Valentino Spring/Summer 2025 Haute Couture Review

Alessandro Michele has exploded Valentino haute couture. Ever since his appointment as creative director for the storied Italian house in March 2024, fashion critics and followers immediately began to anticipate what Michele’s haute couture would look like. Michele’s design codes are well known at this point. Since taking over the creative direction for Gucci in 2015, Michele’s aesthetic tastes and sense of design veered towards the antique and eclectic. 1970’s glamour and nostalgia, pussy bow blouses, prints on prints, and a “more is more” mentality all fitted under the dome of Michele’s world. There was always a blink-and-you-miss-it sense of BDSM in there too. Remember that Gucci show with all the leather harnesses? Or what about this past Valentino show with all the pierced face jewelry? Pretty badass, frilly ruffles included. Hard and soft. 

Though Michele often made flowing, embellished gowns during his time at Gucci, the brand never had an haute couture line.  Haute couture represents the height of dress making. Clothes are hand sewn, cut, an embellished to perfection by an entire team of expert craftsman. During the last century, Parisian haute couture houses were the innovators of fashion and catered to the wealthiest and most aristocratic women in the world. Today, haute couture operates within a completely different fashion system. Many critics argue haute couture collections are nothing more than branding exercises, garnering press and creating images that sell brand’s hero products like perfumes, sunglasses, and bags. There is still an haute couture customer, however. These customers are collectors who buy gowns that often cost $100,000 or more, like an art collector buys paintings. It continues to be about status, exclusivity, and a love for the art. 

Could Michele rise to the occasion of haute couture, with all its technical requirements and near-impossibly high standards? Could the designer who’s obsessed with the past carry on the tradition of haute couture into the year-of-our-Lord 2025? 

The answer to all these questions is an overwhelming, screaming, pulsating, and nearly-vulgar YES. Michele’s entire career has been building to this point. The Spring/Summer 2025 haute couture collection, entitled “Vertigineux”, was about Michele’s sense of vertigo when he first entered the Valentino couture salon and becoming overwhelmed with the possibilities. So many beautiful colors and fabrics, so many techniques for crating garments, and a sixty-five-year-long history could make any gifted designer dizzy. It’s fitting that what Michele unleashed was overwhelming to the eye at first glance, as perhaps couture should be. It was blinding, almost too much. You had to look away to catch your breath in some instances. And the pulsating light show setting for these clothes and clashing musical score didn’t help. 

These clothes were enormous. BIG gowns, BIG bracelets, and BIG ruffles. Forty-inch iridescent black feathers jutted out the back of the second look, a gargantuan 1980’s style black gown with wide shoulders and a duchesse satin skirt. The third look featured layers and layers of crochet work, so detailed you could spend hours trying to count all the flowers individually hand made. Michele blew everything up, in both the balloon sense and in the explosion sense of the word. Eighteenth-century panniers and nineteenth-century hoop skirts padded otherwise standard Valentino gowns into massive semi-circles of fabric. There was a sense of aristocratic children dressing up, models with fresh faces and flat hair enveloped in these massive gowns.  

Rhinestone-embellished stockings were tucked into fantastical velvet heeled sandals. Crystal Venetian headdresses contained beaded tassels that dangled down to the waist. These headdresses evolved into full on luchador masks and veered into the gimp territory. There’s that BDSM thing again. Did you see it?  

The setting of this collection was incredibly distracting, however. Stock-market like ticker text scrolled along the backdrop once the massive black velvet curtain lifted at the beginning of the show. The audience sat far back from the stage on bleachers and many journalists said it was hard to see the details and read the words on screen behind the models at the same time. Phrases like Middle Ages, graphism, arsenic, formality, nudity, Tudor, rustle, pink, and wet droplets all brought a cacophony of references and descriptions against these insanely detailed garments. The eye and the brain couldn’t possibly keep up. Drawing lines between these ideas and references in real-time with the runway looks would be impossible, but there were some obvious matches. “Giambattista Tiepolo” read one red scrolling text. Okay, that makes sense, the Venetian Rocco painter, of course. Venice, Carnival, draping fabrics, Italy. Okay, got it. 

For the finale, the scrolling text glitched to reveal the words “et cetera, et cetera” before completely breaking and blowing out. Glitching lights strobed across the stage, as the models all came running in the wind, lifting their giant skirt and dragging them across the floor. Digital chaos and a storm of references. As Michele took his final bow to a theater full of applause, the audience was left dazed. One of the fashion industry’s most expressive designers has found his stage and created beauty amongst a cacophony of references and a doom-scroll of ideas.  

Photos Courtesy of Vogue