Valentino. VALENTINO.
What is haute couture? To claim this strictly Parisian label, a house must, according to regulations established in 1945 by the Ministry of Industry, have two ateliers – one for tailoring, the other for so-called "flou" (soft, unstructured) pieces; create original, made-to-measure, hand-crafted designs; and employ at least 12 people. These requirements have tended to make haute couture a formal and sometimes stilted exercise. For the spring-summer 2026 season, which was held from January 26 to 29, some designers sought to break free from convention with surprising staging.
The undisputed master of this approach was Alessandro Michele, who has been the artistic director of Valentino since 2024. The Italian designer, whose collections are marked by a strong taste for costume and a certain disregard for moderation, avoided clichés by choosing settings designed to unsettle his audience – such as giant public toilets for his ready-to-wear show in March 2025. This time, he drew inspiration from the Kaiserpanorama, a collective optical device patented in the late 19th century around which viewers would sit and look through small openings to see moving stereoscopic images.
