On Oct. 19, Shanghai Fashion Week will close with an opening.

For one night only, Italian skiwear specialist Moncler will showcase the latest incarnation of its multi-year “Genius” project — and this time, it’s huge: 30,000 square metres, an entire “City of Genius” with a population of co-creatives to elevate the brand’s profile in the key Chinese market and beyond.

“We’ve given each designer the freedom to build a house in the City,” said Moncler chief executive Remo Ruffini.

Multi-hyphenates Edward Enninful and Donald Glover are among the builders. So are Chinese artist LuLu Li, A$AP Rocky, Willow Smith, Lucie and Luke Meier of Jil Sander and Nigo, who is collaborating with Mercedes-Benz. Hiroshi Fujiwara, Rick Owens and Palm Angels, who have participated in Genius in the past, are also taking part this year.

Ruffini claims 2024′s roster of collaborators — who will each design and market capsule collections for the Moncler — is exactly the sort of thing he had in mind in 2018 when he launched Genius in Milan, replacing seasonal partnerships with designers Giambattista Valli and Thom Browne with monthly activations produced with a wider range of creative voices riffing on the brand’s signature ski jackets.

Early on, Ruffini was able to corral an extraordinary group of collaborators: designers like Jonathan Anderson, Craig Green, Pierpaolo Piccioli and Simone Rocha. The concept then widened to embrace popular musicians like A$AP Rocky, Pharrell and Alicia Keys and brands such as Mercedes-Benz and Rimowa.

Genius is one of Moncler’s key pillars, said Ruffini, alongside its main collection and high-end mountain sports line Grenoble. “These three dimensions give us the opportunity to talk with different cultures and different generations,” he explained. Grenoble’s importance was re-emphasised in a spectacular show staged in St Moritz in February. The Shanghai extravaganza fulfils the same function for Genius.

Ruffini is betting the next instalment of Genius will energise Moncler in a challenging luxury market. Moncler reported double-digit growth in the first-half, defying a wider luxury slowdown, though the picture may be darker when it reports its latest results on Oct. 29.

“[Genius] will never be a big business,” Ruffini said. “But it brings a lot of people into the shop: more creative people, people who don’t follow too much the fashion world. I would always go the day we launched a Genius designer in the shop, and it was always a very different crowd, with a lot of energy.”

While Ruffini clearly expects the initiative to deliver results, building the City of Genius in Shanghai has been an emotional investment, too. He loves the city. Since his first visit in 2005, he’s been mesmerised by the speed of change. “They honestly have given me a lot in terms of thinking,” Ruffini said. “So I thought I had to give something back.”

The night before we met for breakfast at Paris’ Hotel Costes (and just under a week after he tightened his control of Moncler after striking a deal with LVMH), Ruffini hosted a dinner at Versailles for 700 of the brand’s store managers and sales assistants from all over the world as part of an internal retail summit. He’d never visited the palace before and was suitably impressed, so you can imagine the effect the venue had on people who’d flown in from Atlanta or Sydney. When I first met Ruffini, he had 25 people working for him. Now there are 7,500. But, as one of his sons pointed out to him after dinner, he didn’t seem particularly happy.

“My biggest problem is I’m never happy,” Ruffini acknowledged. “I’m looking forward to the next step. What can I do to do better? But this is not only my work, it’s my life. Sometimes I stop and think I’m quite stupid. I should enjoy.” But that thought is instantly replaced by a niggle of discontent. Same with his skiing, his lifelong passion. As many weekends as he can, Ruffini heads to St Moritz, and even after all these years, he often skis with an instructor. “Because I learn a lot. I’m not as good as I think. I could be better. I like much more to technically improve than I really enjoy to ski.”

I think the word is “driven.” Like his restless left leg, Ruffini never stops. He met his match in Jony Ives though. They’ve been collaborating on a four-piece collection which, thanks to Ives’ exacting eye, took three years to complete. Ruffini said the only time he’d ever encountered anyone as obsessive was Kei Ninomiya, who designs the Comme des Garçons-owned brand Noir. One of the Noir jackets had 125 pieces. Ives’ obsession was stitches. “We used this sustainable nylon. Usually a roll is 1.50 metres, but we had to make it in 2.50 metres. We found a mill that normally makes fabric for interiors, like curtains. Because Jony didn’t want to see a single stitch. You feel it’s nothing, but we work so much. And the button — it’s incredible, looks like an iPhone.”

His perpetual dissatisfaction clearly gives way to another state when he’s in co-creative mode. Same effect when he talks about his City of Genius collaborators. Ruffini said his life practically changed when he saw Donald Glover as Childish Gambino in his searing video for “This is America. ““I didn’t know who he was, but I said I need to work with him.” Glover is now devoted to Gilga, his farm in Ojai, California, which he is setting up as a cultural and agricultural hub. “He was very concentrated on his farm, I was very concentrated on the video, and in the end, he won,” Ruffini recalled. Glover insisted on designing clothes he wanted to wear all day, so he essentially made a collection of workwear for the farm.

Moncler for the farm is a concession on Ruffini’s part because his own point of view about a real co-creation for Genius is this: “I leave the freedom to the designer for sure, but they really have to follow also our DNA, otherwise it’s not interesting.” A$AP also showed up with a very clear idea, based on Motocross, not Moncler, which didn’t fit the plan, and he was sticking to his guns. They talked and talked … and talked and eventually reached a point where Ruffini could feel enough Moncler in the mix. “Let’s say it’s very him and very us — very concentrated, no compromise.”

“I’m not a designer,” Edward Enninful said to Ruffini when he invited him to participate. “I told him, ‘You are more than a designer,’” recalls Ruffini, “but honestly, the first time I saw the fitting, the product was hanging and I thought, ‘OK, it’s not …’ Then Edward said, ‘Now I have to prepare the girl to show you the magic.’ I was shocked. He layered everything and it was incredible in terms of product. Very styled but very sellable. 100 percent Moncler, but he found another face for the brand, which is super-interesting.”

Glover, A$AP, Enninful and the other residents of the City of Genius appear as adorable, digitally generated versions of themselves at five-years-old in the teaser film that precedes the Oct. 19 event. In the 1960s, a team of experts were apparently able to figure out what makes a genius based on how the study’s subjects used creative imagination to solve problems. 98 percent of five year olds qualified as geniuses. By the age of 25, that number had fallen to two percent. The study concluded that uncreative thinking is learned. So, if you sustain your inner child, you can remain a genius?

Ruffini said he was a disaster at 5, at 6 and all the years up to 18. He didn’t like school, hated studying. His mother was desperate. “I started working at 20 years old and it changed,” he counselled. “My character, my attitude, my energy changed.” So that’s how you keep up with the two percent — work!

PARIS — The season’s most anticipated show was surely Alessandro Michele’s runway debut as creative director of Valentino. Ultimately, Michele’s collection did not clinch the number one slot, but it landed near the top of BoF’s list.

Our editors were divided over Michele’s layered-on styling, but agreed the show was pristinely executed, deeply researched and emotionally resonant.

Milan made a particularly strong showing. We were blown away by Simone Bellotti’s unexpected interpretation of Swissness at Bally, which took the top spot, as well as the collection of otherworldly, conceptual designs shown by Lucie and Luke Meier at Jil Sander.

Fashion month was shaded by a slowdown in luxury sales and a worsening geopolitical climate that darkened the industry’s outlook. Discontent with soaring prices and an ongoing shift towards safe, ultra-commercial design also dampened excitement for the proceedings.

In this context, several of the season’s best-received collections were ones that jolted editors awake with a more challenging, experimental aesthetic. Duran Lantink showed his most confident and complete collection to date, while Loewe’s Jonathan Anderson continued his exploration of textile transformation, resulting in sculptural but ultra-light garments. Junya Watanabe’s collection of complex upcycled pieces also made the list. “I feel that abnormal clothing is necessary in our everyday life,” the designer said.

Other brands added extra punch to their shows by proposing multi-layered experiences, which fostered a dialogue with culture and the wider world. Alaïa decamped to New York to celebrate what is arguably the Guggenheim’s most powerful work: its nautilus-shaped interior by Frank Lloyd Wright. Bottega Veneta’s eclectic, craft-heavy collection was backdropped by a charming design installation and attended by a similarly eclectic and charming cast of VIPs: actresses Michelle Yeoh and Julianne Moore, boxer Imane Khelif and TikTok sensation Jools Lebron.

