Portrait : le directeur artistique de Valentino

Alessandro Michele stands in the Valentino atelier on Via Turati, one hand pressed flat against a length of cardinal-red silk faille draped over a tailor's dummy. The other gestures at nothing in particular. He is explaining something about proportion—the distance between a neckline and the first button, the way a sleeve should break at the wrist—but the real subject is elsewhere. It usually is with Michele. He thinks in references, in borrowed gestures from other centuries, and he builds clothes the way some people build arguments: by accumulation, by digression, by never quite arriving at the point.

This is the man Valentino hired in March 2024, six months after Pierpaolo Piccioli's departure left the house without a creative director for the first time in a quarter-century. Michele had spent two years out of the industry after his exit from Gucci, where he'd turned a sleepy Florentine leather-goods label into the single most profitable brand in the Kering stable. The appointment surprised no one and confused half the industry. Valentino, under Piccioli, had become a house of clean lines and architectural colour. Michele's Gucci had been a magpie's nest: Edwardian collars, Renaissance brocade, stadium-rock embellishment. The two aesthetics shared almost nothing except ambition.

But Michele is not interested in repeating himself. He has said as much in the handful of interviews he's given since taking the role, and the work backs him up. His first collection for Valentino, shown in September 2024, opened with a black wool coat cut close to the body, its sleeves set high and narrow. No fur trim. No appliqué. No lion's-head buttons the size of a fist. Just a coat that moved like a coat and stopped at the knee. The audience, expecting chaos, got rigour instead.

Training, or How Not to Be a Tailor

Michele did not train as a designer in any formal sense. He studied costume history at the Accademia di Costume e di Moda in Rome, which is not the same thing. Costume history teaches you what people wore and why they wore it and how those choices reflected power, sex, religion, money. It does not teach you how to cut a sleeve or drape a bodice, though Michele picked up both skills later, working under Tom Ford at Gucci in the early 2000s. Ford was not a tailor either, but he understood structure, and he understood that a successful collection is a controlled hallucination. Michele absorbed that lesson and filed it away.

His years as an accessories designer—first at Fendi, then at Gucci—gave him a different education. Bags and shoes operate under tighter constraints than clothing. A handbag has to close. A heel has to bear weight. You cannot rely on fabric to forgive a miscalculation. Michele learned to think in three dimensions, to consider how an object sits in the hand or against the body, and that sensibility carried over when he became Gucci's creative director in 2015. His clothes were never about the cut. They were about the surface: the embroidery, the print, the sheer volume of incident packed into a single look. Some called it maximalism. Michele called it abundance, which is a different thing.

The Gucci Years, Briefly

There is no need to rehash the Gucci tenure in detail. Michele turned the brand into a $10bn juggernaut by making it weird, then made it weirder, then left in November 2022 after seven years and thirty-some collections. The official line was "a new chapter". The real story, as always, involved money and creative differences and the kind of exhaustion that sets in when you've been producing six collections a year for nearly a decade. Michele did not speak publicly about the split for months. When he finally did, in a rare interview with System magazine, he said only that he'd wanted to slow down and that Kering had wanted him to speed up. Both things were probably true.

What mattered, in the end, was that Michele left Gucci with his reputation intact and his creative vocabulary unspent. He could have retired. He could have started his own label, backed by one of the conglomerates that circle former Gucci designers like sharks. Instead he took eighteen months off, stayed in Rome, and waited for the phone to ring.

The Valentino Proposition

Valentino is not Gucci. It does not need rescuing, and it does not need reinvention. What it needs—what it has always needed—is a designer who understands that red is not just a colour but a position, a way of being in the world. Valentino Garavani built the house on that premise, and Piccioli sustained it for twenty-five years, first alongside Maria Grazia Chiuri and then alone. His Valentino was intellectual, almost austere. He used colour the way a painter uses colour: to structure space, to create rhythm, to stop the eye. The clothes were beautiful, and they sold, but they never felt indulgent. Indulgence, for better or worse, is Michele's natural register.

His first collection for the house walked a line between the two approaches. The palette was narrow—black, white, red, and very little else—but the construction was dense. A black evening coat carried thirty metres of silk organza in its skirt. A white day dress had sleeves gathered into eight separate points along the armscye, each one finished with a covered button the size of a lentil. These were not simple clothes, but they were not busy either. Michele had stripped out the excess and kept the labour, which is a harder trick than it sounds.

The reaction was mixed. Some critics called it a masterclass in restraint. Others called it boring, or worse, called it Gucci without the fun. Michele, characteristically, said nothing. He has never been interested in defending his work, and he is not about to start now.

Signature, or the Lack Thereof

If Michele has a signature at Valentino, it is not yet visible. His first two collections have been exercises in adaptation, in learning the house codes without becoming their servant. He has used Valentino red sparingly—a flash of it in a lining, a single dress in a forty-look show—and he has avoided the kind of overt historicism that defined his Gucci work. No powdered wigs. No trompe-l'oeil embroidery. No looks that require a degree in art history to decode.

This is deliberate. Michele has said, in the few interviews he's given, that he sees Valentino as a house of craft rather than concept, and that his job is to foreground the atelier rather than his own imagination. Whether he can sustain that position remains to be seen. Michele is not a self-effacing designer, and Valentino is not a house that rewards invisibility. Sooner or later, he will have to choose between serving the archive and building his own.

What Comes Next

The next chapter is already in motion. Michele's third collection, shown in March 2025, introduced pattern for the first time: a small floral print derived from a 1968 Valentino dress, blown up to three times its original scale and printed on silk twill. It appeared on a single coat, worn over a plain black dress, and it looked like nothing else in the collection. Whether it signals a shift or a one-off experiment is unclear. Michele is not in the habit of explaining himself.

What is clear is that he is not trying to be Piccioli, and he is not trying to repeat Gucci. He is trying, instead, to find a third position—one that honours Valentino's past without being trapped by it, one that allows for complexity without descending into noise. It is a narrow path, and Michele has never been a narrow designer. But he has always been a smart one, and smart designers know when to hold back.

The question is whether Valentino's audience will give him the time to figure it out. The industry moves faster than it did in Garavani's day, faster even than it did during Piccioli's tenure. Michele has two, maybe three seasons to prove that his vision for the house is commercially viable as well as creatively coherent. If he succeeds, Valentino enters its next era with its reputation enhanced. If he fails, the house will find another designer, and Michele will retreat to Rome and wait for the next phone call.

For now, he is still standing in the atelier, still talking about proportion, still gesturing at nothing in particular. The red silk faille has been pinned into place. The coat is nearly finished. Michele steps back, tilts his head, and says something to the tailor in Italian. She nods and reaches for her shears. The coat will be ready by morning.