When so much of fashion is stuck in an endless 1990s loop, it’s entertaining – refreshing even – to see someone like Alessandro Michele, Valentino’s Creative Director, take on the 1980s. How could you not find those Reagan era shoulder-pads and the (Joan) Rivers of sequins diverting as they swaggered round Rome’s Palazzo Barberini, with its soaring Bernini staircase.
Yes, for this first collection since the death of Valentino himself two months ago, the house brought its show back to its native city, rather than showing in Paris during fashion week. Owned partly by Mayhoola for Investments (which is backed by the Qatari Royal family), it lavished money on the event, flying in guests and celebrities. Colman Domingo, Dree Hemingway, who plays Daryl Hannah in Love Story and Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu from Emily in Paris were all front row, dressed by the house. So was Gwyneth Paltrow – of course she was. She has been wearing Valentino since she was about 17 and often holidayed on his yacht. Lily Allen performed at the after party.
When I speak of my 1980s allergy by the way, I write as someone who actually lived through the decade. Puffballs and right angles worn together. The trauma is real.
But when it’s filtered through a 2020s lens – proportions tweaked, sensibilities moderated – it’s like seeing it with all the clunkiness removed.
Same same, but different. Take all the fur. Back in the 1980s in any collection from a Roman designer it would have been 1000 per cent real. With alligator knobs on.
Now it’s fake – obviously so in places. But don’t imagine it’s cheap. These will almost certainly cost more than the vintage minks in London’s Portobello Market, where they’re practically giving them away. Anyone who says status symbols are enduring is kidding themselves.
Back to Michele. “I was a teenager in the 1980s,’’ he says. “They felt like a time of positivity”. Probably depends where you were sitting. In Iran, Afghanistan or a manufacturing industry that was about to become the rust belt, not so much. But for a 13-year-old boy getting his fashion fix from all the bella figuras strutting around his home city, it probably looked pretty glamorous. Valentino was riding high, a label beloved by Jackie Kennedy Onassis and any number of Tom Wolfe’s social X-rays. It was also a time when people talked about power dressing unironically.
Those who complain that Michele is distorting Valentino’s purity with his maximalism miss the gusto with which Valentino himself embraced 1980s excess. In the 1960s he was architectural and sculpted. But in the 1980s, his clothes became frou-frou.
Michele captured that, but refined it, adding what he called “Parisian chic”. Spiky heels, shiny satin cummerbunds, leather bow-belts (a veritable trend that has emerged in the past few days on the catwalks) and a sophisticated, knee-length version of the ra-ra skirt – these were the kind of clothes one can imagine being worn to seduce in Maxim’s.
Michele’s styling is knowing, even when, like a mischievous dating app, it deliberately pitches colours that shouldn’t work, together. (In the 1980s, no one outside fashion even knew what styling was). There was just one splash of Valentino red, the designer’s signature colour.
An entire exhibition of his red dresses through the years made for a stand out exhibition in Rome last year, particularly since they were juxtaposed alongside red artworks by Fontana, Francis Bacon, Picasso and Warhol. “For Valentino,” says Michele, “red is like the double G logo at Gucci – it’s central and sums up the positivity of this house’’. To demonstrate that red needs little else, Michele’s lone red dress was a deceptively simple column with a scooped back.
If Dynasty were to be remade (everything else is), this is how the clothes would have to look: over the top but also streamlined. And Paltrow would play Krystle Carrington.