Valentino Haute Couture S/S 2025 Paris

It’s evident crinoline would be easily removed and would significantly alter the shape. This hardly constitutes a critique. It is the bows distracting due to cluttered excess, detracting from the collection's more refined elements. My biggest issue is with his silken Renaissance serfwear.

Alessandro saying he makes costumes just means he lives in reality. Tom Ford called himself a stylist during his GG/YSL tenure.

Alessandro is incredibly self-aware, the comments about theatricality and crinoline. He’s aware of how people view him and he’s using that awareness to craft a collection. He probably is amused that so many people are mad about Vintage Valentino with optional crinoline... I think he's doing this to shape Valentino's image and remind us Valentino has always been in AM DNA... And then there’s the layer of accessibility. AM knows HC shoppers will have the chance to see the pieces without the crinoline and pulled apart into coherent looks.
 
Alessandro saying he makes costumes just means he lives in reality. Tom Ford called himself a stylist during his GG/YSL tenure.
Hmm…Tom Ford was called a stylist by his detractors during the early days of his Gucci success.
And it’s because of those critics that he elevated his design language from the moment he joined YSL and decided to challenge himself. So we’re gone the simple column dresses and things like that. Everything became over detailed and sometimes over designed…

I think it’s too easy to just say « oh I’m a costumier ». He decided to do fashion and not costumes…

However there was someone like Christian Lacroix who always said that he approached fashion as a costumier because for him, each dress was about a woman, a character, representing herself at a special event. But Lacroix never forget about the woman.

For me it’s important to respect the spirit of the house. I really don’t care about house codes if you don’t respect the spirit of the house.

That’s the problem that Stefano Pilati had during his last few seasons at YSL. From Marc Jacobs to Frida Giannini, it seemed like everybody understood the spirit of the Saint Laurent woman better than him despite him raiding the archives.
 

The Problem With Mistaking Costumes for Clothes

Assessing Alessandro Michele’s couture debut for Valentino. Also, Armani Privé and Chanel keep things moving and Gaurav Gupta surprises.


By Vanessa Friedman

Jan. 30, 2025

30COUTURE-VALENTINO-lede-superJumbo.jpg

As the curtain went up in the pitch-black theater, glowing red words ran like an English Lit ticker tape across a black digital screen — “eccentricity, gothic, occultism, Madame Butterfly, existentialism” — in a continuous, random and unceasing stream. Then a woman in a Harlequin ball gown, with a skirt so big it seemed more like a tent with a torso on top, materialized out of the dark. She made her way from stage left, walking slowly to the center where she turned to face the audience, then exited stage right. This exact choreography would repeat itself 48 times throughout the show as an operatic voice sang a mournful cathedral song.

So went “Vertigineux,” or “Dizzy,” Alessandro Michele’s first couture show for Valentino, the brand he joined last year after parting ways with Gucci. And it wasn’t just his Valentino couture debut, it was his first couture, period.

There was excitement in the air. Despite the current seismic shifts in fashion, it’s not often that the couture, the most elite and expensive sector, gets a shot of new blood. Especially from a designer who has a history of changing how people dress.

Giorgio Armani had celebrated the 20th anniversary of his Armani Privé the day before the Valentino show, and viewing the signature parade of 93 star-dusted suits and slinky, chinoiserie-inspired gowns was a reminder that, back in 2005 when he dared breach the barriers of the couture, he was viewed as an arriviste (now he’s the establishment, with a hôtel particulier of his own to show for it). Chanel’s new designer, Matthieu Blazy, will start later this year; for now, the studio team offered a smartly light-handed take on the classics: mini bouclé suits and swishy 1920s tea dresses in Jordan almond shades.

That left room for some new ideas. Maybe Mr. Michele would have them. Maybe he would, at least, get beyond the corset, which has become the most ubiquitous item of the season on almost every runway (it is, after all, the fashion version of Ozempic). Ludovic de Saint Sernin even based his whole guest designer stint at Jean Paul Gaultier on the undergarment: corsets in leather, lace or brocade; corsets romantic, provocative and tough. Even corsets for men.

Though the most interesting take belonged to Gaurav Gupta, who added his instantly recognizable mythological swirls to a bustier worn with oversize trousers, like a nymph come down to Greenpoint. The designer is becoming known for his statement-making red carpet gowns (Megan Thee Stallion was in his front row; Usha Vance wore one of his looks during the recent U.S. presidential inauguration) but the restraint demanded by daywear gave him a dose of unexpected cool.