Miu Miu, which also made the cut, commissioned an art installation by Goshka Macuga that explored misinformation and the search for truth with videos, newspapers filled with links to digital assets, and a factory-like conveyor belt clacking broadsheets around on the ceiling. The collection twisted silhouettes informed by Miuccia Prada’s 1990s archive — sometimes literally, as in the case of a backward skirt — while holding onto the messy-girl modern energy that’s reignited the brand’s sales in recent seasons.

Deft execution took precedence over the thrill of the new at Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent, where the designer mixed louche, androgynous tailoring with a renewed embrace of colour to cinematic effect, scoring a place in our top ten.

Two honourable mentions: S.S. Daley made a polished, convincing womenswear debut that was a highlight of the London season. Meanwhile, in Paris, Balenciaga’s clever trompe-l’œil lingerie pieces and high-voltage soundtrack (an extended remix of Britney Spears’ “Gimme More”) made it a strong contender, too.

1. Bally

“A dropped shoulder, raised collar and rounded shape redefined Bally’s signature leathers. A mention of ‘decorum subverted by the avant garde’ could have been borrowed from a Dada manifesto ... Bellotti is on a mission to expand popular awareness of Switzerland beyond banks, chocolate, precision and neutrality. ‘It’s an amazing culture to explore,’ he insisted after his show.” – Tim Blanks

Read more: WOW = A World of Wonder

2. Valentino

“Michele’s Valentino debut could never match the seismic impact of his first collection for Gucci, because that brand of give-people-what-they-didn’t-know-they-wanted lightning only strikes once. Instead, we were gifted here with a collection that was phrased in Michele’s now-familiar lexicon but re-delivered with such luxurious lightness, effortlessness, exquisite technique and flat-out beauty that it still had the potency of something much missed.” – Tim Blanks

Read more: Alessandro Michele’s Valentino Debut: Lightness, Luxury and ‘Fireflies Seeking Love’

3. Alaïa

“The proceedings began 45 minutes late. It was clear we were waiting for somebody famous, who turned out to be Rihanna, sweeping in like a voluptuous sea creature swathed in sparkling Alaïa net over a too-tight corset, pearls creeping up her legs. The show itself made use of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic spiral ramps, with the models starting at the very top, looking like chic ants you could barely see. But as they grew closer the details of their outfits were revealed — palazzo pants with a clown ruffle at the waist; small swishy low-slung skirts paired with bra tops; a scrumptious salmon pink chubby jacket; a curvaceous white puffer that was an homage to the famous quilted satin evening jacket by the American couturier Charles James.” – Lynn Yaeger

Read more: Hopes and Fears at New York Fashion Week

4. Saint Laurent

“The pearl-clutching shownotes imagined Yves Saint Laurent himself declaring, ‘I am the Saint Laurent Woman.’ A Super Heroine! Vaccarello set out to illustrate that point by dressing his models in simulacra of the spectacular menswear he showed last March, which was very much based on Yves’ own precise, formal style, eyewear and all ... For the finale, he pushed out the boat with clashes of colour so sick and fabric so rich that they were enough to consolidate defiant excess as Saint Laurent’s fashion statement for the season, along with those formidable suit-clad Amazons of course.” – Tim Blanks

Read more: Amazons on the Catwalk

5. Duran Lantink

“Lantink first caught fashion’s eye with his cartoonishly exaggerated proportions. That blown-up trench coat, remember? A year ago, the mutations looked like they might be a gimmick. Now, I’m calling them a physical realisation of independent fashion thinking. And Lantink sees more people trying to do similarly independent things in fashion. ‘Quiet luxury is so boring, isn’t it,’ he muses.” – Tim Blanks

Read more: In Paris, Shapes of Things to Come

5. Loewe

“Jonathan Anderson thought of the sculpture as the analogue of a different way to look at the world, in this case, a literal bird’s eye view. It’s something he’d been considering over the last few seasons at Loewe, which he called exercises in reduction: ‘Putting out ideas, like archetypes that you believe in.’ He said that sometimes he wanted to challenge people’s viewpoints, wanted people to wonder, how you do you wear that? Or, how do you sit on it? Or, how do you deal with it.” – Tim Blanks

Read more: In Paris, the Boys Can’t Help It!

6. Bottega Veneta

“Child’s play was on Matthieu Blazy’s mind. In his show notes, he talked about childhood’s ‘adventure of the everyday.’ One of his major reference points was ‘E.T.’ which is, like many of Spielberg’s films, a coming-of-age story. One of the joys of Blazy’s show was watching him elaborate on that idea in a kind of coming and going of age, weaving backwards and forwards between a child’s view of the adult world, and a worldly adult’s rediscovery of a sense of play in dress.” – Tim Blanks

Read more: WOW = A World of Wonder

7. Junya Watanabe

“Bags are not made but ‘assembled,’ the same way Ava [in the film Ex Machina] was assembled, or Dr. Frankenstein made his monster. That’s how Junya constructed his dresses, as complex collages which remade his models. Also in the Frankenstein vein, the sepulchral strain of Goth in the collection. A pile of skulls decorated a t-shirt. Black lace looked like it had been tarred ... Imagine an opera coat constructed from backpacks, with the straps still attached. Zips, straps and buckles were significant because, as they signposted the origins of the recycled materials, they also underscored the creativity in transforming those materials.” – Tim Blanks

Read more: In Paris, Shapes of Things to Come

8. Jil Sander

“Intelligence and idiosyncrasy can combine to create something that is visually alluring on a higher plane and sensually irresistible on a gut level. There was a gorgeously sinister sleekness at work in Lucie and Luke Meier’s latest exercise. It felt necessary after last season took the Meiers’ experiments with cerebral volume to an extraterrestrial limit. This collection was firmly rooted on dark, possibly dangerous terra firma. ‘Well, obviously we’re living in a dark world,’ said Lucie. ‘So let’s say we were attracted by darkness, and we like the ambience when it changes from light to dark.’” – Tim Blanks

Read more: Milan Goes to the Movies

10. Miu Miu

“The sense of Miuccia re-engaging with her past is what made it so exciting. A suede jacket (didn’t she always say she hated suede?) paired with a vinyl pencil skirt reeked of the John Waters-style bad taste that enlivened Miu Miu’s golden era. The armlets were so bad they were good. Just like the butch belts, slung round the elasticated waists of little cotton skirts. With Miu Miu, the message was so often mixed, and Miuccia left it to us to go figure.” – Tim Blanks

Read more: Relevance: It Begins With a Blessing, and Ends With a Cur

PARIS — Alessandro Michele invited us into a “Pavillon des Folies” for his runway debut at Valentino. In the censorious quarters of social media where the rush to judgment knows no speed limit, “folies” will undoubtedly stand for a madness they’ll view as unmitigated Michele redux, the G word prominent in their critiques. And maybe, by mentioning follies, he was perversely courting that reaction. Surely Michele could only toy with such a response from the supremely confident position of knowing that he had achieved something magnificent. Of course, that’s not for him to say, so I’ll say it on his behalf.

His Valentino debut could never match the seismic impact of his first collection for Gucci, because that brand of give-people-what-they-didn’t-know-they-wanted lightning only strikes once. Instead, we were gifted here with a collection that was phrased in Michele’s now-familiar lexicon but re-delivered with such luxurious lightness, effortlessness, exquisite technique and flat-out beauty that it still had the potency of something much missed. I mean, he’s been gone for how long? Clearly, that interregnum of “quiet luxury” was all we needed to remind us that excitement is a critical ingredient in fashion’s mix. It created what Jacopo Venturini, the CEO responsible for bringing Michele to Valentino, described as “the urgent need to return to creating desires and emotions.” And Ale has already proved himself a master at that.

