With the digital world we live in today, the constant need to evolve is endless. Brands want to show you the never-before-seen, the new, and the next biggest thing. But for their Fall/Winter 2025-26 campaign, Le Méta Théâtre Des Intimités, Valentino does the opposite, refusing the adrenaline of novelty and staying with ideas that linger.

Photos courtesy of Valentino

The stage is set in a public bathroom, a counter-space where privacy meets public. It’s a liminal space, activated by the models that take up the shots. It’s a Met Gala bathroom selfie meets The Shining (Clairo starring in the campaign adds to the atmosphere). What happens in the tiles of this uncanny, communal setting?

Although the scene is stunning, the clothes can speak for themselves. Large structured jackets, lace, and ruffles on everything dress the bathroom attendees. It’s Alessandro Michele at his best and boldest.

Photos courtesy of Valentino

Clothes function as our second skin, leaving our personalities bare to the world. Here, garments aren’t mere coverings but extensions of identity, toeing the line of delicate tension between intimacy and exposure.

Photos courtesy of Valentino

This campaign doesn’t reduce fashion to surface; it insists that surface is where depth resides. The bathroom, in all its banality and theatricality, becomes a site of poetry and politics, of something old yet new, reminding us that identity is never static. It is performance, encounter, and reflection—closed off from the outside, but open to itself.