Valentino SS27: Alessandro Michele Has Stopped Apologizing for More

Alessandro Michele's Spring/Summer 2027 collection piles colour onto lace, corsetry onto romance and enormous jewelry onto already elaborate clothes, yet somehow the woman never disappears underneath it all.

There are collections where you immediately start editing. Remove the necklace. Lose the bag. Simplify the styling. Let the dress breathe. Valentino Spring/Summer 2027 produced almost the opposite reaction. The pleasure was in seeing Alessandro Michele refuse to stop. A vivid corset wasn't enough, so it met a contrasting skirt, jewelry and an embellished bag. Lace didn't need to remain delicate when it could be interrupted by feathers. A beautiful evening dress could still take an enormous necklace. Pearls could become comically large. Gold could accumulate around the neck until jewelry stopped functioning as decoration and became part of the silhouette itself.

Michele called the collection Antibiblioteca and staged it inside the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, drawing on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's discussion of Umberto Eco's library and the idea that unread books represent the vast territory of what we do not yet know. Guests were even asked to bring books that would later be donated to local libraries. It was an unusually cerebral framework for clothes that delivered such immediate visual pleasure, but perhaps that contradiction was appropriate. Michele has never believed fashion needs to choose between thinking and dressing up.

The clothes themselves moved through an enormous amount of territory. There were brightly coloured silk corsets, lace, abbreviated skirts, strapless gowns, feather trims, sequins, tailoring, menswear and extravagant evening clothes, with hot pink, yellow, blue, black and red appearing alongside quieter passages. One extraordinary floor-length pink gown, built around a sculpted bustier and revealing a circular ruffled construction and black bow as it moved, demonstrated how much of the collection depended on seeing garments from more than one angle.

That variety could easily have become incoherent. Michele has been accused throughout his career of giving us too much, and at Valentino the criticism has sometimes been sharper because he inherited a house associated with a very different kind of elegance. Valentino Garavani could certainly do opulence, but his glamour often depended on an extraordinary sense of control. Michele's instinct is to disrupt control, combining references until the distinction between good taste and bad taste becomes much less useful.

SS27 made the case for that approach better than almost any of his Valentino ready-to-wear collections so far. The clothes did not look like Michele trying to restrain himself sufficiently to fit Valentino, nor did they feel like old Gucci ideas transported into a new building. The romance, colour, couture sensibility and unapologetic glamour of Valentino were still visible, but Michele had stopped treating the house codes as precious objects that needed to remain untouched. He was playing with them.

And then there was the jewelry

It would be impossible to properly review this collection while treating the jewelry as finishing touches. The jewelry was one of its strongest arguments.

Huge baroque gold necklaces sat across collarbones like fragments of something excavated from a palace. Oversized pearls became almost surreal in scale. Earrings refused to politely frame the face, and layers of necklaces competed with lace, bare skin, corsetry and elaborate necklines rather than retreating from them. Reuters described chunky baroque-style gold necklaces and oversized pearl earrings among the defining accessories of the collection, but their significance was greater than scale alone.

For years, fashion's dominant styling advice has told women to remove something before leaving the house. Michele would apparently like you to put two things back on.

What made the jewelry work was precisely that it wasn't reserved for simple clothing. The conventional approach would be to place the enormous necklace over the cleanest possible dress so the object could become the focus. Valentino did something much more enjoyable. Embellishment met embellishment. Gold sat against already complicated clothes. Pearls arrived where another stylist might have decided the neckline had enough going on.

That shouldn't work as often as it did. The reason it does is that Michele understands maximalism as composition rather than accumulation. More is not automatically interesting. Anyone can keep adding things. The skill lies in understanding when several competing elements create tension rather than noise, and SS27 repeatedly landed on the right side of that distinction. There were looks where the jewelry changed the entire posture of the clothes, giving a romantic dress something heavier and stranger or making exposed skin feel almost ceremonial.

The bags followed the same logic. Studded cross-body styles and embellished clutches appeared across womenswear and menswear, often refusing to coordinate politely with the rest of the outfit. Everything felt collected rather than matched, which is an important distinction in Michele's world. Matching suggests completion. Collecting suggests a person with a history.

Maximalism works better when there is a woman underneath it

The danger with this much styling is obvious. Clothes can become images before they become clothes, and Michele is exceptionally capable of constructing an image. Sometimes that ability has worked against him. When every element is eccentric, eccentricity can paradoxically become predictable.

Here, the strongest looks escaped that problem because there was sensuality beneath the decoration. Corsetry exposed the body rather than burying it. Lace allowed skin through. Strapless dresses created expanses of bare shoulder against enormous jewelry. Shorter proportions interrupted all the historical references with something immediate and youthful. Even when the clothes became elaborate, they rarely became solemn.

That matters at Valentino. Beauty is part of the house's inheritance, and Michele is most convincing when he doesn't seem embarrassed by it. Fashion has spent enough time treating prettiness as intellectually suspicious and glamour as something requiring an ironic explanation. SS27 was full of clothes that simply wanted to be beautiful, seductive, extravagant and noticed.

There is enormous confidence in allowing that pleasure to stand on its own.

Valentino doesn't need to become quieter

Luxury fashion is currently surrounded by pressure to simplify. Commercial uncertainty encourages safe products. The aftermath of quiet luxury continues to privilege restraint. Houses undergoing creative transitions are constantly told they need clearer codes, easier propositions and recognizable products. Valentino itself has significant commercial work ahead after reporting declining revenue and losses, making the temptation to streamline particularly understandable.

But creative clarity and aesthetic simplicity are not the same thing. SS27 felt clear precisely because Michele wasn't trying to make Valentino easier to summarize. His proposition is becoming increasingly understandable: couture-level fantasy colliding with the promiscuity of contemporary wardrobes, where exceptional clothes can coexist with ordinary ones and historical references don't require historical obedience. He had already articulated that idea in Resort 2027, describing his fascination with wardrobes in which the exceptional and practical can live together.

Antibiblioteca pushed that thinking somewhere richer. The library was filled with things known and unknown, read and unread, while the wardrobe was filled with things beautiful, strange, excessive, familiar and difficult to categorize. Michele didn't attempt to resolve those contradictions because resolution would have made the collection considerably less interesting.

There will always be people who look at an Alessandro Michele collection and want him to take something off. SS27 suggests that asking him to do so may be missing the point. Valentino already knows how to make a perfect dress. What Michele brings is the urge to disturb that perfection, put an enormous gold necklace over it, add the slightly wrong bag and introduce a woman interesting enough to wear the whole thing.

For Spring/Summer 2027, we wouldn't take a single thing off.