VALENTINO SS26
At Paris Fashion Week, the scene unfolded in an uncertain light, almost war-like. Figures emerged from the darkness only to fade away like distant memories. Alessandro Michele didn’t present a simple collection—he built a story. And that story ended up swallowing the clothes.
Titled Fireflies, the show evoked the image of small lights surviving in the dark. It was a poetic, melancholic metaphor: fragility that shines even as everything else collapses. The flickering lights along the runway highlighted seams, textures, threads, and fabrics that reflected light only in fragments. There was no euphoria, only tension. Everything spoke of endurance and vulnerability.
The silhouettes were soft yet unsettling—draped skirts, glossy velvets, blouses with bows and wide sleeves, silk dresses that fell like sheets of light. There were sequins, but muted; flowers, but broken apart; colors, but veiled. No triumphalism here—Michele chose silence as his aesthetic language.
And in that radical choice, the message seemed to overpower the garment. The narrative prevails over the collection. The runway became a theater of the soul, where clothes were merely instruments to tell a story of spirituality, memory, and survival. Beauty remained, but it felt restrained, as if afraid to reveal itself too much.
At the helm of Valentino, Alessandro Michele continues to speak of dreams, poetry, and elegant chaos. Yet in this Parisian debut, there was a new sense of unease—the urge to turn the brand into a language rather than a showcase. There is genius in that, but also melancholy. The light of his “fireflies” doesn’t illuminate fashion; it reminds us that sometimes fashion is only a pretext to tell the story of life itself.
And as those silhouettes moved through the half-light, one question lingered: when the dream becomes stronger than the dress, what happens to the dress?
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SARA DAL MONTE 