Valentino Spring Summer 2026 Haute Couture “When Fashion Becomes Surveillance”. Story by Eleonora de Gray, Editor-in-Chief of RUNWAY MAGAZINE. Photo Courtesy: Valentino.

In theory, Alessandro Michele’s Valentino debut was framed as a tribute — to Valentino Garavani, to filmic dreams, to the “mirror of the world.” In execution, it was a Peep Show in haute couture drag.

Forget Roman elegance. Forget Valentino red. Forget dignity.

This was not a couture show. It was a Kaiserpanorama turned live-action spectacle, with models performing a slow, stylized … posturing in a lit circle while audience members — literally — stared through rectangular peepholes. That’s right: peepholes. A voyeur’s paradise constructed from 19th-century German optical machinery, now rebranded as Specula Mundi — Latin for mirror of the world, once used for encyclopedias and moral treatises, now co-opted to justify couture’s descent into fetishistic ritual.

And what a ritual it was.

Bird of Paradise, Meet Moulin Rouge

A model emerged in a sculpted turquoise and gold gown erupting into red ostrich plumes, paired with long black gloves — a literal showgirl silhouette that would’ve been more at home at the Lido than in the salons of Paris. No trace of Valentino’s past, unless you count the audience’s forced nostalgia as they peered in like spectators at an exotic birdcage.

Saint or Siren?

A sheer silver dress, delicately embroidered, was topped with a spiked halo — part Byzantine icon, part red-light district fantasy. The model posed as a living relic, arms lifted in mock blessing. From behind the peepholes, faces stared back, framed in silence. The whole effect teetered between religious parody and erotic surveillance.

Ruff Dreams and Ruined Theatre

A model swam in a fuchsia robe with gold-ruffled cuffs and a collar the size of a Tudor eclipse. Underneath? A corset and garters. Not a tribute to history — a burlesque of it. The garments were theatrical without gravitas, referencing nothing Valentino, only Michele’s personal collage of exaggerated camp.

Black Swan Dystopia

A towering black feather headdress with pink accents sat atop a sculptural black cloak. The train mimicked seaweed or a Rorschach blot. It was striking. It was spectacle. But in this context — the rotating stage, the isolation booths — it felt like watching a sacrifice, not a celebration.

Close-Up Madness

One headpiece dangled beaded curtains over the model’s eyes like a luxury burqa crossed with a fetish mask. Another perched a velvet crown with a lone pink feather — camp meets court jester. A final close-up showed sequined bunny ears topped with black-and-pink feathers. Holy couture or Halloween cabaret?

Michele’s defenders will cite Walter Benjamin. They’ll say this was about “slowness,” “intentional gaze,” and “ritual temporality.” But let’s speak plainly:

The audience wasn’t contemplating fashion.
They were watching women perform in a surveillance machine, from behind literal viewing slits.
This wasn’t fashion as vision. It was fashion as control.

The Kaiserpanorama — once a marvel of democratized imagination, a way to dream of distant cities — has here been mutated into a panopticon for couture, where the viewers pretend to be monks and scholars, but the architecture screams Pigalle 3 a.m. You’re not contemplating — you’re consuming, one glance at a time.

Valentino Garavani once dreamed of goddesses. Michele gives us gilded burlesque dolls, paraded in a sanitized brothel with techno church bells.

If this is the future of couture — through peepholes, in a white cube of sterile voyeurism — then it’s not “Specula Mundi.” It’s Speculum Mortis.

Couture, stripped.
Ritual, hollowed.
Legacy, erased.

And that mirror?
It reflects nothing but our own cultural exhaustion.

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