Alessandro Michele launches the first Valentino communication campaign under his own name, leaving the user with highly personal traces of contextualization.
In every moving exercise there is a house that is left, and a new one in which one decides to live. We are talking about a ritual in which, at the same time, one abandons something and takes something else. There is detachment and taking, farewell and welcome. In this exercise of dislocation and metamorphosis we make ourselves available for new determinations in dialogue with the new spaces that we will inhabit.

It is immediately clear to the user that “after crossing an unknown threshold, we immediately find ourselves immersed in the traces of the experiences that preceded us, in the memories that time has deposited layer upon layer. These are memories that have an unexpressed life potential because they preserve a nucleus of ulteriority ready to be reactivated.” This is where Michele expresses his great potential.

Maison Valentino is reimagined starting from that mythical place that is Palazzo Mignanelli, the historic headquarters of the brand. The door of this ancient Roman palace becomes the access point to a house populated by an eccentric, uninhibited, eclectic humanity.

“It is a convivium of the human that celebrates the art of the party. Here we meet visionary and disenchanted artists, women of the cinema bearers of an eternal and magnetic charm, grotesque prelates and the fascinating heirs of a nobility now in decline. They are all actors in a living comedy that embody the pulsating and libertarian soul of a city, Rome, to which I wanted to pay homage in the wake of the love that tied it to Valentino Garavani.” The designer is keen to point out.

To build this comedy Alessandro Michele could not help but steal the words that Federico Fellini addresses to Anna Magnani when he bids her farewell at the door of her house at the end of the film Rome. “It’s night, all you can hear are the bells of a church and the sound of footsteps on the ancient cobblestones of the city. The director’s voice affectionately caresses the Roman actress who is celebrated as “the symbol of the city: a Rome seen as a she-wolf and a vestal, aristocratic and ragged, gloomy, clownish”.

In the video campaign, the camera focuses on a girl who is returning home along the wall of an ancient Roman building, followed by some pugs: fraternal creatures so symbolically linked to the figure of Valentino Garavani. Together, they cross that legendary door that the founder of the fashion house must have crossed a thousand times. On this threshold, the street comes into contact with the glitter of aristocracy, the low with the high, the profane with the sacred, the outside with the inside. It’s an entire city that bursts in and explodes joyfully within a domestic space. The aesthetic rendering of the campaign expresses together the neo-realism of Luchino Visconti, the visual symbolism of Ingmar Bergman and the magical realism of Federico Fellini creating

“An untimely, misaligned, anachronistic and therefore extremely contemporary present”.

CREDITS:
Creative Director: Alessandro Michele
Director and Photographer: Glen Luchford
DOP: Jack Webb
Art Director: Christopher Simmonds
Stylist: Jonathan Kaye
Hair Stylist: Paul Hanlon
Make Up Artist: Yadim
Manicurist: Lauren Mitchell
Choreographer: MJ Harper
Casting Director: Ben Grimes

www.valentino.com