Valentino's dizzying Haute Couture by Alessandro Michele
Through a bold and poetic collection, Alessandro Michele transforms fashion into an infinite exploration of references, stories and meanings.
Valentino 's first Haute Couture show under the direction of Alessandro Michele , entitled Vertigineux , turned out to be a poetic and labyrinthine dive into the infinity of creation. Inspired by Umberto Eco's reflections on the "vertigo of the list", Michele constructed his collection as an infinite catalogue, an accumulation of references that, far from seeking to order everything, played with the dispersion and dizzying multiplication of meanings. Each dress thus became a "vertigo" in itself, an open list that mixed materials, emotions, pictorial influences, cinematographic references, historical legacies and symbolic traces. Through this accumulation, the aim was not to contain chaos, but to invoke and contemplate it, in a mixture of rationality and irrationality.
As Eco suggests, the list can be both an attempt at order and a call to infinity—and this duality is fully present in this collection. The forty-eight dresses are not simply fashion creations; they are living archives, knots of woven meanings, where each element, from the fabric to the color, from the cut to the story it evokes, intertwines to form a constellation of images and memories, an emotional cartography. All of this manifests itself in an endless stream of associations, a dance of echoes, reminiscences, and juxtapositions, creating a sensory experience of vertigo and ecstasy.
Alessandro Michele does not seek to complete the list, but to suspend it, to make it infinite, like an "etcetera" that refuses closure. This collection is a "zodiac of ghosts" in the manner of Italo Calvino: a space where each thread, each seam, each trace of color extends beyond the visible, towards a beyond of saying. The dresses become canvases of intertwined meanings, in a flow of ideas, inspirations and crossed stories, suspended on the edge of a creative vertigo that does not seek to control, but to let the infinite potential of fashion as a language unfold . It is a journey into multiplicity, a living "maps and territories", a world where each seam is a word that, while remaining suspended, becomes a story, a memory, a vision.