle production of Oscar Wilde's Salomè. And fortunately.

Thanks to this excellent exercise in discipline and anti-indulgence, the collection retains all the flavor of Alessandro Michele, who remains today one of the best eveningwear designers on the market, winking at the Valentino of the '80s (also here without exaggerating) and finally brings itself close, in a convincing way, to interpreting the heritage of the great Italian couturier in an honest and sincere way. It was enough, in fact, to counterbalance the "weight" of the more eccentric looks, simplify the styling, clean the silhouettes of pearls, berets, jewelry, fur stoles and that post-ironic armamentarium to speak to us directly and frankly. A sobriety that also allowed the most eccentric and sequined accessories to retain their originality without seeming over the top. In increasingly unbalanced times, in fact, the true provocation is to maintain one's balance as firmly as possible. We hope that in the future times become more balanced and Alessandro Michele's Valentino remains exactly like this.