Valentino’s Fall Winter 2025-2026 “The Public Toilet of Alessandro Michele’s Intimacy”. Story by Eleonora de Gray, Editor-in-Chief of RUNWAY MAGAZINE. Photo Courtesy: Valentino.

An Autopsy of Valentino Fall 2025 Collection

There was a time when Valentino meant refinement, a vision of elegance draped in sumptuous fabrics, where couture was synonymous with beauty. That time has passed. What took its place in the Fall/Winter 2025-2026 collection was something entirely different: a horror set in a public restroom, an exhibition of existential nausea, a blood-soaked, dystopian restroom fantasy intellectualized into an incoherent manifesto on intimacy.

The show was introduced by a short film featuring a distressed girl staring into a mirror in a public toilet—hardly a novel concept, yet the depths of discomfort were only beginning. As the camera moved closer, her eye split in two, revealing the Valentino logo. A grotesque image meant to shock, to unsettle, to implant itself in the viewer’s psyche like an intrusive thought. This was the thesis of the collection: intimacy as exposure, as decay, as psychological rupture.

The show itself unfolded like an academic migraine, dressed up in pseudo-intellectual drivel to justify what was essentially a horror set to present a collection in a public bathroom. Alessandro Michele, in his ever-expanding lexicon of cinematic appropriation, leaned into the A Clockwork Orange aesthetic—an exercise in stylistic brutality, drenched in artificial depravity. The models moved erratically under red lighting, the garments seemingly caught between costume and asylum uniform, the ambiance carefully curated to evoke unease. Every look whispered of crisis—not just existential, but aesthetic.

But if this was supposed to be a meditation on intimacy, the question remains: intimacy for whom? Is it for the consumer—who is now forced to decipher a narrative stitched into garments that appear designed for a deranged nightmare? Or is it merely an exhibition of one man’s sickness, paraded under the guise of artistic rebellion? Michele’s obsession with spectacle has often teetered between homage and excess, but here, he does not simply cross the line—he obliterates it.

And where does Valentino fit into this? A house once revered for timeless sophistication is now hosting a theatre of disturbance, a space where elegance is no longer the goal, but rather a corpse being clinically dissected, piece by piece. Who is the customer? Who, in all honesty, is buying this? Who wants to wear a conceptual descent into madness, disguised as a collection?

The absurdity is staggering. The press release—written in toilet paper—attempts to intellectualize what is, at its core, a shock piece. Layer upon layer of jargon attempts to convince the audience that the act of dressing and undressing in a public restroom is a metaphor for identity construction. That the garments, steeped in dystopian unease, are tools of self-exploration rather than mere props in a fever dream. But the reality is far simpler, and far more damning: this is not fashion, this is a conceptual stunt, an art-school provocation masquerading as luxury.

Valentino, once a beacon of refined Italian couture, has now staged a collection in a public toilet covered in blood. The legacy of beauty, of impeccable tailoring, of a house built on grace and sophistication—all drowned in a Lynchian nightmare of synthetic angst.

This is more than just a rejection of beauty—it is a deliberate rejection of creation itself. The process of creation, the spirit, the soul—all dismantled, dissected, stripped of meaning. Alessandro Michele has never been about growing a flower—he is about dissecting it. This is destruction masquerading as art.

Like a sick medical student, he delights in dissecting his subjects alive, peeling away their layers not to understand, but to disconnect and deconstruct—to leave nothing but raw, exposed flesh.

Mr. Valentino Garavani, can you feel it? Can you feel how Alessandro Michele is dissecting you and your world, piece by piece? The house you built, the elegance you defined—all laid out on his operating table, carved into something unrecognizable and horrible.

See All Looks Valentino Fall Winter 2025-2026