Public baths and underwear: Alessandro Michele’s bold vision at Valentino

by Nathan Merchadier.

Publié le 10 march 2025. Modifié le 16 March 2025.

A Fall-Winter 2025-2026 show at the public baths

A few months after his first show for the French fashion house in October 2024, Italian designer Alessandro Michele continues his exploration of a troubled, theatrical romanticism. This season, in a universe worthy of a David Lynch film, bathed in intense red light and set in the middle of public toilets, he interrogates the notion of intimacy through a fashion show with a performative dimension.

On a red-tiled catwalk, the first silhouette appeared: a transparent bodysuit, paired with a lingerie ensemble, one of the main threads of the collection. In a note accompanying the show, Alessandro Michele explains: “I imagined public toilets: a counter-place that neutralizes and suspends the dualism between inside and outside, between what is intimate and what is exposed, between the personal and the collective.”

A sensual and theatrical Valentino collection

Then come masculine silhouettes that also challenge the notion of clothing as a second skin. A red top embroidered with flowers plays on transparency, while downstairs, the Valentino man swaps pants for lace mini-shorts, infusing the collection with an assumed sensuality.

But Alessandro Michele doesn’t break away from Valentino codes. On the contrary, he brilliantly reinvents them. A coat with a wide collar comes in the house’s inimitable “Rosso” red, while as the final silhouettes approach, materials meet in theatrical evening looks.

The suit was revisited, with broadened shoulders, and a long dress was adorned with sequins, sublimated by a pair of XXL glasses that obscured part of the face. A way, no doubt, of reaffirming the ambiguity between what we choose to show, and what we prefer to conceal.