Valentino's SS27 show was a book we're not sure we want to read Sometimes a complete creative U-turn might be the right move
The concept behind Valentino's SS27 show was Umberto Eco's anti-library, a notion the great Italian writer used to describe the books we own but have never read, representing the untapped potential of the volumes we keep at home. Ironically, the clothes Alessandro Michele chose to send down the runway — undoubtedly after being given a thorough dressing-down by brand management — were precisely the clothes of that anti-library: in other words, clothes we would never wear.
Michele's problem — and that of the other mega creative directors whose metaphorical stock is sinking fast in the court of public opinion — is that he simply doesn't know how to take a step back, assess his own creativity from an outside perspective, and call it into question. The world would be pleasantly shocked if, aware of what audiences now expect from him, he managed to get ahead of the game and surprise everyone with something different. Instead, it's always the same old song. And this time, it was unhinged, to say the least.
He would at least prove he has another trick in his repertoire. But rather than a repertoire, what this magician appears to possess is a single top hat concealing one tired, worn-out rabbit. One can't help but wonder: is this overpaid creative actually capable of looking at a given look and remembering that he's already done it years before? That audiences have seen those hideous bows a hundred times already? It also remains a mystery why the brand's creative team seems so captivated by the highest-contrast colour combinations imaginable (yellow/pink, green/fuchsia, fuchsia/aqua, and even acid lime/raspberry), or why they decided to add a pair of gold boxer shorts pulled up nearly to the waist to a menswear look that already featured a Chanel-style jacket, trousers with irregular double pleats in satin, and a mandarin-collar shirt with a black clip.
Like Demi Moore in The Substance, endlessly reapplying lipstick and swapping accessories before a date she'll never keep, Michele's obsession with the incoherent accumulation of decoration reeks of desperation. Why does he have no faith in the design itself? What reasoning was followed when, faced with a yellow dress with '80s shoulder pads and long sleeves, someone decided to add a sculptural, asymmetric ruffle, all gathered and bunched, and — as if that weren't enough — fur trim on the sleeves? Why flaunt originality when the styling includes a shirt tucked into visible boxer shorts — perhaps the most tired and hackneyed styling trick of the season? And what exactly was the thinking behind lace fitted shorts worn under jackets that Sally Spectra from The Bold and the Beautiful might have worn thirty years ago?
The truth is that Michele was cool when the cultural zeitgeist aligned with his sensibility, but times have changed. We live in an era in which meta-cultural, post-ironic pastiche has curdled into mere chaos. Of course, beauty takes a thousand unexpected forms — no one would argue otherwise — but we always recognise it when it's in front of us; and the same goes for its opposite. This taste for contrariness and kitsch is a foolish act of rebellion, a child's tantrum, a purely performative nonconformism. Not least because it follows no coherent concept, even on an intellectual level: the show notes themselves are an elaborate begging of the question, pre-emptively justifying the fact that nothing makes sense.
We could have had a unifying theme; we could have had even a vaguely quirky reinterpretation of a particular era from the archives; we could have had something wearable in real life. What Michele has given us instead is nothing more than a greatest-hits playlist of the worst of the '80s and a philosophical doorstop, asking the audience to extract some coherent meaning from it all. Perhaps the time has come to set aside the books by Adorno, Benjamin, and Eco, toss semiotics out the window, and face reality head-on.