MILAN — For Valentino’s fall 2026 campaign, Alessandro Michele again put pen to paper and wrote a letter explaining the reasonings behind his choices.
First, his decision to stage the photos, lensed by his longtime collaborator Glen Luchford, at Rome’s Centrale Montemartini. This is a former power station erected in the early 20th century, the city’s first public electricity plant before it was converted in 1997 into a satellite venue of the Capitoline Museums.
“Its hybrid nature — suspended between classical statuary and industrial archaeology — constitutes the generative principle of the campaign,” Michele writes. “Here, the images do not simply use the site as a backdrop, they extend its internal logic. Centrale Montemartini thus becomes the stage for impossible imagination: a space where elements from seemingly incompatible worlds cease to exclude one another and instead coexist, unleashing new narratives.”
The collection and the campaign are called “Interferenze,” and, for Michele, the venue reflects this theme, as “a metaphysical place, an in-between realm where the age of gods and that of machines, myth and progress, memory and invention no longer belong to separate temporalities. Here, the classical beauty of the Roman statues resonates with the looming grandeur of turbines and boilers that powered industrial modernity. Fragments of pagan eternity emerge among the cathedrals of technology, in a space that eludes every classification.”
Models Apolline Rocco Fohrer, George Anderson, Qiuyue Li, Joe Bottomer and Dario Tonin were photographed posing next to the antique statues, almost extending their gestures, and the juxtaposition of art, machines and fashion “escape the linearity of history,” and “from this perspective,” believes Michele, the Centrale is reminiscent of the unfinished work “Mnemosyne Atlas” by German art historian Aby Warburg, “not so much an archive of memory, as an apparatus of montage in which images drawn from disparate contexts, precisely through their juxtaposition, generate resonances and new possibilities of interpretation.”
He cites the goddess Fortuna, the muse Polyhymnia, and Queen Cleopatra standing near the huge diesel engines, alternators, flywheels and overhead cranes of the machine hall. “The pallor of marble meets the opacity of cast iron, anatomical perfection challenges mechanical power, and sculptural equilibrium clashes with the monumentality of engineering,” each modifying the other’s perception and creating new relationships.
An image from the Valentino Garavani fall 2026 campaign.
Michele also turns to the late Soviet film director and screewriter Sergei Eisenstein, a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage, which “offers a particularly rich interpretive lens here. Against a linear and additive conception of composition,” Eisenstein “asserts that meaning does not originate from the mere sum of elements, but from their collision: the moment when divergent symbolic orders are pushed into confrontation. It is the spark generated by such a collision that makes the novel perceptual configuration possible — a configuration that cannot be reduced to its individual components.”
Michele exceptionally paraded his fall collection for Valentino in Rome and not in Paris last March at the majestic Baroque Palazzo Barberini and the show was attended by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Giancarlo Giammetti, brand ambassador Colman Domingo, Britt Lower and Lily Allen.
