Inside Alessandro Michele’s “Weirdly Chic” Valentino Debut

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“It’s been a while!” said Alessandro Michele with a chuckle on Sunday afternoon in Paris. The designer was holding a press conference following his Valentino debut, which marked the ex-Gucci maestro’s eagerly anticipated return to fashion and his first runway show in two years. Perched on an antique armchair blanketed by a dust cover, legs crossed, it was hard to miss the symbolism. Michele looked like a king returned to his throne, although one with staunchly modern values: his long chestnut locks crowned by a gray ballcap embroidered with the phrase “Techno Is My Boyfriend.”

About an hour earlier, on the outskirts of Paris, we entered the same subterranean theater where Michele sat to find a cabinet of curiosities draped in the same dust covers: wooden chairs and brass lamps and even a grand piano forming the ghostly set. (My ticket led me to a time-worn loveseat with—as I discovered underneath the sheet—sumptuous velvet upholstery.) It was, it seemed, the symbolic dormant palace Michele unlocked when he arrived at the Roman couture house in April. “It was really beautiful,” he said. “It was a home, a home full of precious things, fragile objects, difficult to approach but also full of life.”

The floor, an acre of cracked mirror laid down by Italian contemporary artist Alfredo Pirri, gently crunched under Hari Nef’s heels. “We’re so fucking back,” said the actress. Nef was part of Michele’s artsy Gucci gang that repped his baroque-punk sensibility on stadium stages and red carpets the world over. Now, you can call them the Valentino set: along with Nef, Harry Styles, Elton John, Florence Welch, Andrew Garfield, and Jared Leto all returned to the front row. “I feel excited and wide-eyed in a way that I can’t remember feeling in fashion since I began working with Alessandro the last time,” Nef said.

The feeling, at least on my side of the press section, was mutual. In Michele’s nearly eight-year blockbuster run at Gucci, the designer (who lives and works in Rome) seamlessly folded pop culture into luxury fashion. His influence on menswear was also profound. Michele’s work is often reduced to its front page moments—Harry Styles wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue!—but he taught men a much subtler lesson that reverberated far beyond the reach of embroidered snakes and fur-lined horsebit slides. Michele’s exuberant world has always been about dressing in a way that’s a little off. At Gucci, you might have been carrying your own head, but hey, how about that epic rococo necklace under your plaid topcoat, those LA Dodgers-logo slippers peeking out from perfect trousers? With his ersatz sartorial mashups, Michele doubt that style isn’t found in perfection but in the strange choices we make to become who we are. Case in point: when Styles slipped into the venue, a ruffle-neck shirt poking out from under his burnt orange sweater, all felt right with the world.

On Sunday, Michele distilled that message in 85 looks of the most beautiful—and righteously off—clothing he’s made to date. As he put it (via translator) in the press conference: “I wanted to tell the new generation that it’s possible to be weirdly chic, in an unusual way.”

If you had to define weirdly chic, the first men’s look, a silky black dinner jacket studded with small white polka dots worn over fulsome black trousers and ballet flats, was more chic than weird, only because it was immediately apparent that the Michele is using the Valentino ateliers to make the finest tailoring I’ve seen all season. “The seamstresses should be protected like leopards, because they do extraordinary things with a fantastic ease,” noted Michele of the craftsmanship available to him, also obvious in a handsome floral Mandarin collar blazer, a tailed waistcoat covered in a garden of silvery brocade, and a beguiling skeletal ruffle bib knotted around several model’s necks. Many of the men wore lace gloves, and some clutched fringey suede totes and glossy evening bags in the same hand, a good way to pack more product on the runway that to my eye simply looked eccentric and cool.