For its newest Fall/Winter 2024 campaign, Valentino launches “Avant Les Débuts,” a project that conjures a remembrance of Roman history’s past. The collection, which is Alessandro Michele’s first for the house, memorializes the process of reinvention, the renaissance that comes from the inevitable beginning blossoming out of the end. 

Set in the legendary Mignanelli palace, the mythic headquarters of Maison Valentino, the campaign represents a Roman paradox, a melange of the gritty and the glamorous under one gilded roof. Michele guides us through the labyrinthine palace, revealing a portal into the soul of the city that Valentino Garavani was so inescapably bound to. 

In the campaign, viewers are introduced to an orgy of contradictions. The eccentric lay with the eclectic, and the glamorous lounge with the grotesque. The indulgent waltz through the cavernous hallways while resting on the cushions of the palace’s antique chaises. The nobility cling to their fading fortune with desperation, as the insignificant relish in the surrounding opulence.

Influenced by the cinematographic terminology of Federico Fellini’s Roma, Michele reimagines the paradoxical character of Rome so eloquently captured in the film’s dialogue: “Rome, seen both as a she-wolf and a vestal, aristocratic and ragged, gloomy and clownish.” And naturally, there are pugs, the beloved canines of Valentino Garavani himself. 

With Maison Valentino, Michele has reinvented a 70s-era Rome, one rife with as much splendor as saintliness, as the designer allows us a glimpse into the mythical Mignanelli palace, and on that threshold, we encounter a past that hasn’t fully parted with the present.

“It’s the place where blasphemies and rosaries coexist, where history merges with everyday life and beauty is anchored to the ground by a polytheistic antiquity, by a world still not completely abolished.”

Alessandro Michele