## The Fitting Room at Via Turati

The Fitting Room at Via Turati

Alessandro Michele stands in the first-floor atelier at Valentino's Roman headquarters, adjusting the sleeve of a cream wool coat. The garment hangs on a mannequin, not a person, which tells you something about the way he works. He steps back. Steps forward. Tugs the shoulder seam a quarter-inch toward the nape. The coat doesn't move again for twenty minutes.

This is January 2025. Michele has been Valentino's creative director for sixteen months. The coat is from his third collection for the house, and it carries none of the magpie maximalism that defined his thirteen years at Gucci. The silhouette is narrow through the body, flared gently at the hem. The cloth is double-face cashmere, unlined. There is a single button at the sternum and no visible branding. If you passed it in a wardrobe you might think it was from 1968, which is more or less the point.

The Gucci Years, in Retrospect

Michele joined Gucci's design studio in 2002, under Tom Ford's successor, and spent more than a decade as an associate before Kering handed him the creative director role in January 2015. His first collection—shown that February, six weeks after his appointment—arrived like a transmission from a different century. Pussy-bow blouses. Fur-lined loafers. Embroidered snakes and blurred florals and velvet everything. It looked, at first glance, like the contents of a Florentine grandmother's attic, assuming the grandmother had impeccable taste and a trust fund.

The market responded immediately. Gucci's revenue doubled under Michele's tenure, climbing from €3.5 billion in 2014 to €9.7 billion by 2021. The aesthetic—often called maximalist, sometimes called cluttered—became the house signature. Logomania returned. So did waiting lists.

But by 2022, the formula had calcified. Collections began to feel like remixes of earlier collections. The embroidery grew denser, the references more laboured. In November of that year, Kering announced Michele's departure. The statement was cordial. The timing was not.

Formation: Rome, Then London

Michele was born in Rome in 1972, the son of a Alitalia executive and a film production assistant. He studied at the Accademia di Costume e di Moda in Rome, then moved to London in the mid-nineties to work under a series of anonymous pattern-cutters in Soho. The jobs were unglamorous—sample adjustments, toile corrections, the occasional evening-wear commission for private clients. But they taught him construction, which is the part of fashion education most designers skip.

He returned to Rome in 1997 and spent five years at Fendi, working under Karl Lagerfeld's creative direction. Lagerfeld, by all accounts, ignored him. But the atelier didn't. Michele learned fur technique, leather manipulation, and—crucially—how a heritage house operates when the founder's children are still involved in daily decisions.

The Gucci offer came in 2002. He accepted it as senior accessories designer, a role that kept him out of the spotlight and inside the leather goods studio for more than a decade. When Frida Giannini departed in 2014, Michele was not on the shortlist for her replacement. Kering's then-CEO, Marco Bizzarri, selected him anyway, reportedly after a single conversation.

The Valentino Appointment

Pierpaolo Piccioli left Valentino in March 2024 after twenty-five years at the house, the last eight as sole creative director. His departure was announced without a successor in place, which is unusual for a brand of Valentino's scale. The parent company, Mayhoola for Investments, spent six months in quiet negotiations. Michele's name surfaced in July. The contract was signed in August. His first collection debuted in Milan that September, five months after Piccioli's final show.

The timing was tight, but Michele had a head start. He'd been sketching a hypothetical Valentino collection since his Gucci exit, working from a rented studio in Rome's Monti district. The sketches—never intended for production—focused on a single idea: reduction. Fewer seams, fewer colours, fewer gestures. He kept a photograph of a 1967 Valentino day dress pinned above his desk, not as inspiration but as a reminder that the house had once known how to stop.

A Signature, Revised

Michele's Valentino is not Piccioli's Valentino, and it certainly isn't Gucci. The first collection featured forty-three looks, most of them in ivory, black, or a particular shade of grey that sits somewhere between dove and slate. The silhouettes were lean and high-waisted, with narrow trousers and coats that skimmed the knee. There was almost no embellishment. The only print was a single geometric jacquard, derived from a 1969 archive piece, used on three skirts and a pair of wide-leg trousers.

The reaction was mixed. Some critics called it restrained. Others called it boring, which Michele seemed to expect. In an interview with System magazine published last November, he said, "If you've been loud for thirteen years, people forget you can whisper."

The second collection, shown in February 2024, pushed further into austerity. Knit dresses in fine-gauge wool. Tailored jackets with no lapels. A series of evening gowns in black crêpe, cut on the bias, that moved like liquid and photographed like sculpture. The accessories were minimal—small leather clutches, flat sandals, a single gold cuff worn high on the forearm. Valentino's signature red appeared exactly once, on a floor-length cape that closed the show.

The commercial response has been cautious. Valentino's revenue dipped 8 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2025, though Mayhoola has publicly backed Michele's vision. The ready-to-wear is selling steadily in Asia and the Middle East, where Piccioli's maximalist codes had begun to feel overworked. The accessories—particularly the new Piccola bag, a structured top-handle in smooth calfskin—are performing above forecast.

What Comes Next

Michele's third collection arrives in September. He has said almost nothing about it, which is consistent with his current approach to press. But the atelier has been working with a new cloth supplier in Biella, and the sample room is full of wool suiting in weights that suggest tailoring, not dressmaking.

There is also a menswear component, which Valentino has not shown on the runway since 2022. Michele has hired a Savile Row-trained cutter and brought in a consultant from Huntsman to advise on shoulder construction. The implication is clear: he is building a wardrobe, not a series of seasonal statements.

Whether the market will follow is an open question. Valentino's identity under Piccioli was romantic, exuberant, and unmistakably Italian. Michele's version is cooler, more cerebral, and harder to summarise in a single image. It is also, arguably, more sustainable as a long-term proposition. You can only turn the volume up so many times before the audience stops listening.

For now, Michele is back in the atelier, adjusting sleeves and moving buttons. The work is slower than it was at Gucci, and the results are quieter. But quiet, in fashion, is often the hardest thing to get right.