Still, it wasn’t as unexpected as the fact that upon entering the Valentino show, guests found a 200-page “script” on their chairs that contained a meditation on “the poetics of the list.” One that also included a quote from the Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco and then list upon list of yet more words for each outfit, more than 50 for the first look alone. Clearly something different was in store.

That’s one way of putting it.

What transpired was, in fact, an exercise in designer self-indulgence — a fancy dress party of Shakespearean costume dramatics adorned in the pomp and circumstance of the intellectual. For all the incredible work and thousands of seamstress hours and fabulous materials that went into each piece (1,300 hours in the first look alone, according to the show notes), if the emperor got some new clothes for a royal cosplay convention, they might actually look like this.

Like, for example, Marie Antoinette playing an English governess romping through the fields of Le Petit Trianon in a floral silk chiffon shirtdress with a giant panniered skirt. Or the Queen of the Prairie in a patchwork ball gown complete with Elizabethan ruffs at the neck and wrists. Or a Hussar in metallic jacquard pantaloons and matching feather headdress.

Even the occasional day look, and there were some, seemed to have been unearthed from 1960s movie sets at Cinecittà studios in Rome (or the Valentino archives, as in the case of one narrow black dress with a panniered turquoise overskirt, inspired by a look from 1985).

When Mr. Michele brought his big-tent, more-is-more, vintage bricolage to Gucci, it seemed like a relief after the nouveau riche-ness of that brand’s previous incarnation. In the context of Valentino couture, the balance has tilted away from something for everyone (even though Mr. Michele’s use of models that spanned the decades was laudable) and toward old-fashioned excess. At the end of the show, the digital screen started glitching dramatically as strobe lights came on and all the models walked out into a windstorm.

At a news conference later Mr. Michele, his hair in two Heidi braids, perched on a thronelike tapestry-covered gilded chair and explained his affinity for lists, which he said originated in his childhood and was “a way of bringing order to my apparent disorder.” Fair enough, but where was the customer in all that? Maybe struggling to get her dress through the door.


It’s not that couture needs to be practical, or even realistic. But it should show some sensitivity to the modern condition. Otherwise it’s just a museum piece.
NYTIMES
 
We cannot deny the technical brilliance of this collection, which is precisely why we will continue to indulge him. Who else is truly capable of producing anything that remotely resembles this?

The collection veers wildly, offering perhaps 8 or 9 pieces that are Very Valentino. This collection is too often interrupted by Alessandro's Venetian pageboy fantasy. I find the armor-inspired dresses quite gorgeous. it's the sole Renaissance reference I find worthy of admiration within this collection.

Alessandro, without a doubt, demonstrates a profound mastery of construction and is a couturier.
I completely agree with your critique of what I thought a brilliant show. I am quite a bit older than most members here and have enjoyed Couture since the early 60's. I believe Alessandro is bringing an exciting time to fashion. Has no one noticed the return to browns and beiges? And the sad repetition of the "bling masters"? UGH.
The moment the show started I was ready for something unusual and OTT and got it! As you wrote, the armor-inspired dresses were gorgeous (remember Galliano and McQueen?) and his addition of ethnic cultures is certainly laudable, to say nothing of the all-inclusive models. Sad that so many were put off.
 
when did they change the color of the logo to this sunflower yellow?
it's looks too commercial. would fit a health insurance or detergent brand better
every show will adapt as well the ig logo color and video header etc it's not an permanent change .....
 
I completely agree with your critique of what I thought a brilliant show. I am quite a bit older than most members here and have enjoyed Couture since the early 60's. I believe Alessandro is bringing an exciting time to fashion. Has no one noticed the return to browns and beiges? And the sad repetition of the "bling masters"? UGH.
The moment the show started I was ready for something unusual and OTT and got it! As you wrote, the armor-inspired dresses were gorgeous (remember Galliano and McQueen?) and his addition of ethnic cultures is certainly laudable, to say nothing of the all-inclusive models. Sad that so many were put off.
because over decorating the cake with all the tricks of the trade does not mask that underneath it it's a vanilla sponge cake with not much novelty or modern advancement ...i think that what people are criticizing its to much visual comfort zone under beauty and access but not actually addressing modern needs or attempting to in symbol of concept or actual fashionable clothes.
 
its bad that he has really really poor taste issues. there are some beautiful things in there that don't really come together as a whole.
 

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