Valentino Spring 2026: Alessandro Michele's Fireflies

Alessandro Michele has spent his career being accused of excess. His Spring 2026 collection for Valentino answered the charge in the most disarming way available: he turned out the lights.

The Show

Shown on the afternoon of Sunday 5 October 2025 at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Fireflies was Michele's third ready-to-wear runway show for the house — not his second, as has been widely and wrongly repeated. Eighty looks, menswear and womenswear together, walked through near-total darkness.

The room opened with a recorded voice. Pamela Anderson read a letter written by Pier Paolo Pasolini on 1 February 1941 — a young man describing, in the middle of a war, the night he and a friend saw an immense quantity of fireflies making small woods of fire inside small woods of bushes, and envying them because they loved each other.

We need to disarm the eyes and reawaken the gaze. It's the only way to understand how the gloom of our present is actually woven with light swarms of fireflies.

— from the show notes

Behind the 1941 letter sat Pasolini's better-known 1975 essay on the disappearance of the fireflies, and Georges Didi-Huberman's reply to it: that the fireflies never vanished, we simply stopped being able to see them. That argument — whether the light has gone or whether we have lost the eyes for it — is the whole collection in one sentence.

The Room

Michele commissioned the Paris-based duo Nonotak — Noemi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto — to build a kinetic light installation titled Sora, Japanese for sky: rotating overhead light modules re-engineered over three months for the space, firing into blackness. The models' movement was devised by the choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni, and the show ended not with a bow but with the cast gathered in the centre of the room, still, looking up.

The Clothes

What everyone noticed was the subtraction. The pearls, berets, piled jewellery and fur stoles of Michele's earlier Valentino outings were gone; even the show notes had shrunk to four clean paragraphs. nss magazine read it as a deliberate turn towards wearability; Hypebae as a refinement on the previous spring, with the ruffles and layering reduced.

• Shapes: voluminous gathered blouses and long-sleeved tunics with bows at collar and hem; pencil skirts; straight-leg tailored trousers; single- and double-breasted blazers, some sequinned; heavily draped asymmetric evening gowns.
• Surface: micro polka dots, florals, black sheer lace and mesh, dyed feather neckline trims, oxidised copper scales on blazers — and firefly-shaped jewel embroidery, the literal motif made small and repeated.
• Palette: candlelight neutrals — ash rose, ivory, moss — jolted with chartreuse, cobalt, fuchsia and a near-perfect Valentino red.
• Accessories: oversized chandelier earrings, antique-gold butterfly talismans at neck and shoulder, fabric flower brooches, snake-embellished heels, fringe and beaded bags.

Every one of those surfaces was chosen to do the same job: catch a moving light and throw it back. In a blacked-out room, sequin and beadwork stop being decoration and become the only way the clothes are visible at all.

Michele on Michele

I was looking for light. I am obsessed with light.

— Alessandro Michele to Alexander Fury, AnOther Magazine

He described the opening as a storm of light, and the collection as four things only: the emptiness, the light, the bodies, and the clothes. He also admitted the instinct behind the paring-back — wanting to clean up a little, and keep only the most beautiful things.

Pamela Anderson, who read the letter and sat in the room, told Dazed: “We must find joy. We have to permeate this new world with a mother's instinct and love.”

Not Everyone Agreed

Numéro found a poetic fashion of gentleness and contemplation, and read the show as confirmation of Michele's wish to re-enchant the house. The Impression called it a deepening of tone — still ornate, but inwardly so. Alexander Fury, writing in AnOther, noted silhouettes cleaner and more precise than anything Michele had yet done at Valentino.

The dissent came from Savoir Flair, where Haleh Nia argued the collection offered less reinvention than repetition, and that the presentation overstimulated to the point of fatigue. It is a fair charge to put to a designer whose signature has always been abundance, and worth recording alongside the praise.

The Irish Note

No Irish model, guest or outlet features in the record of this show. Valentino is carried in Ireland by Brown Thomas, whose own brand copy singles out Michele's collections for their prints and embroidery — though stock of any given season is worth checking before making the trip.

Hero photograph by Renaud Confavreux on Unsplash.