Alessandro Michele Dusts Off Valentino

I'm not sure if Michele is dusting off Valentino, or a return to embellishment is dusting us all off.

PARIS—The much anticipated show at Valentino by Alessandro Michele stands in stark contrast to a lot of the smaller designers showing at Paris, which are very deconstructed, simple, displaying a minimal sort of futurism that pines to not be mistaken for laziness.

Michele presents us with the grains of a timeless grammar pulled from the closets of an old European house, with many historical elements that he loves, and a regeneration of things that happen in between. What I’m sure some critics will call ‘Guccification,’ or an overabundance of archive-inspired looks, has too much energy to be either.

Frills, embellishments and so-called superfluous elements that Midcentury modernism disbanded with, we find, never really left, were just draped in cloth somewhere in a massive holding area (with a black, broken-mirrored floor).

The show, with elements taken from all different decades, brims with ambitious optimism and an overall maximalism still niche, albeit less and less, in our post-modernist world. An army of lamps draped in white fabric mulls over the pure, ghost-like libraries through which the vibrations of Michele’s work strut.

The set, a kind of grandma’s closet, ‘grandma’ being Mr. Garavani’s post mortem repertoire, is where Michele returns with the kind of elegance and glamor that ‘pinches’ you everywhere, with a ferocity and specificity that, for me, ‘brings’ them into the present rather than simply parading their museum-like charm.

I’m not sure whether it is Mr. Michele who is ‘dusting off’ Valentino, or if it is Michele’s initiation of a return to fabric, embellishment and opulence that is shaking the dust from everywhere else.