The designer’s autumn/winter show featured jewel tones, big shoulders and spray-on tight jeans
Valentino Garavani wanted to make beautiful clothes for the women who could afford them. The perpetually tanned designer, whose vision of jet set glamour was matched only by his own yacht-and-pug lifestyle, died in January. So there was an obvious logic in taking the first proper catwalk show since his death off the fashion week schedule and back to Rome, where he lived, worked, and died. Milan and Paris may be the capitals of European style, but Rome looks better.
Garavani left his own brand almost 20 years ago. But his singular approach to beauty has not been without its obstacles for his most recent successor, Alessandro Michele, who took over the fashion house in 2024. “It’s a complicated DNA because beauty is always changing,” he said after the show, which took place in the 17th-century Palazzo Barberini. “This collection is about Valentino. It’s about beauty. But it’s [also] about the tension between me and the brand, a beauty I’m trying to translate.”
As a designer known for putting Harry Styles in pearls at Gucci, and using the Pasolinian leitmotif of fireflies to represent anti-fascism in his first show for Valentino, Michele’s idea of beautiful clothes is less straightforward. By contrast, Garavani did not use fashion to incite gender equality, stir up political change or even set trends. As he once told the New York Times: “It is very, very simple. I try to make my girls look sensational.”
