Inside Alessandro Michele’s showstopping debut haute couture show for Valentino

To decipher one of Alessandro Michele’s press releases can be a degree-level task: the thick tome left on each seat at the Italian designer’s first haute couture collection for Valentino, held in Paris earlier today, was as thick as a script for a feature-length film. In it, he referenced everyone from Umberto Eco to Homer, James Joyce to Italo Calvino, couched in the language of philosophy and semiotics.

Its essence, though, spoke of an altogether more simple task: that of making a list. Titled ‘Vertigineux: A Poetics of the List’, he spoke of Eco’s assertion that the list is a way to ‘confine the infinite extension of the existing within a meaningful framework… to bring some order to the chaos of the universe’. To create a couture collection is a daunting task: it represents the pinnacle of dressmaking, and the designer who takes on one of the handful of haute couture houses must work in harmony with the petite mains of the atelier (they are responsible for the hand-construction and embellishment of each of the collection’s looks).

Alessandro Michele’s debut couture collection for Valentino

So in the book’s pages were Michele’s own lists, an attempt to distil the infinity of options that haute couture affords into a framework for a gown: 48 in total, each corresponding with a single look, a ‘feverish’ assemblage of words and phrases from the simple ‘shirt’, ‘ruche’, ‘satin’ and ‘dress’ to ‘dramaturgy’, ‘austerity’ and ‘my mother’. In the show, which took place at Palais Brongniart in central Paris, guests look downwards onto a long black stage, behind which the various words flickered along the backdrop (at the show’s end they jolted and distorted, before reading simply ‘etcetera’ over and over, as if malfunctioning).

It was an apt glimpse into Michele’s approach to the medium, which, like both his debut ready-to-wear collection for the house and his star-making collections at Gucci, was freewheeling and eclectic. An impossibly flared gown, which opened the show, fell away into colourful harlequin diamonds constructed from gathered tulle; others were adorned with enormous peacock feathers, rich layers of sequin embellishment, frothy waterfalls of tulle, plissé capes and tassels, while panniers, Tudor ruffs and plays on Victoriana were a soaring spin through fashion history. To attempt to describe each look – and its multitude of elements – would require a pages-long list of its own. It was best to simply let yourself be entertained.

Michele described this approach (in typically esoteric style) as ‘a constellation of visions… a plurality of interconnected worlds’. ‘Each dress is not just an object,’ he continued. ‘It’s rather the knot of a net of significance, [recalling] eras, cultures and echoes of past stories.’ In its expression of sartorial freedom – always at the heart of Michele’s approach – this was a showstopping opening act.

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