Some designers want to cut through the noise. Alessandro Michele is embracing it. He titled his spring 2025 couture collection “Vertigineux,” and proceeded to stare down into the dizzying depths of history. Pre-show, the V-word was projected in red on a screen behind the blue opera curtain-lined runway. And as the show progressed, a flurry of terms flew by, like a stock market ticker for liberal arts graduates: Freud, intarsia, William Morris, Cleopatra, pointillism.
In his couture debut, Michele appeared to be grappling with the vertigo that arises when you’re faced with innumerable choices and sifting through infinite references. Yes, it’s a lucky problem to have—a couture atelier and its battery of resources at your disposal—but for a creative person, there’s a kind of paralysis that comes from being able to do anything and everything. You can be hamstrung by it, or you can lean into it. Guess which route he chose?
Michele chose for his epigraph an Umberto Eco quote about lists, a topic that he said has fascinated him since he was a child. As Michele wrote in his show notes, they can be a way to “bring some order to the chaos of the universe,” or a Babel-like way to spiral further and further into said chaos. He considered each one of the 48 looks to be a list in itself; each dress, he wrote, was “a plurality of interconnected worlds.” (For the real students of maximalism, a 200-page version of the show notes was available.) In a post-show press conference, he said that he liked the idea of “something that is not finite, not finished.”
As he did in his runway debut for the house, Michele spliced together a library’s worth of references and time periods, from Nancy Cunard bangles to extreme Barry Lyndon panniers. Quilting, ruffs, needlepoint, harlequin patterns, Doric column-esque flounces, Maleficent-like wings—all found a way into his melting pot. Sometimes, the mashups were more explicit, as with a simple flapper-style gown bisected with elaborate panniers, a trick of sartorial time travel. As the models hit their taped marks, sporting Surrealist glasses dripping gems or eerie masks with jeweled pieces hanging from them, the number of each look flashed behind them, an updated version of the analog practice in old-school couture. (“The idea of theater is as important as clothes,” he said post-show.)
As you might imagine, Michele took to couture instantly. He found it to be “an incredible journey” and “very meaningful” to see the painstaking handcrafting a made-to-measure piece goes through and work with the petites mains, of whom he says, “I had to gain their trust.” Most impactful was the extreme attention to detail these pieces commanded: “Even if I was impatient, the dresses asked for needed time.”
The front-row crowd, which included Colman Domingo and Yoona, appeared enraptured. And can we get a little commotion for the intergenerational casting? Between this and Lanvin on Sunday, it’s nice to see the runways reflecting a bit of the age diversity of their eventual customers. As Michele said when asked about it, “Time provides grace.”
Additional reporting by Roxanne Robinson.
Véronique Hyland is ELLE’s Fashion Features Director and the author of the book Dress Code, which was selected as one of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year. Her writing has previously appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, W, New York magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Condé Nast Traveler.