On Sunday afternoon, when guests walked into a cavernous space filled with huge pieces of furniture, art and sculpture — all of it, walls included, draped to ghostly effect in gauzy fabric which blurred the sharp edges — it felt like we were entering a pavilion not of follies but of dreams, with a floor of shattered mirrors to compound the effect. The backdrop was the contents of a life that had been warehoused while its central players were elsewhere, which kind of reflected the feelings Michele expressed to me about moving into Valentino’s “house” when he assumed the role of creative director in April. He claimed he felt his presence everywhere when he was working, never more so than in the brand’s fabulous archives. And all those details he’d absorbed spilled out onto the catwalk in an unabashed torrent of ruffles, bows, brocades, glittering embroidery, gilded lace, polka dots, hats, facial jewellery and a spirit of bohemian excess that tapped into Michele’s own appetites, especially in the orgy of desirable accessories, fringed, embroidered, and even logo-ed with the “V” that is simultaneously one of the most recognisable and least offensive logos in the canon of fashion logograph.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… Michele’s stint at Gucci was influenced by his reverence for Valentino, so Sunday’s presentation was actually a relationship finally consummated. And it confirmed his own distinct voice. We can stop talking about anyone else, and settle on this as the new world he has defined for himself. As with all his presentations in the past, there was an arcane manifesto penned in collaboration with his professorial partner Giovanni Attili. Once again, their words offered a free-associative stream that illuminated a creative process unlike anything else in fashion:  “…the magnificence of a finely embroidered dress, the long lingering of soul over flesh, the majesty of the void, the pursuit of fireflies seeking love, the scent of wet soil, the touch of organza ruffles, the miracle of libraries, the delicate layers of a watercolour.” Who needs a “review” after that?

Valentino Spring/Summer 2025

PARIS — Tracey Emin’s tiny bronze bird perched high on a pole at the very centre of the Loewe show space on Friday morning. Jonathan Anderson thought of the sculpture as the analogue of a different way to look at the world, in this case, a literal bird’s eye view. It’s something he’d been considering over the last few seasons at Loewe, which he called exercises in reduction: “Putting out ideas, like archetypes that you believe in.” He said that sometimes he wanted to challenge people’s viewpoints, wanted people to wonder, how you do you wear that? Or, how do you sit on it? Or, how do you deal with it Reasonable enough questions when you consider the archetypes he offered in his latest Loewe collection.

Foremost among them was a huge circular hoop skirt, draped in pale floral georgette. “Kind of like ‘40s silk,” was Anderson’s description. He’d got the idea from prewar crinoline sets, which he’d refined. The featherlight fabric was weighed with a fine chain so it undulated while the hoop created a different movement altogether. From the vantage point of Tracey’s all-seeing bird, it might almost look like they were hovering, not unlike the leather UFO skirts-cum-tutus he showed two weeks ago in London. Also kissing cousins with the mini-shifts that were a key component of that show were the long-sleeved sequinned minidresses Anderson showed for Loewe, even mini-er here. If London was Twiggy, Paris was Edie. The dresses were the result of some complicated-sounding experiment with 3D knitting which apparently allowed the sequins to sit flat like scales. You get the feeling that is often how things happen in the Anderson atelier. “Experiments.” A couple of the little dresses had the iridescence of shells that had been crushed and mounted on georgette, so they shimmered in movement.

Another archetype was the “tourist art” of the souvenir t-shirt. Anderson was very taken with the news that previously unheard music from Mozart was recently discovered and “dropped” the way Beyoncé, Drake or Gaga might release a new album. He printed Mozart — and Chopin and Bach — on a t-shirt of white feathers. And Manet’s Little Drummer Boy, and Van Gogh’s Irises and Sunflowers too. It was a high/low moment: the feathers redolent of old couture techniques, the music and art expressions of high culture … and the t-shirt a t-shirt. Anderson compared great composers or artists to rock star pinups. “It’s like when you go to a museum or concert, it’s experiential, you want to take the moment home with you.” He said he occasionally used to wish he was a painter or a musician, because art and music last. “But the more I do this job, the more I realise fashion lasts too. Garments make you remember things.”

There was a ring attached to the invitation, engraved Loewe 1846, the year the company was founded. Obviously a ring is a circle, like the hoops on Anderson’s skirts, like the shape of his show space on Friday. Anderson was thinking in circles, but he was also thinking of the ring as a symbol of commitment. “The last few seasons, I’ve been into refinement, rather than moving on,” he said. “As a designer you are always looking to the future, and it sometimes takes a long time for the audience to catch up.” A perfect illustration of that sentiment showed in the new collection as a navy suit matching a trim jacket to a pair of the voluminous trousers scooped up to one side that Anderson’s been showing lately. It was a stand-out look, even amidst the much showier silken hoop skirts and feather T’s. “It’s a weird accomplishment,” Anderson said with some pride. “Loewe’s not actually been very good at tailoring for a long time, but we’ve been able to build the craft and manufacturing to get it right.”

There was a intriguing sidebar to Friday’s presentation in the stellar front row of Anderson’s peers. Sarah Burton, Nicolas Di Felice, Pieter Mulier, Adrian Appiolaza and Kris Van Assche all showed up. Could be a simple case of their curiosity getting the better of them all at exactly the same moment.  But that’s nothing compared to what mine is doing.

Speaking of people who’ve been the subject of industry speculation as the game of musical chairs warms up again, Daniel Roseberry at Schiaparelli gave less than a second’s thought to quiet luxury and said, “Meh!  Let’s do loud luxury.” But his mission was more complicated than that. As far as press and clients are concerned, he’s the Couture Kid, but he wants — needs — to impress on the world that his vision has a commercial viability above the haute, and beyond the red carpet. Roseberry has restored a sense of enduring preciousness to Schiaparelli. “People don’t buy Schiap, they collect it,” Bergdorf Goodman’s Linda Fargo told him. That gave him the idea for this new ready-to-wear collection: “Future Vintage.” He imagined what women bought now being passed to their daughters and granddaughters.

At the same time, Roseberry insisted he wanted to turn the page, keep the collectible desirability of the couture but add ease and effortlessness. He spent the last gasp of summer in Ibiza. The afterglow lingered. “I want everything to feel like you could pull it out of your suitcase. We have not done that before.” A man’s white button-down, a piqué polo and a tank top opened the show, and they certainly sounded like breezy summery staples. But Roseberry Schiapped them, made hourglass bodysuits out of them. He pointed out that all the tailoring in the collection was unconstructed, and the only embroidery was in the last three dresses, where clusters of handpainted sequins in floral motifs turned the models into radiant naiads, but still, Roseberry’s irrepressible bone-marrow maximalism meant that the overall impression was hardly subtle. One look, a zipped jacket with batwing sleeves in gleaming eelskin, had all the grandeur of a Poiret opera coat. And what might pass for his version of a tracksuit made me chuckle: a jacket in ribbed neoprene with even bigger batwing sleeves paired with matching harem pants. Extravanganza!

Roseberry insisted the collection was rooted in ready-to-wear techniques. “I did not want this to look or feel like couture, I want to make a clean break.” He mentioned pieces in salt-washed, over-dyed cotton, which sounded humble enough until Natasha Poly appeared in a stonking great trench coat. I’m exaggerating for effect, of course. Not everything was scaled up like that, but Roseberry can’t help himself. He also loves an effect. So the nautical stripes were intarsia-ed with a trompe l’oeil sarong, and a little rib knit tank ombré-ed away into sequins. And the scuffs (flats being a new development) already had sandy toes, another trompe effect. Roseberry has always taken an unholy delight in fashion’s (im)possibilities. He’s a true heir to Elsa Schiaparelli in his appreciation of the sartorial surreal. Here, for instance, there was a hyper-formal floor-sweeping tuxedo coat worn with nothing but Schiap’s new-signature anatomically correct foot-shaped slip-ons (a look that was followed closely by Vittoria Cerretti as a Bond Girl, but that one I get!). Pull that out of your suitcase.

ROME — I would love to sit with Valentino Garavani and his new standard bearer Alessandro Michele and listen to them talk for however long it takes them to establish common ground: Valentino the immaculate, perma-tanned Sheik of Chic; Michele his shaggy, bearded, baseball-capped opposite.

Even though there are four decades between them, I’m imagining a mentor-acolyte relationship. There is, after all, already a shared vocabulary: words like “beauty,” “dream,” “chic” and “crazy” (as in “crazy for beauty”) are common to them both. There’s just one hitch. Michele claims he feels like an impostor as he assumes the role of creative director in the company that Valentino founded 65 years ago because, he reasons, “I’m not Valentino.”

That might seem to be stating the obvious, but it’s actually the words “creative director” which are the issue. “I’ve never sat in the chair of a real couturier, what we called for years and years a fashion designer,” Michele explains. “Valentino is a fashion designer. I’m a creative director. I like to build a story; I like to work on the pieces. But I could never be a real fashion designer because I didn’t grow up in a world that puts you in that position. The world of my job was a creative director. That, for me, is really different.”

