When the lights dimmed at Valentino’s Spring 2026 couture show in Paris, the room didn’t fall silent in the usual “fashion week” way. It felt closer to a collective inhale — the kind you take before opening a love letter you already know will matter. Valentino Garavani had passed just days before, and Alessandro Michele, newly at the helm yet already fluent in the house’s emotional vocabulary, chose not to memorialize him with sentimentality. Instead, he staged a dialogue. One designer speaking to another, decades apart, using the only language both trust completely: clothes.
The show opened with Garavani’s own voice, recalling how movie stars once taught him how to dream.
Instead of a runway, guests circled wooden viewing chambers, each with a peephole placed at eye level. A 19th-century optical device — the Kaiserpanorama — became Michele’s answer to the modern attention span. You weren’t scrolling. You were waiting. You were watching. And the waiting made the watching feel almost ceremonial.
Each look appeared alone. You had no choice but to pay attention. In an industry that runs on speed and spectacle, he insisted on slowing down. And in the wake of Garavani’s passing, that demand for stillness felt like respect.
What emerged through those apertures were characters, not outfits. Michele has always designed in personas, but here the approach felt especially deliberate. These were women imagined as icons in formation: silent film sirens, Art Deco aristocrats, operatic heroines suspended somewhere between history and fantasy.
Several gowns nodded to the visual language of early Hollywood. Bias-cut satins clung and released with a knowing ease. Velvet coats pooled dramatically, embroidered with a level of handwork that reminded you couture still lives in hours, not hashtags. Feathered headpieces and sculptural crowns framed faces. You didn’t look at these women casually. You studied them.
What made the tribute poignant was the sense that Michele was speaking to Garavani in a language the founder understood instinctively: cinematic fantasy, crafted stitch by stitch, with women at the center of the frame. The gowns — many destined for upcoming red carpets — carried the tension between spectacle and intimacy that defined Valentino’s legacy.
