It’s easy to feel like a fly on the wall in fashion, especially if you aren’t a celebrity or an Editor-in-Chief of a magazine. Many of us will only see the latest shows trickling in on our feeds. I try to consume as much as I can, watching livestreams, reading coverage, reviewing releases—my entire media consumption becomes that for the better part of a month. I haven’t had the privilege of sitting runwayside yet. But what happens when even fashion powerhouses are separated from the runway? At Valentino Couture, it may not be through a screen, but through a pane of glass.

For Alessandro Michele’s latest couture collection for Valentino, he constructed twelve kaiserpanoramas inside the Tennis Club de Paris, creating somewhat of a peep show instead of the traditional runway. A kaiserpanorama is 19th-century technology where participants loom through small windows to view rotating images, kind of like a video pre-video. Michele, however, used them as a way for onlookers to view models.

The collection showed just days after Valentino Garavani’s Rome funeral, too close in time to pivot into a eulogy of a show. It may be some sort of divine intervention, or just Michele’s devotion to house codes, but the show became a beautiful tribute to Garavani and his namesake.

So if you looked through the peephole at Valentino, what would you see? Apart from fogged glass and José Criales-Unzueta’s self-portrait of a phone case, you’d see drama. You’d see about a century of fashion references and Michele at his best.

We wouldn’t know the order of looks until the finale, since each kaiserpanorama started with a different model, but the opener was, of course, Valentino Red. It was caftan-esque, with a plunging ’80s neck.

The show opened with a soundbite of Garavani from Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor. Garavani reminisces on his early life. “It was the dream of my life to see these beautiful ladies on the silver screen,” he said of his love for beauty, magazines, and film.

Feathered arched-back panels and beaded leotards looked like the dancers of Cabaret. Mountainous collars and cuffs gave the rococo of the 1700s and the Marie Antoinette 1938 film. There were pirate collars and sashes, tufted pink smoking jackets—even a little Cher at the Oscars.

The looks become divine of sorts, making the viewing space seem more like an altar. Feathered headpieces are up to heaven, while bead capes pool onto the depths below. There was a lot of embroidery, a Michele staple. A favorite being a maroon cape with the gold flames of hell.

A gown with a white-and-gold collar that went up to the top of the head looked like that of an angel. Another, being an all-black cape with a chic pixie cut, looked like that of a fallen.

Although besides beauty, I wouldn’t say there was a theme. But at Michele’s caliber, I don’t think one is needed. It was a tour de force. An untouchable sense of vision.