Valentino Fall 2025: Indecent Exposure
“All goes down in the toilets,” Stella McCartney once captioned a bathroom selfie from the Met Gala. Though publicists spend months preparing for the event known as the fashion Oscars, those impromptu group shots often eclipse the carefully choreographed action on the red carpet.
Alessandro Michele’s set for his sophomore Valentino ready-to-wear show acknowledged the lure of the illicit. Guests emerged through a cubicle door into a giant public toilet bathed in red light to create what he dubbed in his show notes a “dystopian, disturbing, Lynchian space.”
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Guests including Jared Leto — predictably — headed straight for the mirrors, either to take a commemorative selfie, or to check their reflection. Michele said the show was about exploring the performative nature of intimacy, and the way we construct our identity through clothes.
“I’m also trying to reflect the idea that Instagram is putting this conversation outside, because what’s intimacy?” he said during a preview. “Now Madonna is in the toilet,” he quipped, referring to the singer’s habit of posting risqué shots from the bedroom, the bathroom and beyond.
The idea of borderline indecency ran through his collection. Models emerged from cubicles in various states of dishabille. Some wore nothing more than lace bodysuits left flapping open at the crotch, directing the eye to seek out the reassurance of nude tights worn underneath.
At the opposite end of the spectrum were the all-black looks, including an immaculate velvet column dress scooped low in the front and back. Mostly, though, Michele hewed close to his maximalist tendencies as he continued to explore the opulence at the core of the brand.
Take away the styling and show set, and some of the prim skirt suits and power-shouldered cocktail dresses could have stepped straight out of the “Chic Savages” era chronicled by WWD’s legendary chairman and publisher John B. Fairchild in the ‘80s.
Michele’s idea to pair a soigné suit jacket or a knotted chiffon bustier top with baggy jeans felt more current.
His grand evening gowns also felt of another era, though they were a compelling argument to bring back the kind of formal events that were the stomping ground of socialites like Nan Kempner, Brooke Astor and Jacqueline de Ribes. Think tiers of stiff gold lamé ruffles, or a daring chartreuse and lilac gown with an old lace train.
There was a sense of déjà vu to some of the menswear, like a gray suit jacket worn with a Valentino red pussy-bow blouse. Michele also seemed to reference himself with the profusion of sheer tops — an echo of the opening look of his debut show for Gucci in 2015.
“I like a kind of pornography,” he said. “I’m very surprised that Instagram is now censoring nipples. It’s kind of crazy.”
The designer recalled that growing up in Italy in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, naked bodies were everywhere: on TV variety shows, which apparently lacked a watershed, and in the streets of Rome, where statues of Saint Sebastian beckoned on every street corner.
“Nothing was forbidden. It was pretty wild, in a very interesting way,” he mused. “Mediterranean culture is about being naked.”
A form of nakedness is also inherent in the job of fashion designer. People’s fascination extends to both their public and private personas, something founder Valentino Garavani understood and exploited by embodying the brand’s jet set lifestyle.
“Trying to make fashion is creating a world, and people more and more want to get inside that world,” Michele said. “Private life is pornography, and we are very curious to see the things that are forbidden, who you are when I’m not seeing you.”
He appears to have an ambivalent relationship with his own fame. At the 2022 Met Gala, he and Leto were playfully dressed as twins, but Michele has resisted scrutiny of his work with show concepts that blur the senses — this time, strobe lights and thumping club tracks by the likes of Liquid Soul.
Part of it is playing cat and mouse with the Valentinologists who dissect each look. “I’m having fun, because there are people that are trying to play the game of the things that came from the brain of Valentino in the past and the things that are completely new, or things that they think that I’m copying,” he said.
Nevertheless, you get the sense that despite holding lengthy press conferences after each show and letting glossy magazines into his Roman palazzo, Michele doesn’t want to subject his mind to forensic examination. After all, isn’t a little mystery a good thing?
Launch Gallery: Valentino Fall 2025 Ready-to-Wear Collection
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