The bathroom stall is the best place in the club. There’s just so much to do: make new friends, share positivity, and even get a quick workout in. While we choose to remain PG, Alessandro Michele went in the opposite direction. In a Valentino-red set, the designer presented an extravagant yet intellectual collection—an apt setting for a show that reveled in excess and spectacle, borrowing freely from Mr. Garavani’s maximalist archive to conjure a wardrobe for nocturnal hedonists.

Michele’s Valentino is not about restraint. Instead, it’s a heady, hallucinatory vision of glamour—psychedelic office wear saturated with riotous colour and texture, sequins refracting light like a disco ball. There were moments of elegance, of course—razor-sharp tailoring slicing through the opulence, offering a brief reprieve in an otherwise intense lineup. But, even grey structured jackets were paired with shiny collars, long coats with snakeskin pockets. He pulls from history, but rather than preserving it, he remixes it into something feverish and deliriously modern. It’s the kind of fashion that seduces, overwhelms, and ultimately intoxicates. And then, there was the quintessential Michele oddity: an enormous, hyper realistic cat dress that felt utterly surreal.

Michele personifies himself as Dionysus—a conjurer of dancing orgies where extravagance isn’t just opulent but spiritual. The clothes aren’t merely meant to be worn; they are meant to be lived in, worshipped, and paraded under the pulsing lights of a dance floor (or rather, the dim bulbs of a bathroom stall).

Words by Pedro Vasconcelos

VALENTINO FW25

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