Alessandro Michele is the Italian designer who, during his seven year tenure as creative director at Gucci, made maximalism a meal ticket for the brand.
His challenge now is to bring the same hot sauce to Valentino. He's been in the top creative job for just 30 months but time moves fast in fashion and he's already rolled out 10 collections and four catwalk shows. At Paris fashion week on Sunday afternoon, he ticked off show number five.
A series of satin bustier tops paired with knee-length skirts opened the show. Some skirts were almost see-through in gauzy fabrics. Some came smothered in glimmering beads or trimmed with feathers or both.
The show may have been held at the Sainte-Geneviève library but these were clothes made for the dancefloor. The debauched partying mood dominated menswear too, with creased trousers and silky boxers peaking out above their waistbands and mis-buttoned double-breasted blazers. Michele said he liked playing with "the idea of glamour in the wrong way".
The reaction to Michele at Valentino has been mixed. In a turbulent luxury market, its revenue declined 15% to €1.12bn in 2025. Michele's opulent outlook has been slightly out of step with fashion's vanilla era. However, the reign of quiet luxury is quietly coming to a close; "personality dressing" is on the rise and Michele is poised in the wings.
Speaking after the show, Michele described "sensuality as part of the vocabulary of the brand". This time around he had pared back his signature voluminous silhouettes, instead focusing on exposing skin.
The brand's founder Valentino Garavani famously hated the casualisation of fashion, recoiling at flip-flops and shorts, but Michele likes to toy with codes. In this case, there were deep V-cut cotton vest tops while some models wore brightly coloured baseball caps emblazoned with "Villain Teen". Michele, who wore one in green, said he enjoyed the way it sounded a bit like "Villain-Teen-O". But he also liked that in Italian it's "a chic way to say you're a little outside of the rules", adding: "Where everything is perfect, it's an elegant way to make something wrong."
Valentino is controlled by Mayhoola, which owns 70% of the company, while the French luxury group Kering holds the remaining 30% and has options to increase its stake to 100% before the end of the decade.
The brand's sweet spot – and key to Michele's turnaround strategy – is red carpet dressing. The collection's longer length ruffle and bow-adorned dresses had Hollywood written all over them.
In a world where increasingly red-carpet looks are captured in 360 degrees and quickly dissected on the internet, Michele knows a dress with a bit of extra oomph counts. A final hot pink dress featured a giant pleated train and huge black bow that bounced down the catwalk, grazing the audience's knees.