Still, after some days spent with him in Rome this summer, I would suggest that Michele is coming to grips with the fact that the longer he sits in that chair, in charge of Italy’s finest maison de couture, with a legacy for the ages, and a 90-strong atelier of peerless craftspeople on call, the easier it will be to stop feeling like he doesn’t belong there. “It’s going to happen in a very natural way,” he predicts. “I’m discovering the relation between life and fashion, and also the idea that all these amazing fabrics, paints, embroideries, silhouettes, colours, jewels are about the arc that we have in life. When you are in such a specific environment, you’re gonna change. Like, if you move to Italy, you’re gonna start to speak Italian.”

Embodying Valentino

There’s no fashion story more imposingly Italian than Valentino’s. “We had the Pope, the President and Valentino,” says Michele when he thinks about growing up in Rome. “Valentino’s palace was one of the centres of power. Everybody knew about it. The Palazzo Mignanelli was a very specific place on the map of the city.” And when Valentino walked among the people, it was like a visitation.

Michele remembers when McDonald’s first opened in Rome, in March 1986, in the Piazza di Spagna just round the corner from the palazzo. He was hanging out there as usual, playing guitar, when Valentino and his partner Giancarlo Giammetti appeared in the street, two incongruously elegant figures amongst all the scruffy teens who congregated in the piazza every day. “I don’t want to say they went into the McDonald’s,” Michele says, laughing, “but it was pretty new and they were curious, maybe. I mean, can you imagine a McDonald’s opening up alongside such a chic palace?”

So now it’s the Pope, the President and Alessandro Michele? “I don’t have that perception of myself, ever,” he’s quick to counter. “I walk here from home, 10 minutes. Today it’s sunny, so I’ve got my straw hat on, and I feel just like an ordinary guy going to work… and sometimes I forget what a privilege this is.” His first day in the archive, Michele came across a dress Valentino made for Audrey Hepburn to wear at a party thrown by the Rothschilds in Paris in the early 70s. “It was superlight, embroidered with white strass, but when it was laid out, I saw the body, not the dress. Her arms were reaching out, like I was getting in touch with her. The dress was completely connected with the life, with the friendship, with the conversations she would have had that night. That’s what I saw in the archive, the way clothes amplified life. And I was in contact with every single detail of this life.”

The connection is real. Michele comes back to it time and again. Hundreds of thousands of pieces are archived in Valdagno in the northeast of Italy. “A vortex of beauty,” he calls it. “You can’t imagine one person created so much. The way Mr Valentino approached the dresses was about beauty and life. Everything was surrounded by a strange kind of power, like there was a spell on it. I touched dresses that were 45 years old, and there was an aura around them. There was not one dress that you thought could be for day. I was going through and thinking, ‘Which one could be for 9am? I don’t know.’ He was always thinking fabulous because life is so precious that you must celebrate it. He dressed queens, empresses, aristocrats, movie stars. That life doesn’t exist anymore at all. But I think the connection between me and him is that we loved our lives.”

“The reality is also that I love the time that he worked in fashion in Italy,” Michele continues. “And I grew up in that era. So it’s natural when I’m thinking about the stuff that I’m doing. There is a similarity in the way that I look at things. But I also have another perspective, because I was born in 1972 and I grew up with pop music, rock music, the 80s and I was a young guy so I am more about the jet set being outside in the street. I feel more that life is outside. I’m gonna use the dresses to enjoy the idea that you can be chic in the street. I am thinking about the freedom to be beautiful and dress up.”

Michele believes another connection between Valentino and himself is that their private lives are the raw material for their work. “Inside the world of Valentino dresses, there is a hidden world of culture, travel, art. Looking at the couture in the archive, I saw little embroidered jackets with a base in Chinese carpets from the 19th century. I saw Aubusson tapestries. And he did so many dresses with Delft tiles. That made me think he probably had an amazing collection of those things. There was no space for the bad things in life. I think he understood that to be in this life, you had to really enjoy who you are.”

Giancarlo Giammetti confirms as much when I ask him what he would most like to see from Valentino now. “I would like to acknowledge it as a serious and modern reinterpretation of the essence of our work,” he says. “And I say ‘our’ because we are talking not only about the dresses, but about an unmistakable style.”

Like Valentino, like Giammetti, Michele is an OCC, an obsessive, compulsive collector. “We have the same disease. They were obsessed with buying beautiful things. I’m the same. I feel free to say that I sometimes live for objects. The connection between me and the concrete things that surround me is very deep.”

He’s not exaggerating. Michele’s magnificent apartment in Rome is like a series of remarkable wunderkammers, from the Delft-tiled kitchen to the cavernous salon lined ceiling to floor with ancient paintings. Every surface is crowded with objets, clusters of collections. It’s the den of a mage, dustier, more eccentric than the museum-quality majesty of a Valentino interior, where the walls would be hung with some of the greatest names in art history, but you can easily recognise the same acquisitive impulse at work, the same desire to drown yourself in beauty.

In the space that used to be Valentino’s office in Palazzo Mignanelli, Michele has begun his own customisation by propping huge Renaissance canvases around the room. Valentino once hung Renaissance master Bronzino’s portrait of Eleonora di Toledo on those same walls. “I had to have that painting at any cost,” he said at the time. “I was crazy about it.”

Michele’s Next Chapter

The fashion industry rumour mill went into overdrive when Michele left Gucci in 2022, eight years of unprecedented success crumbling into recriminations about falling sales, inflexible aesthetics. “The day after, I started many conversations,” he says cryptically. “LVMH came to me. I started out with Fendi, so it would be amazing to work at Fendi. Also, Chanel is amazing. Everything is amazing!” But he was burned out. “I was thinking, ‘I’m gonna wait, I need to live my life now.’ And I was living really well, three-hour breakfasts, reading the newspaper, chatting with friends, organising my lunch in a beautiful square in Rome, just with my book, maybe alone sometimes. I went to the countryside whenever I wanted. I didn’t travel. That was really a privilege. No more New York or LA or Tokyo, just the countryside. I kept my driver for the first six months, then I felt I wanted to be free. I wanted to drive my own car again” — a Mercedes SUV, if you’re wondering. And all the while, he was happily back at home, in Rome.

And then the itch kicked in. “Maybe I’m gonna do a movie, maybe I’m gonna do a book, which I did. But for the last three or four months, I was missing this job. I was wondering why I’d stopped. Fashion is really me. I was thinking if I have to start this job again, I would love to do it with the right person in the right place. I didn’t want to lose myself struggling with a crazy situation and business issues.” Michele insists geography wasn’t important. “Maybe I go back and forth to Paris. Or if it was in LA, I didn’t care. I really respect my job, and my job is not that I want to be comfortable.” Still, it was 16 months since Gucci — 16 months of furious conjecture, including speculation about a Michele-led revival of the much-loved Walter Albini label — before he read about Valentino parting ways with creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli. CEO Jacopo Venturini called him a few days later to offer him the job.

“After a year and a half of other conversations, I signed the contract in three days,” recalls Michele. “I didn’t choose Valentino because it was in Piazza Mignanelli. I was just thinking that Valentino is amazing. I was looking for a beautiful place full of beautiful things to make new. And Jacopo and I worked together for five years at Gucci and he is such a great partner in crime, because he loves the brand, he has a specific sensibility with creative things, and he lets me work in a very free way. It’s not easy to find a person like him, a CEO who has this passion. So it was good to start again.” Venturini shares the sentiment wholeheartedly: “It all happened suddenly but at a very precise moment in fashion: we both felt the urgent need to return to creating desire and emotions, with a great care for people.”

But Venturini isn’t the only connection with Gucci in Michele’s new position. It brings him back into the orbit of French luxury conglomerate Kering, which acquired a 30 percent stake in Valentino last year. “Perhaps it’s karma, because I was thinking to maybe go to LVMH, but I am back again in the family.” And Pinault père et fils, the tycoons who control Kering, are, he says, very happy with the new arrangement. No wonder. During Michele’s peak years at Gucci, from 2015 to 2019, annual revenues roughly tripled, reaching almost €10 billion, a rapid expansion the likes of which the luxury sector had never seen.

