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Spring 2025 was Alessandro Michele’s first couture collection for Valentino, and it felt more like a film than a fashion show. At the Palais Brongniart, 48 models ran across a dark stage under strobe lights, capes and crinolines flying behind them, while giant screens flashed words like rapture and disruption.
Michele called the collection Vertigineux, after the dizzying feeling of having the Valentino archive and ateliers at his fingertips, and took Umberto Eco’s book The Infinity of Lists as his guide. Every guest got a thick bundle of pages listing the references behind each look: Venetian carnival, medieval nuns, Marie Antoinette, Georgian panniers, Victorian crinolines, silent film stars, cardinals and much more.
Classic Valentino techniques were all there, from tiny pleats on trumpet sleeves to delicate ruffles, floral prints, bows, jewelled lattice embroidery and the shape of a princess coat. Then Michele blew them up, putting 1950s-style dresses over huge panniers so they looked like court robes from Versailles. Valentino red appeared on a giant crinoline with a bolero and on a cardinal’s scarlet moiré robe. One look was dedicated to his mother, who worked as a costume designer in Roman cinema.
It divided people, loudly. W called him fashion’s intellectual hitmaker and Vogue’s critic described being swept into a kind of cinematic psychodrama. Others hated it: Runway Magazine found it excessive in all the wrong ways and mourned the house, and some readers on fashion forums wanted him gone altogether.
Maximalist, theatrical and impossible to ignore. A thrilling, if divisive, start to a new era.
More Valentino: see every Valentino couture collection we have reviewed, Michele’s next couture in Valentino Haute Couture Spring 2026, the rest of the week in All about Haute Couture Spring 2025, and how he got the job in Fashion’s Great Designer Reshuffle.
Previous collection: Valentino Spring 2024 Couture · Next collection: Valentino Spring 2026 Couture
Pictures courtesy of Vogue Runway
We do not own the rights to any of these images and they have been used in good faith. Every effort has been made to ensure that all images are used with proper credits. If you are the rightful owner of any image used on our site and wish to have it removed, please contact us at ayerhsmagazine@gmail.com and we will promptly remove it. We are a non-commercial, passion-driven, independent fashion blog and do not intend to infringe any copyright. Thank you for your understanding.
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