Alessandro Michele’s Valentino mirrored a world of voyeurism and light, refracting the late Valentino Garavani’s distorted legacy through private lenses

Alessandro Michele has a thing for high fashion in low places. Almost a year ago, he showed the Valentino autumn/winter 2025 RTW collection in a set that was designed to look like a public toilet. For this couture season, he made the guests sit though a peep show. This wasn’t the peep boxes of the past, when street entertainment was watching movies through, say, a kinetoscope (19th century motion picture exhibition devices). Rather, he set up a more atas peep facility kaiserpanorama, a German word (literally ‘imperial Panorama’) that refers to a very specific piece of 19th-century technology that is essentially the high-class Victorian ancestor of the peep show booth. But the motivation behind the set-up was more akin to the modern usage (particularly from the mid-20th century onward) of the peep show, a term that almost exclusively refers to adult entertainment venues before the online porn age. Guests did not take it all in from the front row, now totally missing. They sat at their designated seats around a circular structure and peeped. Even Anna Wintour, now the bobbed voyeur.

In Valentino’s peep booth—a dozen of them, squares of glassed-up peep holes are positioned across the curved wall in a linear manner. The viewers alternately pressed their faces or smartphone against them to view the reveal within. The models emerged and pose (or whatever you might wish to call their physical display) for visual consumption. By replacing the 3D glass slides of the original kaiserpanorama with live models, Mr Michele turned a 19th-century educational tool into a human/peacock menagerie. By sitting the world’s most powerful fashion folks in dark spaces outside the booth, bodies against the wall, to peep at models through framed holes, he made them act out the reality of their jobs or desires. Fashion is, at its core, a ‘looking’ industry, so is social media. He took away the polite pretenses and made it feel like a secret, private gawk. He turned ​the kaiserpanorama from a ‘world-viewing’ machine into a sartorial safari—or at least, a very expensive way to morph the elite of couture week into peepers. The only thing thinner than the models was the line between connoisseur and common stalker.

This was Mr Michele’s first collection for Valentino after founder, Valentino Garavani died more than a week ago. Considered the “king” of high-society elegance—red carpets, mansions, and fancy cars—Mr Valentino did glamour, especially Hollywood glamour better than most back in the late ’60s. It was this period and the following decade that Mr Michele was enamoured with. The media kept saying how true he has been to Valentino. There’s a difference between keeping the spirit alive and turning it into a 童乩 (tongji or danki in Hokkien) spirit medium. When a designer gets this obsessed with the past, the clothes stop being ‘living fashion’ and start becoming ceremonial regalia. Keeping a spirit alive usually means taking the essence—for Valentino, the red, the bow, the elegance—and making it work for the world we live in now. But Mr Michele simply isn’t interested in 2026. In his elaborate world, bygone eras aren’t a memory to be polished, but a historical wardrobe to be raided, where the past and the past, and the past collide in a gaudy, permanent now.

No matter from which hole you saw the clothes, it wasn’t just Hollywood glamour, it was Hollywood costume. These were gowns that even Carmen Miranda, if she were alive, won’t wear. Those towering ruffs that could be Erté discovering that the only thing better than a silhouette is a distraction. And the extravagances were many. Sequined gowns with metallic embroidery and trailing capes that recalled Golden Age musicals. Encrusted jackets over sheer ’20s style dresses that would ensnare the likes of Daisy Buchanan. A velvet kaftan with a waistband shaped like a fringed panty. There was no lid on the excess, certainly not a gold and encrusted one. Every look spilled over with the energy of a man trying to fit centuries into a single strut. Do bodies really desire to be scaffoldings for fantasy? Perhaps Alessandro Michele was trying to prove that Valentino’s beauty is even more powerful when it’s dragged through the gutter. A lace dress looks more alive in a public toilet or a peep show booth than it does in an antique armoire.