Valentino Unveils Maximalist Collection at Paris Library
Naomi Watts clutched a copy of Jane Eyre for the cameras. The 19th-century building in Paris’s Latin Quarter, France’s first public library, had become the gate for the Valentino show, and every guest had to bring a donated book to enter. Photographers and fans watched as she held the novel up.
“I can’t remember the last time I went into a library,” Watts said. “I remember this is what we used to do to study. We’d come and rifle through the shelves to find all the information that we needed, and you know it took hours of dedication. And now we just press a button, and it’s sad. So I feel emotional actually being here.”
Cynthia Erivo arrived the same way, with a book in hand, turning the volume toward the lenses and the crowd before she stepped inside. Alexander Skarsgård brought Icelandic sagas. “It’s basically the ‘Iliad’ of the Norse culture,” he said. Zoey Deutch donated Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction. “I love it, it’s a great book,” she said. “I love to read, but I’ve recently adopted the Kindle life, which I’m enjoying.” Joe Alwyn, Jeff Satur and Clairo were among those who also brought books.
Inside, guests sat at long oak reading tables dotted with green lamps beneath the iron latticework ceiling arches. Models walked past the bookshelves and stacks and prowled along the reading tables in tight silk corset tops in bright blue, yellow and hot pink, often paired with skirts in contrasting colors. Opening looks brought seamed-cup satin bustiers in jewel tones, worn with knee-length skirts in crinkly crepon, floral silk dévoré or leather. Lace skirts and tops were trimmed with ostrich feathers. Strapless dresses cut through the line. An eighties-style jewel-buttoned jacket appeared with lace biker shorts. Chunky baroque gold necklaces and giant pearl earrings finished many of the women’s silhouettes, while cross-body bags and rectangular clutches covered in studs and sequins moved with them past the shelves.
Menswear mixed half-buttoned double-breasted jackets with sequined shirts. Some jackets sat open so the cloth gathered at the waist, and silk boxers were pulled inches past the pant waistbands. Tinted sunglasses and baseball caps printed VILLAIN TEEN completed the men’s looks. Troye Sivan’s song Party, sampling Madonna’s Music, played on loop. The final look was a floor-length red gown with an oversized black bow.
The collection was titled Antibiblioteca, Alessandro Michele’s fourth ready-to-wear show for Valentino. The title came from a term coined by the late writer and philosopher Umberto Eco: an antilibrary is the collection of books a person owns and has never opened. Those books stay on the shelf. Michele cited Eco’s term as the inspiration for the season. He keeps scores of unread books of his own and compared that trove to all the clothes sitting idle in his wardrobe. In the show notes he set the closed books beside the unworn garments and pointed to the enormous potential in both.
“Even the garments that we will never wear, no differently than those books sitting unopened on our shelves, still speak to us of the lives we could have lived. Not as regrets, but as promises,” Michele wrote.
Michele has led Valentino since March 2024, after eight years as creative director of Gucci from January 2015 until he stepped down in November 2022. He had already worked inside Gucci for more than a decade before that, arriving in 2002 to design handbags under Tom Ford and rising to senior leather-goods designer and then associate creative director. Once in the top role, his maximalist and eccentric designs revived the house. He opened with a nonconformist, romantic, intellectual menswear show prepared in a week, then carried a sophisticated androgynous feel into the women’s collections. Gender-fluid silhouettes, Geek-Chic references and pieces such as fur-lined loafers reinvigorated the brand and boosted sales. He reintroduced the double-G logo and created the Dionysus handbag. He called himself an art archaeologist rather than a creative director, treating garments as objects that needed historic context and mixing cinema, theatrics, post-punk and centuries of embellishment into one ornate language.
At Valentino the business arc inverted. The house swung from an operating profit of €31 million in 2024 to a €103 million loss, with revenue falling 15 percent. Mayhoola owns 70 percent of Valentino and Kering owns 30 percent; in June the shareholders pledged additional financial support after debt increased, and Kering holds options to raise its stake to 100 percent before 2029. He faces pressure to revive sales at the Roman house.
“I’m trying to translate beautiful things with my idea of freedom to make the look,” he said. “I was petrified and I was trying to understand what was going on. I’m not against technology, but life is about me and the things that surround me. I don’t want to lose everything. I don’t need a second brain.” He drew the same line around commerce. “I don’t want to live fashion just as something that belongs to numbers. I want to give back to fashion what fashion has always given me. I would love to push people to inject something more, because otherwise we risk falling asleep.”
