A cinematic campaign from Alessandro Michele explores memory, everyday rituals, and timeless dressing through a contemporary lens.
By Fashion Editorial Staff
Alessandro Michele’s first campaign for Valentino Garavani is a poetic gesture to the enduring elegance of 20th-century style—reinterpreted for the present moment with a quiet, subversive edge.
Titled The Poetics of Everyday, the Fall 2025 campaign is a statement of intent: an artistic direction that honors the brand’s Roman sophistication while reweaving it into the textures of contemporary life. Shot by Glen Luchford and composed like vintage postcards, the imagery blurs past and present through cinematic stills of youth in motion, dressed in garments that feel both heirloom and entirely now.
Rather than chase spectacle, Michele leans into subtlety. Set outside a nostalgic ice cream parlor or captured in moments of quiet distraction—solving a Rubik’s Cube, playing with a yo-yo, sharing glances—the campaign reframes glamour through the lens of routine. The wardrobe, however, is anything but ordinary.
Structured coats, mid-length skirts, pussy-bow blouses, and sharply tailored suits recall postwar silhouettes and 1970s bourgeois dressing. Yet Michele injects these classics with his signature eclecticism—styling them with mismatched accessories, casual layering, and an emotional looseness that rejects strict codes. There’s a feeling of vintage luxury made personal again.
With this campaign, that philosophy is tangible. Each look evokes the sensory richness of a bygone era yet nothing feels fixed in time. It’s fashion as memory, re-edited for a generation that curates its identity through layers of influence.
The cast reflects this synthesis of nostalgia and now. Kai Schreiber (daughter of Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber), Scarlett White (daughter of Jack White and Karen Elson), Amelia Gray, actress Sophie Thatcher, and Italian actor Lorenzo Zurzolo form a quietly powerful ensemble—familiar yet unpolished, evoking the kind of timeless faces often found in photo albums, not just Instagram feeds.
Their presence anchors the campaign in a generational handoff—heritage seen through a youthful lens, less about rebellion than reclamation. Here, at Valentino Garavani, Michele appears to be carving out a new language—one built on subtle provocation, emotional intelligence, and a reverence for the beauty of dressing. In Michele’s world, nostalgia isn’t retrograde—it’s regenerative.
In an industry constantly chasing the future, The Poetics of Everyday repositions style as a form of memory-making. It asks us to look closer at the classics, to wear them differently, and to find modernity not in disruption, but in reinterpretation.
With The Poetics of Everyday, Valentino Garavani under Alessandro Michele opens a new chapter—rooted in history, tailored for today, and dreaming well beyond the moment.