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Alessandro Michele knows what you might think of the clothes he sent down the runway for Valentino’s spring/summer 2027 show. You might think some of them are fabulously impractical, gorgeously unwearable, spectacular but fantastical. And in some cases, you would be right. But that’s the point.
Anchoring his collections with meditations on fashion and the way it fits into life, Michele hit the shelves for spring/summer 2027. Well, in theory, at least. The collection centred on the idea of the “antilibrary” — an inspiration sparked by the Lebanese-American professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan — which posits that the more unread books one has in their possession, the more knowledge they have to gain. Instead of suggesting unfinished business, it represents the potential for discovery — of stories, ideas and lives beyond our own.
Michele proposed that same idea, but instead of books, the unread artefacts were garments. “Some of them will cross the space of the show only once; others will stay alive in the images that hold their fleeting appearance; while others will enter the wardrobes to remain almost untouched, cherished like relics,” Michele wrote in the show notes. As a result, Antibiblioteca, as the show was named, was a flamboyant collection of pieces perhaps not designed to be worn daily, but intended to challenge what fashion can be and how it can make you feel.
Skirts were a blank canvas for Michele, who reimagined them in all kinds of ways: in tutti-frutti colour palettes; fashioning them from brocade, lace, ruched silk taffeta; trimming the hems with feather and fringe; and rounding the silhouette to make them orb-like. Dresses were his next project, sending slinky pleated styles down the runway alongside richly embellished slips and column gowns with startling trains, all with a Michele-esque bizarro element. Sometimes it was a pair of elbow-length ruched silk gloves in magenta; other times it was a straw boater hat, most often, it was a pair of wide rectangular sunglasses.
For all its eccentricity, there was plenty to actually wear in the collection, too. Michele is a master of layering, but if you peeled it all back, the collection was more practical than you’d think. A pair of kelly green barrel-leg jeans worn with a lilac lace camisole would look just as good with a white T-shirt; the trench coats were relaxed and unfussy; the rosette sandals might be the perfect summer shoe.
Those spectacular gowns might never go into production, or perhaps they’ll only ever be owned by a lucky few, but as Michele wrote in his show notes, the collection was designed to “expand the realm of the imaginable.” As Antibiblioteca proved, if there’s one thing Alessandro Michele excels at, it’s making people dream.
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