He was at Gucci for almost 22 years so it was no wonder it felt like a home. Tom Ford was in charge when he arrived. “He and Domenico built a beautiful company with another culture, very well-organised, like an office… very American because Tom was from Texas. I mean, it was a company with a boss. So when I came here after a year and a half, this was not just a new job, it was a new life, completely. I instantly connected with a place that was the invention of a single person, the place where he dreamed, where he spent time with his friends. I felt I was in Valentino’s house. I forgot the idea of an office forever. I was inside the life of someone else.”

“When I left, I felt that most of the people who contacted me were looking at me like King Midas,” Michele muses. “Someone who touches things and they become gold. I think they saw me as some kind of crazy creative who could make money easily. But I was thinking more about me. Gucci was big, and it wasn’t easy. The more money it made, the more people wanted to be in your things, to understand what you did so they could steal something in your job, do the same thing in their way. That was pretty funny. I mean, it’s a mystery to me what I’m doing. I can’t explain it.”

“But when I came here to Valentino, I felt like it was a safe place.” Last year, Valentino generated €1.35 billion in sales. “I don’t think the vocation of this brand is to be a multi-billion euro place,” Michele says. “That’s too big. You’re gonna destroy the beauty, because it’s as fragile as the dresses Mr Valentino made in the past. It’s a place you need to protect. It’s the most beautiful wardrobe ever.”

Just as Valentino the brand couldn’t have wished for a more emblematic helmsman than Valentino the man, Michele became the perfect figurehead for his re-vision of Gucci. How inclined is he to do it all over again for “crazy, chic” Valentino? “I don’t think that I’m chic,” he answers. “I’m wrong. I’m a wrong person. I grew up as someone who is always off. But I think that you need to be a little bit off to work in this brand, because you need to look at things from another perspective to do exactly what Valentino was in a contemporary way. You need to look at things like a director, as a person who has so much material. Every day, I’m making a movie in my mind. I was just shooting the campaign in an amazing Roman palace and I was thinking, ‘This is what I did at Gucci, but here it’s so easy.”

I get what Michele means about easy, and what he means about off. Ultimately, it’s all about Rome, hot but not bothered, slightly twisted, and historically inclined to excess of all kinds: imperial orgies, la dolce vita, the bacchanal that opened La Grande Bellezza, Paolo Sorrentino’s love/hate letter to the city. Fellini defined it. Valentino refined it, even though he was born up north. “He arrived at such a beautiful moment,” says Michele, “when Rome was at the centre of so much in terms of cinema and art, and all the socialites were here because of the place and the climate. And Valentino loved Rome as a decadent place where you can do what you want, dream what you want, no rules. His own life was metaphysical, like a life of gods. It’s a life that’s impossible to reproduce now. All that Rome, all that richness. That’s so Fellini. Every time I enter this world, I feel like a kid, having fun in his room. We say in Italian frivolo.”

A few days before we meet, Michele’s therapist let him know how impressed she was by his progress. He’s been seeing her for eight years, sometimes as often as three times a week, ever since the pressures of Gucci made him realise he needed a small, safe space just for himself. “I always go deep inside things I hate, things I love, things that make me happy or mad, the past, the present, the faces,” he told me years ago. “It’s not just a beautiful colour. It’s an obsession I go to sleep with and wake up with.” But everything is different now. “I’m feeling in control,” Michele says. “I’m telling myself I don’t have to complicate things. I think I know what my job is. Gucci was so big that I got anxious sometimes worrying about the work, the awards, all the people I had to meet. I was protected by so many people but there was something that didn’t connect well. First of all, everything started like a huge explosion, it happened so fast and it’s really hard to deal with those kinds of things, and I lost my way a little bit. Thank God I was almost 40. If I was 25, I’d have been completely out of my head. But now I’m more conscious about everything, and I’m really enjoying what I’m doing in a deep and easy way.”

Which begs the question: what happens if that same bomb goes off at Valentino?

“If it’s something that’s never happened to you, you don’t know how to deal with it. But when you know it, you understand that it’s all hype, it’s nothing. The way they talk about me just makes me laugh now. The big thing that happened at Gucci was that I wasn’t really ready. I mean, you’re never ready. But here, it’s more me. I don’t know what people are gonna expect from me. There is always a lot of gossip around what I’m doing. When the pre-collection went out during the week of the men’s collections, they were talking like crazy about Valentino.”

But of course everybody gossiped, because the massive 177-look pre-collection was released at the same time as the Gucci show, and that kicked a hornet’s nest. Michele was accused of regurgitating his Gucci at Valentino. “It’s such a big confusion. I know. Some of them will say Alessandro, others will say it’s Gucci. But it was me. And it’s a compliment for me because if they’re saying, ‘Oh that’s Gucci,’ it means what I did was so strong. It’s like when they confused Gucci with Tom. It was Tom, not Gucci. Gucci is like an empty box, you can put into it what you want.”

“The reality was that I was planning to launch in September,” Michele continues. “I did the pre-collection because I thought we needed clothes for the shops. I was thinking just to start, because you need to start somewhere. I wasn’t planning on showing it, those pictures were just for internal use. We shot them in a room in Milan. But it’s very hard to keep a secret. They leaked, I don’t know how. They tried to crack my laptop, the same with Instagram. So I thought, ‘OK, we need to go out.’ But, as you saw in the pictures, I was already thinking about a world. Valentino is such a specific world, full of ruffles and pleats and jewels and turbans and headpieces, you can’t believe it.”

And I thought all of that pointed to something a lot more provocative than the kneejerk criticisms. What if Michele had actually been doing Valentino all those years at Gucci, rather than the other way round as his critics assumed? “Yeah, because I got inspired so many times by the things from Valentino,” he agrees. “Also, in terms of aesthetic, he was the strongest image of that Italian style during the 70s. He invented most of the other designers’ look. I mean, all the Italian ladies, they identified themselves with the Valentino style, glamour and chic every hour. Mr Valentino did so many things that, in a very subtle way, pushed so many other designers to manipulate that aesthetic. I know it’s a strong thing to say, but without Valentino, Prada wouldn’t exist, because Miuccia was resisting and manipulating that bourgeois aesthetic.”

As a Communist activist in her youth, Miuccia might even appreciate Karl Marx’s original dialectic at work in Michele’s version of Italian fashion history. If Valentino Garavani was the thesis, and Miuccia Prada was the antithesis, would that make Alessandro Michele the synthesis? “Kind of a lady but in a wrong way,” is his succinct distillation. “I mean, that’s me. That’s my world, and it’s wrong. But Mr Valentino was doing it in his time in the right way, with the beautiful houses, the boats, the vernissage, the nightclub, no regrets. And that’s why it’s so shining and beautiful. He put a big emphasis on that kind of Italian aesthetic, which is why I think Italian women are much closer to Valentino than other brands. You know, I still recognize in every single Italian lady some contact with the aesthetic of Valentino.”

On a more pragmatic note, Michele isn’t giving much away about his debut runway show on September 29th. There will be some Valentino red, although Michele points out that he also has some history with red, given that the red pussy-bow blouse in his first collection for Gucci generated transports of both joy and confusion. There will also be some Valentino white, because Michele marvelled at the “40 to 50″ shades of white he found in the archive, and how could you not acknowledge the 1966 all-white collection that turned the fashion world on its head?

And more. “I was working on some jewels, because Mr Valentino loved jewels and bijoux and costume jewels. And I am always asking myself, ‘Would he love this? Is it too much? Or could it be a nice thing to do in 2025 for Valentino?’ Because I was trying to translate him now. But I also did many things from his archive, trying to be literal, trying to be very Valentino. Being very close to his idea of fashion seems to me very revolutionary. I was looking at some shoes and they’re so chic, so crazy, they’re amazing. It was like, let’s do them almost exactly the same. There is my touch, obviously, because it’s crazy. But he was crazy too. I think we’re both sick about fashion.”

“The space is always my way to show a landscape in fashion,” he says of the staging. “It’s a space that doesn’t exist, a space that is in your memory, in your dreams, in the past and in the time in between. He is peopling this “real, unreal space” with a co-ed collection, maybe 15 men’s looks, 75 women’s. “Because it’s my way to work,” he explains. “I think that it’s easy. It was interesting to do just a men’s show when I was at Gucci but now, I think it makes sense to put them together, giving more space to the woman because I want to try to start as Mr Valentino did, thinking more about the woman because he was the man. When I think about the men’s aesthetic here, I usually look at him in the 70s, that picture of him with Jackie O in Capri, with the printed shirt and the big belt, the big hair, the tan, the shoes, the costume jewels. Really sophisticated, but also eccentric. He invented himself 100 percent. I think that young people are gonna love what I’m trying to tell them. They need to reinvent themselves as fabulous.”

