Interferenze: Where Valentino Makes Time, Memory And Desire Collide

There is a particular kind ofrestlessness inside Maison Valentino when a collection is finished. Alessandro Michele knows it well. 

In the atelier, silence is never quite silence: pencils move, fabrics are handled, conversations overlap; somewhere, another idea is already taking shape. A completed collection is not an ending but an invitation to begin again.

In the Roman atelier, Michele turns towards the archives. Between sketches, books, photographs and the accumulated memory of a house founded in Rome in 1960, his gaze travels backwards and forwards simultaneously.  

The past is not a museum piece here. It is raw material. Somewhere between what Valentino was, what it is and what it might become, an image begins to form in his mind: Interferenze, the Autumn/Winter 2026 advertising campaign.

Its setting could hardly be more eloquent.

Enter Centrale Montemartini, and Rome suddenly appears to have suspended time. Built on Via Ostiense and inaugurated in 1912, it was Rome’s first public electricity-generating plant, a monument to the industrial ambitions of a rapidly modernising city. 

In 1997, it was transformed into an exhibition space for the Capitoline Museums, eventually becoming a permanent museum. Today, its monumental halls contain an almost surreal dialogue between colossal turbines, diesel engines and boilers and the marble gods, muses and figures of ancient Rome. 

It is precisely this impossible conversation that Interferenze makes visible.

Here, Fortuna can rise beside machinery; Polyhymnia can inhabit the same visual universe as a colossal engine; Cleopatra can appear amid iron, steel and architectural enormity. 

The campaign does not treat Centrale Montemartini as picturesque scenery. It understands the building as an intellectual proposition: antiquity and modernity, myth and technology, permanence and obsolescence occupying the same frame.

And this is where Michele is at his most fascinating.

Since his appointment as Valentino’s Creative Director in April 2024, he has approached the Roman house not merely as a repository of couture history but as a vast cultural conversation.  

His instinct is rarely to offer fashion as a straightforward answer. Instead, he asks questions. What happens when an old image is placed beside a new one? Can clothing become a form of memory? Can historical references acquire contemporary urgency rather than merely decorative nostalgia?

In an industry increasingly addicted to instant gratification — the spectacular reveal, the viral silhouette, the engineered shock — Michele proposes something more enduring: intellectual seduction.

His Valentino is glamorous, certainly, but it is glamour with a library card.

That distinction matters. Fashion has always borrowed from art, history, cinema and literature, but Michele seems determined to make those references active rather than ornamental. His collections and campaigns reward curiosity. 

They ask the viewer to linger, to connect one image with another, to recognise that beauty can become considerably more intoxicating when accompanied by thought.

Interferenze takes that proposition and turns it cinematic.

Light slices through the cavernous darkness. Bodies appear in fragments. Marble profiles encounter garments of extraordinary lightness. Steel structures loom like sleeping titans. 

A gesture from a living model seems to continue the movement of a carved figure; a couture-like silhouette suddenly makes the industrial machinery appear almost sculptural.

Nothing is entirely still, yet nothing truly moves.

This is fashion as collision — and, consequently, fashion as possibility.

There is an almost Warburgian intelligence to the composition: images separated by centuries are brought together until they begin to speak. The machinery is no longer simply machinery; the sculpture is no longer simply sculpture. 

Their proximity alters both. The effect is less about historical chronology than simultaneous existence — a Rome in which the ancient, industrial and contemporary coexist without asking permission.

It is a particularly appropriate philosophy for Valentino.

Founded by Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti in 1960, the Maison emerged from Rome with an identity already steeped in artistry, couture and theatrical elegance. Garavani’s name would become inseparable from a particularly Italian vision of glamour: immaculate craftsmanship, extraordinary eveningwear, vivid colour and an unapologetically fabulous understanding of occasion. 

His clientele became a constellation of royalty, actresses and fashion’s most photographed women, while Valentino itself evolved into one of the defining Roman names in international couture.

The house’s history is therefore not merely one of clothes. It is a history of spectacle.

And yet Interferenze suggests that Valentino’s future need not depend upon repeating that spectacle. Under Michele, the Maison’s Roman inheritance becomes something more intellectually restless. 

The grandeur remains — the beauty, the drama, the seductive intricacy — but it is now accompanied by questions about memory, identity, time and perception.

That is perhaps the campaign’s most exhilarating achievement.

At Centrale Montemartini, Valentino does not choose between the gods and the machines. It chooses both.

The marble remains marble. The iron remains iron. The clothes remain clothes. But placed together, they generate something else entirely: a new visual language in which history is no longer behind us and the future is no longer ahead. Everything happens at once.

For Autumn/Winter 2026, that is an intoxicating place in which to dress.

And Michele, with his scholarly appetite and instinct for theatricality, appears to understand something increasingly rare in fashion: the most seductive image is sometimes the one that leaves you with more questions than answers.

Maison Valentino’s FW26 ready-to-wear and accessories collection is available now in all Valentino boutiques worldwide and online. 

*Photos courtesy of Maison Valentino.