MILAN – Alessandro Michele is opening another door into his imaginative world through the launch of his first Valentino ad campaign to promote the “Avant les Débuts” resort 2025 collection that was unveiled in June. To this end, he turned to none other than legendary director Federico Fellini.
“Starting this new phase, I wanted to return to a language that would echo the neorealism of Luchino Visconti, the visual symbolism of Ingmar Bergman and the magic realism of Federico Fellini,” explained Michele in an exclusive interview. The voiceover in the video for the campaign conceived by the designer with Glen Luchford is Fellini’s from his 1972 film “Roma.”
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In the movie, Fellini with his camera followed actress Anna Magnani returning home at Palazzo Altieri, as he described Rome and all its contradictions.
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“I pretend to follow a girl in my new home, Palazzo Mignanelli [Valentino’s headquarters in Rome], playing with the transposition of space and time,” said Michele.
Fellini celebrated Magnani as “the symbol of the city: Rome, seen both as a she-wolf and a vestal, aristocratic and ragged, gloomy and clownish.” Michele added: “Federico Fellini couldn’t have been more accurate, because Rome has this precise paradoxical nature.”
The designer wanted the film and the photographs of the campaign “to have a patina as if they dated back to Valentino Garavani’s heyday,” he explained.
In fact, the photos in the printed layout look like Polaroids, he pointed out. “We are so used to scrolling images that we are almost consumed by them, so I wanted them to be smaller in size, which would lead to a precise choice to look at them.”
Within the palazzo, “celebrating the art of the feast,” Michele envisioned a series of “eccentric, uninhibited and eclectic” characters that include a cardinal skating through the salons, heiresses of a declining nobility — and a number of pugs, a clear reference to the couturier’s favorite dogs.
“It’s a party, aristocratic, eccentric, intimate, sacred and secular, a combination of different layers that reflect the city of Rome,” said Michele.
The designer said he wanted to work once again with Luchford, with whom he created several Gucci campaigns, whether inspired by the science fiction genre from the ’50s and ‘60s, including the TV series “Star Trek,” or featuring Harry Styles in a fish-and-chips shop in northern London posing with animals including chickens and dogs.
“Glen is a friend, and I work with those that I appreciate on a personal level. Also, I admit I have the ambition that cinema can be a medium that works for me, and together with Glen we have invented an eclectic, very cinematic aesthetic,” said Michele. “The home of Valentino lights up through the images of the film, grandiose but also simple.”
The “Avant les Débuts” collection first dropped in the Valentino Paris stores on Saint-Honoré and Avenue Montaigne on Sept. 30 and will be rolled out in stores globally on Oct. 15.
As it has in the past, Rome remains at the center of Michele’s imagination — its incongruities, its beautiful art and architecture but also its chaos and its rough edges — which he admits contribute to its attraction in his eyes.
That said, speaking a few days after his debut show in Paris on Sept. 29, the designer was upbeat about the experience in the French capital.
“I adore Paris. Valentino [Garavani] built a bridge between Paris and Rome, and he was the first Italian to be admitted to the court of couturiers,” said Michele. “In any case, Paris and Rome share so much,” he said, citing as an example Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino, an Italian cardinal and politician who became French and its main minister in the 17th century, succeeding Richelieu. “Valentino has two very prestigious headquarters in Paris and Rome and they are equally important.”
Appearing in good spirits, he said that the spring 2025 show was “cathartic.” Expressing his admiration and respect for Garavani, he said he “did an archeological work with the collection, to rebuild with my own eyes and my own vision that world, but this is me. Probably [Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti] recognized some archival pieces, revisited and redesigned, but I do not copy and paste. In every new house we will inhabit, in fact, the relationship with its past will never be an act of mere contemplation, rather of reinvention.”
He described the spring collection as “an antidote against transience,” and said that it was “extraordinary how much [Garavani] loved life, there was no remorse toward lightness and beauty, using beauty as a medicine and he was brave in saying that fashion is not futile.”
Several of his longtime supporters, from Jared Leto to Elton John, came to the spring show. Asked if he ever designed thinking of such high-profile friends, he mulled the question over and responded: “No, but I do observe people around me, and am influenced by them.”
Speaking of friends, he went on: “I think Valentino had many close friends. I don’t compare myself to him and I am not part of a jet set, but that jet set, that kind of rarefied life does not exist anymore. He created clothes for the life that he knew, it was all authentic, it was not merely a brand, but the world has opened up and mixed.”