Valentino Spring 2026 Couture
At Paris Couture Week, Alessandro Michele delivered one of the most emotionally resonant shows of the season with Valentino’s Spring 2026 collection. Staged only days after the funeral of the house’s founder, the presentation felt both intimate and cinematic, a love letter to Valentino Garavani’s lifelong devotion to glamour and the mythic power of clothes. The set, a series of circular viewing chambers inspired by the Kaiserpanorama, invited guests to peer into glowing dioramas where models appeared as living film stills. It was a format that captured both Michele’s fascination with spectacle and his talent for turning nostalgia into something transcendent.
In his Specula Mundi, or “mirror of the world,” Michele imagined a series of modern goddesses draped in liquid silks, embroidered velvets and lamé that caught the light like celluloid. The silhouettes echoed the Art Deco fantasies of Erté and the lavish excess of 1940s Hollywood, with ostrich feathers, gilded crowns and capes that seemed to ripple with movement. Each look appeared suspended between fantasy and history, somewhere between Gloria Swanson’s screen sirens and a contemporary red-carpet muse. You could almost picture the gowns reappearing at the Oscars, shimmering under flashbulbs, their dreamlike quality intact.
The result was a meditation on fashion’s ability to create worlds, both sacred and cinematic. As Michele said before the show, he sees himself as an archaeologist of beauty, excavating symbols that link fantasy to reality. His Valentino is not simply about luxury, but about how clothes transform the wearer into something larger than life. In an age when couture can feel detached from emotion, he reminded his audience why it matters. Through a lens of devotion, he turned mourning into celebration, and in doing so, offered a vision of fashion as the ultimate act of worship.
