When Alessandro Michele was growing up in Rome in the 1970s, one of his favourite pastimes was to rummage through his mother’s closet and to run his hands over the rustling taffeta, glinting sequins, and other adornments of time past. Michele’s mother worked as an assistant to an executive at a film-production company, a career that called for a glamorous self-presentation, and one gown particularly captured the young Michele’s imagination. Fashioned from crepe de chine in the style of Valentino, it was full-length and high-necked, falling straight down in a manner that reminded Michele of a candle. The front of the dress was entirely black, which Michele’s mother considered reliably chic. Embroidered on its reverse, however, was an enormous pink and lilac butterfly—an elegant yet subversive gesture, suggesting metamorphosis and transient beauty. Michele’s mother explained that she had bought the gown for a premiere; it seemed to him, he later recollected, “like she was telling me: ‘I wore it in a world that now no longer exists.’ ”
Four decades after those closet explorations, Michele last year came into possession of another sartorial treasure trove: the archive of the house of Valentino, to which he was appointed creative director in the spring of 2024. On his first day at the Valentino offices, in a late-Renaissance palazzo on the Piazza Mignanelli in Rome, Michele immersed himself in an extraordinary storehouse of garments, shoes, and other objects, all of them constructed with an exquisite lightness that belied an almost architectural rigor. In his former role as creative director of Gucci, a position he held for almost eight years until late 2022, Michele had established himself as a consummate curator, reshaping that brand with his magpie taste for the vintage and the bohemian and dressing his aficionados in garments that looked like they’d been found in English church-hall sales, or had been sourced from the cast-off wardrobes of…