So don’t expect quiet luxury. Michele snorts at the very idea. “I really respect every point of view, but it’s not me. Please, I can’t! I’m blessed by the planet that I’m here, I’m alive. We’re born, and that’s amazing. We’re gonna die, and that’s fine. But in the middle, I want to be a peacock. I can totally agree with the richness of minimalism. That’s Baroque. That’s a peacock. I’m very proud to be light and superficial as a ruffle, because I’ve really found the way to be happy and alive. In Italian, we call it frou frou. I think that fashion needs this injection again. Because fashion now is about nothing, being like a monk. Is that better than the ruffles? I don’t think so. I think that’s just nothing, like a kind of death.”

Life Against Death

Life and death are actually, classically intertwined in Michele’s Renaissance-inclined thinking. Earlier this year, he and philosopher Emanuele Coccia published a book called The Life of Forms – Theory of the Re-enchantment (rather more prosaically retitled The Philosophy of Fashion for its English translation). It bears repeating that, for Michele, the notion of something magical hangs heavy over Valentino. “He lived in a spell,” Michele says dreamily. “You don’t know if this spell is gonna stay forever.”

But you do know what breaks the spell. Death! It preyed on Valentino’s mind. It drove his retreat from the world during the pandemic. “I feel the same,” Michele says. “I don’t know if I’m terrified, but I do know that I live constantly with the idea that I have to die. I like the idea that I’m gonna die because it makes my life light, because there is no reason I have to preserve myself for the next 1000 years. I like the idea that this lady is always with me. She’s between the paintings I have in my house, the jewels that I collect, the pieces of fabric… she can create you and she can destroy you whenever she wants.” Michele’s cherished aunt died when he was very young. He says she was obsessed with fashion. Beauty was her medicine. “The closer you are to things that belong to death, the more you feel alive,” he told me years ago. Contro morte, against death.

So the proximity of annihilation, personal or planetary, is an inspiration for Michele. “We can go on saying that the world is full of wars, and the planet’s gonna collapse and it’s the end of the world, but till then, I want to live. We are in between these two energies, the heart that is beating and the idea that we could die any single moment. So I think that the ruffles really save my life, because I’m inside those ruffles, I’m inside that pleat, I’m inside that strass, I’m inside that bangle, I’m inside that shoe, that dress. Because it’s here that we are living our life. There is no other space. It’s like a lullaby.” (Listen for that lullaby, because Michele says it will apparently be playing on the soundtrack of the show.)

He drifts into a free-associative reverie about the Renaissance basilica of Sant’Agostino, which is just behind his apartment in Rome. It boasts a glorious Caravaggio, La Madonna dei Pellegrini, which Michele can visit every day whenever he wants. “It’s not a painting, it’s a masterpiece of cinema, like the beginning of Neo-Realismo in the movies.” The beauty of the carved marble façade of the basilica sends him into similar rhapsodies. What makes someone spend months carving a delicate marble feather on the outside of a church?

One of the restorers who works on Michele’s own collection also restored the Caravaggio, so he was able to examine it, to see the painting on the back of the canvas. “It’s like the entire universe,” he enthuses. Through the same connection, he also got to see the back of the Michelangelo Pieta in St Peter’s. “You could see the real stone, I was saying to my therapist you could see the life inside it. And that is almost what I get from being here, it’s the idea that I need to live, and to celebrate life. I can’t do it any other way. We are so concentrated on being powerful, on being rich, on ‘I want to be the first.’ I don’t want to be the first. I want to be that stone. I want to be that painting. I want to be that piece of carving that maybe five men made on the outside of a church. I want to be a ruffle! If I’m a ruffle, I know I won’t die.” You could imagine top model Karen Elson feeling the same way about the glorious confection Michele created for her wedding at the beginning of September. Posterity should note this dress as his first piece of couture.

Haute couture was the very essence of Valentino, so it will be Michele’s next great adventure when he shows his first couture collection in January. He brought a dozen people with him from his past — “We are like a family,” he says. “We’ve been working together for more than 20 years.” — but it’s that prodigious 90-person atelier where the real gold is buried. “When I was working at Gucci, I did so many crazy things that looked a little bit like couture,” Michele says, “and it was very hard because I didn’t have a real salon, like here. Now, it’s a dream. It’s like being in the Narnia movie. When you go through that door, you’re in the beating heart of Valentino. It’s the most interesting laboratory because it makes it possible to think about time in fashion. I’m thinking about couture as no season, no time.” He plans to show couture once a year.

Reflecting on Valentino’s methods, Michele feels that couture was so fundamental to him that he never really thought about replication. “He was just very concentrated on the dress that he was working on.” And yet, the brand has pret-a-porter production facilities in Turin that have blown Michele’s mind. “The way they work is unbelievable. The level is super high. So you can make an amazing gown in the atelier here in Rome, but you can do an amazing gown there in Turin. For me, it’s about making a connection between the two of them, because that’s the legacy. I would love to make that kind of richness in the pret-a-porter, because I think there was a link when Mr Valentino was working on the couture. It would be amazing to build a bridge.”

For all that Michele is a classicist, it’s his natural streak of iconoclasm which makes the immediate future, September 29 and beyond, so tantalising. “Sometimes I need to be respectful but also not,” he acknowledges. “It’s like a chic lady also needs to do a crazy dance. But I promise you there’s nothing I’m doing that didn’t come from Mr Valentino. Nothing. I mean, 100 percent. And sometimes when I’m working, I’m saying, ‘Would Mr Valentino like this longer or shorter or maybe here because it’s chic?’ I’m trying to work with him. But it’s probably gonna be so different. I’m not trying to change myself. I’m just trying to experiment because that’s me. I like the idea to be excited and nervous. I feel like a horse in a box, kicking against the stall.”

And now, the clincher. What will Valentino himself think? Via email, I asked him how difficult it was for him to see his legacy in the hands of others. “It’s a feeling we’ve grown accustomed to,” he wrote. I imagined his voice, him answering me in his typically tight-lipped droll way. “It’s a mix of admiration and sometimes disappointment, of joy and at times discontent, of laughter from happiness, and also from disbelief.” That’s an entire gamut of expectations for Michele to meet. Will he feel brokenhearted, should Valentino not like what he does? Maybe he’s managing those expectations when he replies, “I think that he’s probably not gonna like it. It could be possible. He can say what he wants. I don’t care. He’s the boss. He’s almost 93. I’m just trying to make this place alive again with Jacopo, and I think that is very respectful because Mr Valentino’s work was about celebrating life, and these places must talk the language of now. It must be now again.”

PARIS — The Courrèges invitation was a metal Möbius band: no beginning, no end, no inside, no outside. Infinity. Somehow, Nicolas Di Felice used that concept to design a collection of entirely finite clothing. His post-show explanation made infinity dressing sound like a possibility, even as my tiny mind wrestled with his logic. “It’s the notion of evolution,” Di Felice said. “I always started from what I just did.” So Look One was the base of Look Two, Look Two was the base of Look Three and so on. It’s impossible to assess the success of such an effort from 2D runway thumbnails, so you’ll have to take his word for it. And, to be quite honest, the evolution wasn’t remotely obvious while we were watching the show. But what was reinforced is how 41-year-old Di Felice is one of fashion’s deepest thinkers. He’s the full mind/body package, brainiac on the outside, taboo-worshipping sensualist on the inside. And so it was with his latest show.

It began with a solemn all-embracing leather cowl, harking back to a cape from a 1963 collection by Andres Courrèges. The cowl turned into a coat turned into a dress turned into everything that came afterwards. It culminated in dresses that moved up and around and down the body like waves, said Di Felice. Transmogrification was the theme. Bras became collars, collars became straps that suspended slips of dresses. The constant undulating movement of the clothes and their components was designed to duplicate the movement of water. The lapel of a stark black coat unfurled on one shoulder like the curl of a wave.

But the collection also celebrated the patriarchy-defying power of female physicality. True to the original spirit of Courrèges, Di Felice bared the body in audacious ways. His signature bra top looks like the censor’s strip that Instagram insists should cover bare breasts. It harked back to his childhood, when any programming for over-18s was signalled by a white square, un carré blanc, onscreen. That was one sensibility-shaping way to teach a young Walloon what was so right about what was so wrong.

