Alessandro Michele is not done rearranging Valentino’s furniture. His Cruise 2027 collection, presented in an as-yet-undisclosed villa location, takes the house’s polished codes and injects them with something approaching mischief — think preppy gone punk, with a wardrobe allowance.
The collection reads as a dossier on youth culture filtered through Michele’s baroque sensibility. Tailored blazers in house-check wool are worn over distressed denim shorts. Silk slip dresses in Valentino’s signature red share rail space with graphic-print hoodies. The silhouette veers between the constructed and the careless.
The preppy references feel less like nostalgia and more like reclamation. Michele is not reviving a bygone WASP aesthetic; he is filtering it through a contemporary, cosmopolitan lens where the pearls are real but the attitude is faux. The result is a collection that feels both familiar and entirely new.
The accessories program continues to develop with confidence. The Rockstud, once a signature of the house’s edgier moments, is applied with greater restraint — a single row on a ballet flat, a discreet cluster on a shoulder bag. The effect is more nuanced than the full-on stud coverage of previous seasons.
