Valentino: Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2025

«The Infinity of Lists» by Umberto Eco

01 Feb 2025

By Irina Perova

Alessandro Michele has unveiled his first haute couture collection for Valentino – a display of 48 overdressed looks. Michele drew inspiration from Umberto Eco’s " The Infinity of Lists".

"The fascination with lists and the taste for enumerating things, people, and phenomena have always accompanied human history. Despite their apparent simplicity, the rhetorical figure of the list has rarely been examined by scholars in terms of its narrative and poetic potential. Umberto Eco, unlike others, deserves recognition for bringing this topos to the forefront of contemporary intellectual discourse, collecting and meticulously analyzing examples from art and literature, from Homer to Joyce, from Ezekiel to Gadda, from Arcimboldo to Calvino and Moreau."

photo: SPOTLIGHT/valentino

photo: SPOTLIGHT/valentino

Forty-eight dresses represented forty-eight lists. Each look incorporated both material and immaterial elements, such as symbols, colors, philosophy, and archetypes. Every piece was a story, assembled from Valentino Garavani’s archives and the events that shaped Michele’s creative perception and thinking.

On the runway: esotericism and the circus, lace, knightly armor, pleated silk, headpieces in the spirit of Queen Amidala, bows, ruffles, Eastern patterns, and polka dots, all reminiscent of Valentino's imagery from the 1960s to the 1980s came together in a grand and theatrical display.