Speaking of white squares, the huge void in the centre of Di Felice’s show space has become an artistic extension of his intent. Last season, it heaved and breathed. This season, it oscillated with thousands of ball bearings making the soothing white noise of waves as they ebbed and flowed. It fed in and out of a dissection of Underworld’s rave anthem “Born Slippy.” Quite stunning.

Later in the day, Di Felice went to see the show of his friend Julien Dossena, who designs Rabanne, the modern incarnation of fashion’s original heavy metal kid. Dossena called his collection Material Girls. Towards the end of the show, Mancunian Model of the Moment Libby Bennett walked in a dress that left flutters of gold leaf all over the catwalk. She was carrying a bag made by Maison Arthus Bertrand from 371 discs of 18 carat gold. No one in the audience could have known, but it was, nevertheless, a moment you might classify as pre-revolutionary, if and when such a moment ever arrives in our ethically stunted era. And I wouldn’t want to impose a political sensibility on Dossena, because he was talking about Todd Haynes’ movie Safe as a reference point, and the idea of a woman sealing herself away from the world in a profoundly paranoic state, wrapped up to protect herself.

Mind you, Dossena’s wrappings were, he said, like the silver foil of a candy, or the layers of paper that encase a gift, or even the transparent wrapping you get on fruit in Japan. He liked the naivete of the idea, but there was obviously something protective about it, like Safe, or even like Paco Rabanne’s original chainmail and armour-influenced looks. I was seeing men’s boxer shorts too, chucked under substantial outerwear. Dossena called it toughness filled with tenderness. The layering was the key. You could take what you wanted from it. Soft banker-stripe blouson on Gigi, metallic geometric breastplate on Loli — that was the Alpha and Omega of Dossena’s Rabanne. It was quite the gamut. I’m not convinced. But still, I want to see more.

PARIS — Amazons. Funny that Dior and Saint Laurent, French fashion institutions which are umbilically connected, should find themselves exploring the same notion within hours of each other on the first major day of Fashion Week in Paris. And in such different ways. Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent used tropes of masculine dressing to expand his women’s forcefields. Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri refracted ancient female myths and legends through contemporary sportswear.

She launched her show with one of the most striking gambits in recent memory. SAGG Napoli, a performance artist whose medium is archery, appeared on the catwalk looking like a 21st century version of Diana the Huntress. Throughout the presentation, she fired off arrows (in a very controlled environment, but stimulating nonetheless). Align your body with your mind to hit the target: SAGG’s message felt particularly relevant for a fashion industry that’s rather wandered off of late.

And here, it was Chiuri who was doing more wandering. As usual, before the show, she seemed bent on an interesting course, looking at the way that the classical idea of Amazons, women who defied the roles expected of them, can translate into a contemporary fashion collection from a corporate giant like Dior. Her research certainly yielded a rich tapestry of inspiration, from a 1951 Dior dress named Amazone (an asymmetrical “afternoon dress” in black wool that was tailored after a woman riding sidesaddle, or “comme une Amazone,” as the French apparently call it) to Wonder Woman, pop culture’s original Amazon. The concept of Amazonian asymmetry applied to all the looks that bared one shoulder (mythically, that made it easier to use a bow and arrow). Dior Sport, launched 75 years ago astonishingly enough, was in there somewhere with its skiwear influences and technical fabrics. So was the graphic op black/white quality of Dior sportswear in the early 70s.

Dior was deeply ingrained in the recent triumph of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics so it made sense that body-conscious athleticism was a driving force here. The knee-length gladiator trainers were a smart distillation of the Olympic spirit. Boy racer stripes and checkerboard patterns were similarly animating motifs. But, when Chiuri eventually scaled her own Olympus at show’s end with a trio of chiffon goddess dresses, I felt she’d lost the plot. Still, how would I know? My grip on reality had loosened way before.

Still, Olympus isn’t a bad place to pitch your tent, especially with your own archer firing arrows off into the void on your behalf. Anthony Vaccarello’s shows for Saint Laurent have always banked on a similar, spectacularly scheduled sense of place. We would usually be sitting in a venue with a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower and, right on cue, it would burst into its nightly light show. On Tuesday night, it was easy to imagine that something similar had been planned. The audience sat in a huge penumbral space under a giant oculus lined in gold. Above, the night sky, below, a deep navy blue floor. On past experience, you might have expected a single precisely timed shaft of moonlight to come shooting out of the heavens, illuminating the gilded oculus, giving the floor a spectral glow. But no. It rained instead, heavily. So it was umbrellas and puddles, rather than lunar illumination, that created the atmosphere.

That more melancholic effect suited the clothes Vaccarello showed just fine. The pearl-clutching shownotes imagined Yves Saint Laurent himself declaring, “I am the Saint Laurent Woman.” A Super Heroine! Vaccarello set out to illustrate that point by dressing his models in simulacra of the spectacular menswear he showed last March, which was very much based on Yves’ own precise, formal style, eyewear and all (with a sidebar of black rubber pieces to suggest the full range of YSL’s interests, his “attraction to danger” as those notes phrased it). Broad-shouldered, full-bodied, double-breasted suits were accessorised with capacious blousons, overcoats, even silken bathrobes, for an impactful take on androgynous power dressing. They were impressively uncompromising Wonder Women. But it was hard to shake the impression that it was less dressing,  more dressing up (maybe because it was only four nights ago that Matthieu Blazy showed similarly oversized tailoring for Bottega Veneta, and he actually did call it “dressing up,” as in child’s play). What does it all mean now? Those days are so long gone. Maybe that’s why heaven was weeping. Weeping also for the full-skirted silhouettes of 1976′s Russian collection, or Jerry Hall’s opiated sprawl in the 1977 campaign for ... what else? ... YSL’s Opium perfume. Visions of bygone beauty that Vaccarello also managed to summon up for his latest looks.

The equivalent of the black rubber pieces from March were the edgy concatenations of metallic brocade, lace and ribbon that closed the show. Saint Laurent was a peerless colourist. Vaccarello had already hinted at that earlier on when a combination of saffron jersey and bronze chiffon made its way down the catwalk. But for the finale, he pushed out the boat with clashes of colour so sick and fabric so rich that they were enough to consolidate defiant excess as Saint Laurent’s fashion statement for the season, along with those formidable suit-clad Amazons of course. No arrows needed here.

Dior Spring/Summer 2025

Saint Laurent Spring/Summer 2025

Marni Spring/Summer 2025

In this episode of Backstage Pass, Tim Blanks goes backstage at Marni’s Spring/Summer 25 show to interview designer Francesco Risso on his inspiration for the brand’s latest collection.

Read More: Milan Goes to the Movies

The author has shared a YouTube video.You will need to accept and consent to the use of cookies and similar technologies by our third-party partners (including: YouTube, Instagram or Twitter), in order to view embedded content in this article and others you may visit in future.

Watch more episodes of Backstage Pass with Tim Blanks:

Versace: Finding Joy in Troubled Times

Versace Spring/Summer 2025

In this episode of Backstage Pass, Tim Blanks goes backstage at Versace’s Spring/Summer 25 show to interview designer Donatella Versace on her inspiration for the brand’s latest collection.

The author has shared a YouTube video.You will need to accept and consent to the use of cookies and similar technologies by our third-party partners (including: YouTube, Instagram or Twitter), in order to view embedded content in this article and others you may visit in future.

Marni Spring/Summer 2025

In this episode of Backstage Pass, Tim Blanks goes backstage at Marni’s Spring/Summer 25 show to interview designer Francesco Risso on his inspiration for the brand’s latest collection.

The author has shared a YouTube video.You will need to accept and consent to the use of cookies and similar technologies by our third-party partners (including: YouTube, Instagram or Twitter), in order to view embedded content in this article and others you may visit in future.

Read More: Milan Goes to the Movies

MILAN — On Saturday night, Bottega Veneta seated its guests on hundreds of huge beanbags in colourful animal form. Michelle Yeoh got a ladybird, Jacob Elordi a bunny rabbit. François Henri Pinault, CEO of Kering, was a bear. Fashion’s probably never been a more doggedly serious business than it is right now, but Matthieu Blazy turned the prelude to his Bottega Veneta presentation into a playground. For a joyful moment, “What’s your animal?” replaced woe about the third quarter. Mine, by the way, was a red fox, with a fine tail. I wish I could have taken him home with me, but the whole menagerie is destined for auction on the brand’s website.

