Alessandro Michele’s Valentino Era Kicks off with a Little Magical Realism
The Alessandro Michele Valentino era is officially here, with the Italian creative director launching his first campaign for the fashion house.
Created for the "Avant les Débuts" resort 2025 collection that was unveiled in June 2024, the campaign pulls from the legendary director Federico Fellini and his 1972 film Roma, creating a cinematic and magically surreal world for the clothing to live in.
Italian director Federico Fellini is a fitting reference for Alessandro, as Fellini's films are celebrated in cinematic history and equally revered in the fashion world for their enduring influence on style. (8½ might be the most stylish movie of all time.)
Equally, the House of Valentino, led by the legendary Valentino Garavani, boasts a mythical fashion archive that seamlessly blends old Hollywood glamour with Italian aristocratic elegance. Valentino has always mastered the art of making people feel unapologetically beautiful.
Michele understands this intuitively with his Avant les Débuts campaign, building on this legacy and injecting his imaginative maximalism and rebelliousness to create something contemporary but wouldn't feel too out of place in Fellini's Roma or Rome in the 1970s.
"Starting this new phase, I wanted to return to a language that would echo the neorealism of Luchino Visconti, the visual symbolism of Ingmar Bergman, and the magic realism of Federico Fellini," Michele says in WWD.
Aside from the mini-film, the Michele-led campaign includes patinaed polaroids of the looks that were intentionally created to feel nostalgic, slightly out of time (and space) on your For You Page.
"We are so used to scrolling images that we are almost consumed by them, so I wanted them to be smaller in size, which would lead to a precise choice to look at them," says Michele.
As for getting your hands on the garments, the cinematic pieces from Alessandro Michele's Avant les Débuts have already dropped in select Paris stores, with the clothing being rolled out globally on October 15.
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