The first Valentino Couture show after Garavani’s death was held at the Kaiserpanorama

I wish I had enough words to describe my deeply sentimental relationship with the fashion house Valentino. Just two years ago, I was sitting with Garavani’s closest friend and the brand’s right hand for more than two decades, Georgina Brandolini, in her apartment in Rome, listening to stories about the golden age they lived through. We have so many memories, she said. Laughter and tears. Immense admiration and love. He is my family. In recent days, after the news of Valentino’s death, I have found myself thinking about this often, while at the same time anticipating the first Valentino Couture collection signed by Alessandro Michele. As expected, it opened with his letter as a dedication to the legacy, both to Garavani and to all those who, throughout history, shaped the Roman house.

Valentino Garavani passed away just a few days before the haute couture show, at a moment when all the work had entered its final phase, too far along to be withdrawn or changed. And yet I feel the need to speak, aware of the debt I carry. What we do today unfolds within a history we did not create ourselves, in a house long inhabited, rich with traces and gestures. A luminous presence guides us, a presence that shaped the space in which a creative vision could flourish and become, for all of us who work in fashion, both a compass and a goal. To work within that space means to accept both its weight and its grace. It means acknowledging that every form exists only in relation to what made it possible, that every creative act is also an act of preservation. For me, Valentino was a mythical figure, a presence, a lasting reference that remains both origin and measure. That myth does not belong to the past. It establishes a language, reveals a world, makes habitable a space rich in meaning. Its power lies in its ability to transcend the contingency of historical time without being consumed by it, to rise above the everyday and become a principle that establishes order. In Valentino, myth took on a concrete form: the idea of creative beauty that still speaks today, beyond the succession of seasons. To be invited to safeguard this legacy, even if only for a certain time, is for me an invitation that cannot be refused. To enter such a great history, even for as long as we are given, means recognizing oneself as part of a continuity that precedes the individual and outlives them. As a link in a chain in which what is passed on gains meaning precisely because it is not retained, but entrusted to a movement that surpasses it, wrote Alessandro.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a device appeared in major European cities: the Kaiserpanorama, today almost forgotten, yet crucial to understanding a certain historical regime of vision. It was a collective optical machine with a circular wooden structure, punctured by small viewing apertures. The audience gathered around the machine and observed stereoscopic moving images inside it, looking through these openings. Each viewer watched individually, even though everyone watched at the same time: a public ritual based on the isolation of the gaze. This device allowed access to images of distant cities, exotic landscapes, monuments, ruins, scenes of everyday life in unreachable places. An entire world entered the room. It was a way of traveling while staying in place. In this theater of fleeting apparitions, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, a disciplined, patient, hypnotic vision was cultivated, one that paved the way for cinematography while preserving something more archaic: contemplation, distance, duration. The image does not yet overwhelm the viewer. It teaches them to remain still, to focus their gaze, and to assume a position grounded in attention.

This is the main inspiration behind the staging of the Valentino Couture 2026 collection titled Specula Mundi. Our present time is marked by the simultaneity of gazes, media saturation, and rapid consumption, which is why Haute Couture seeks to offer a vision defined by a different temporality, composed of slowness, closeness, and concentration. Each garment celebrates a singular encounter, both through the way it is conceived and crafted and through the conditions under which it is offered to the gaze. The Kaiserpanorama translates this need into spatial form by performing a conceptual reversal: it does not amplify visibility, but restricts it. The eye penetrates an intimate, almost inaccessible space. Within this isolated space, clothing is no longer an object of rapid consumption, but appears as a hierophany: a sacred presence that demands pause, attentiveness, and a particular disposition. In this way, fashion here once again discovers its ritual and critical dimension, a threshold at which we learn to stop and contemplate.

Below, we present a first look at the Valentino Couture 2026 collection.