Child’s play was on Blazy’s mind. In his show notes, he talked about childhood’s “adventure of the everyday.” One of his major reference points was “E.T.” which is, like many of Spielberg’s films, a coming-of-age story. One of the joys of Blazy’s show was watching him elaborate on that idea in a kind of coming and going of age, weaving backwards and forwards between a child’s view of the adult world, and a worldly adult’s rediscovery of a sense of play in dress. The scenario definitely benefited from the designer’s full post-show debrief, but you could still catch the drift from the colour, movement and energy on the catwalk.

He started from the idea of “primal” fashion. Your first experience of fashion is playing dress-up in your parents’ clothes. The oversize tailoring had that flavour, in both women’s and menswear, with styling flourishes like rolled-back sleeves emphasising the too-big-ness. “Chic awkwardness,” Blazy called it. Same with the half skirt-half pant, which was his idea of playfulness from an adult perspective, a “why not?” proposal that Jean Paul Gaultier also suggested once, to similar striking effect. Blazy’s thought processes were fascinating. Continuing in the awkward vein, he imagined one slightly off dress as something nervously acquired for a job interview where a good impression was essential. No, the fit wasn’t the best, and the dress had a drab, institutional mien, but Blazy had attached a little articulated frog brooch to its collar as a message. The frog is as much a symbol of transformation as the butterfly. It’s a tiny ambassador for a world of wonders.

Like all his work for Bottega Veneta, Blazy’s collection was a celebration of character. And such characters! His idea of a businessman (Oh! That kimono-influenced top!) carried a child’s pink backpack across which ran a bunny rabbit (bunny ears another of the collection’s nature motifs). He imagined a dad dropping his little girl off at school. A woman in a sensational blouson and pants was carrying a plastic bag (surely not!). He imagined her as a chic Milanese in the supermarket. A strapless confection of fabric scales with dark flowers blossoming on a fiery background was somehow inspired by a drawing Blazy had seen of Darryl Hannah in “Splash.” He wanted a mermaid in his collection. Elsewhere in the show, he gave Hannah her normcore Tom Hanks. “It’s maybe not my childhood, but I can connect in some way to all of them,” he said.

You could attach similar vignettes to every single look if you had the time, such was their range and diversity. All forms of life were here. On the soundtrack, an emotional surge of the “Atonement” soundtrack veered into the celebratory “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” from “Hello Dolly,” to accompany a passage of people in wrinkled clothing (tropical wool with a little polyester to keep the crease) which reminded Blazy of how your parents sent you out neat as a new pin on the morning of your first day at school, and, by the end of the day, you’d come home a mess. Life is chaos, and clothes reflect that. As Blazy also said, “You try to dress up, you add something, you become a new monster, a kind of Frankenstein beauty.” He paraded women with their heads encased in wigs of raffia, and I imagined children fascinated, slightly freaked out. He also showed a jacquard of cigarette butts, and a black dress decorated with matches, as subtle reminders that “the adventure of the everyday,” the freedom to experiment that childhood offers is inevitably dangerous. But we continue to play, because it is exactly that: an act of freedom.

It would be hard to imagine anyone freer than Hugo Ball, who, at the height of the First World War, created Dada, a radical art movement that exalted chaos as a protest against the social, economic and political orthodoxies that had produced such a cataclysmically destructive conflict. Are we there again? Dada bloomed in Zurich. Here we stand on the brink of another abyss, and the spirit of Dadaism reappears in Switzerland, embedded in a collection by that most Swiss of fashion brands, Bally.

Creative director Simone Bellotti put the Ball in Bally courtesy of the silhouette he drew from one of Hugo’s cocoon-caped costumes for an early performance piece. A dropped shoulder, raised collar and rounded shape redefined Bally’s signature leathers. A mention of “decorum subverted by the avant garde” could have been borrowed from a Dada manifesto, the tailoring and the footwear exaggerated just so, a kind of dada-bourgeois. Bellotti said he was trying to find a balance between the precision that is a Swiss cliché and more organic elements, like flowers, mushrooms, stones, things you might collect on a hike in the Swiss Alps. And cowbells too, which he’s already added to Bally’s repertoire. Here, the bells weren’t just decoration, they inspired actual rounded-hip skirt shapes (hand-painted with a particularly magical mushroom), or peplums, like huge petals from which the lower body emerged.

Bellotti is on a mission to expand popular awareness of Switzerland beyond banks, chocolate, precision and neutrality. “It’s an amazing culture to explore,” he insisted after his show. But the perceptions he needs to change most immediately are obviously those that relate to Bally, a brand which is still best known for shoes and bags. The shoes Bellotti pulled from Bally’s formidable archive were perfect. He wanted something a little less so, and he was spectacularly successful in achieving that aim. The spiked heel counters (a reminder that Bellotti used to work at Gucci) and the studded mary janes were hardcore. An antique shoehorn from the archive provided beautiful, odd detailing for belt buckles and handbag straps. And there were women’s shoes with a fabulous clump which he’d unearthed from 1945. “I like masculine looks on women,” Bellotti said, unnecessarily in light of the strictly besuited women he’d just shown on his catwalk. Meret Oppenheimer was on his mood board, Surrealist, not Dadaist, but still furiously non-conformist.

As far as revealing Swiss culture’s less appreciated arcana goes, Bellotti couldn’t have done a better job with his music. Swiss-Nepali musician Aïsha Devi is described on-line as “a hypnotic, spherical musician.” She claimed the magnificent soundtrack she’d made was “designed to generate an alternate state of consciousness” in the true spirit of Dada. I know that I left Bally on Saturday with a mind that was well and truly changed.

Glenn Martens’ tribe of “aliens among us” has powered Diesel’s collections for most of the four years he’s led the brand. In Saturday’s show, his new model army was blessed with disconcerting mutant eyes. “They’re trying to look normal, not too crazy but they can’t hide it,” Martens explained. “So their eyes are exploding.”

That story – aliens trying to fit in – could be Martens’ own, and Diesel’s too. “I’ve always been a bit alternative in the industry,” he agreed. “And Diesel is an alternative to luxury. We are still in fashion week with crazy clothes but at the end of the day we’re a lifestyle brand doing denim and t-shirts and really cool products for everybody.” But that slightly generic notion is transformed in Diesel’s shows into something that is often thrillingly incomprehensible. Martens once admitted that there were catwalk clothes that would never see the light of day at retail because they were complicated one-offs that were simply too hard to scale. No longer! “Everything right now is industrialisable,” Martens said. “Everything on the runway can be made.” And that adds a different level of appreciation to the work that he and his team are doing.

The visual spectacle this time was a denim wasteland, 1500 kilos of post-production denim scraps, which might have looked dystopian but actually celebrated a message that was anything but. As Martens said, “Four years ago when I arrived at Diesel we had three percent of our denim fibres made out of regenerative, organic or recycled cotton. Now we’re at 57 percent.” Plus the business is building up clean brands, because basic garments are left untreated, which means less toxicity. That’s how things roll at Diesel, where 40 years of expertise has created the university of denim. Even now, when he’s learned enough that he considers himself “potentially a denim master,” Martens can look at what his team is making and marvel, “How did you do that?”

Where that happened in Saturday’s show was with denim so light it was gossamer, and frayed fibres so fine they were angel hair. Diesel’s fabric technology is surely second to none. I couldn’t think of higher praise than to say that its artisanal effects sometimes remind me of Issey Miyake. As well as the lightness, there were what seemed to be substantial, classic Prince of Wales checks that were actually printed denim. Coats and jackets of this fabric dissolved into long, thick fringes that were draped like a cloak. And that was a real what thuh! moment.

Martens felt the show was more measured than usual, “because Diesel is maturing.” He was especially enthused by the dresses that closed the show: dozens of vintage Diesel scarves wrapped, tied and stitched into a single sinuous column. The soundtrack featured a lengthy AI-generated tutorial about denim and indigo dye. Mercifully, maturity didn’t mean the retirement of the usual musical racket. During the show, the AI earworm was steadily co-opted by a raging storm of the pounding techno that Martens loves. In life, as in art.

Bottega Veneta Spring Summer 2025

Bally Spring Summer 2025

Diesel Spring Summer 2025