When Alessandro Michele brings Valentino home to Rome, he doesn’t ask the city to pose for the postcard. He lets it interfere
Fashion houses have been buying a version of Rome for decades: the Rome of golden-hour light on travertine, of fountains doing their cinematic business, of heritage polished until it gleams like a museum placard. Alessandro Michele’s Valentino has no use for that Rome. For Fall 2026, the house has gone home – but home, as Michele sees it, is a warehouse full of broken gods.
The new campaign, “Interferenze,” delivers on its title: a study in signal crossing. Conceived with art directors Ezra Petronio and Lana Petrusevych of Petronio Associates and photographed and directed by Glen Luchford, it places Michele’s richly eccentric characters inside an industrial repository of classical fragments – colossal hands, disembodied torsos, monumental heads, antiquities torn from the architectural contexts they once inhabited. Antiquity, industry, fashion and contemporary image-making keep interrupting one another, and the interference is the point. This is Rome not as heritage with a capital H, but as static, as signal, as something that won’t stay in its lane.
The Marble, Unworshipped
The tension is immediate, and it is the campaign’s best trick. Monumental sculpture ought to dwarf the clothes – that’s the risk any Italian house runs when it invokes the classics – but Luchford plays with scale rather than reverence. A model lounges beneath a gigantic stone arm as casually as if it were living-room furniture. Another sits beside a truncated male torso, holding a studded Valentino Garavani bag aloft like a trophy or a talisman. A fur-clad figure stands between classical fragments while a monumental head shares its frame with an extravagant sweep of fuchsia satin.
The antiquities are not treated as untouchable treasures. They become participants, props, and occasionally rather intimidating supporting actors. Which is, of course, the most authentically Roman gesture available. Rome has always lived comfortably with historical contradiction: ancient columns emerging beside apartment blocks, Baroque churches interrupting ordinary streets, fragments of vanished civilizations coexisting with scooters, traffic, and daily life. History there is not something one visits. It is something one walks around, leans against, and occasionally complains is blocking the road.
Fashion as Accumulation
The approach feels particularly right for Michele, who since arriving at 발렌티노 has shown less interest in preserving history behind glass than in letting different histories collide. Suzanne Koller’s styling makes that collision explicit: severe tailoring meets jewel-like color, lace meets leather, extravagant 보석 accompanies almost monastic silhouettes, contemporary accessories sit comfortably beside bodies carved centuries ago. Michele’s fashion exists through accumulation – and the campaign cleverly places that philosophy inside a setting that is itself an accumulation of cultural memory. The clothes and the marble are doing the same thing, just on different timescales.
Luchford’s lighting gives the stills their peculiar psychological charge. Hard illumination throws enormous shadows against institutional blue-green walls, sometimes making the silhouettes almost as important as the models themselves. The flash has something forensic about it. These are not romanticized museum portraits bathed in flattering Italian light; they feel more like something discovered after hours, when the statues and the clothes have been left alone together and are beginning to misbehave. The coldness of the environment makes Michele’s purples, pinks, ochres and jeweled surfaces appear even more decadent – color as contraband smuggled into a morgue of beauty.
A Film That Won’t Settle
The film pushes that sensation further. Its quick cuts and abrupt camera movements refuse the contemplative pace normally associated with looking at antiquities. Instead, Luchford makes the space flicker past in fragments – body, statue, garment, face, shadow, object – and we never quite settle. That visual restlessness is essential. It prevents the classical setting from becoming a grandiose backdrop, keeps Rome arriving as sensory information, broken apart and recombined through a contemporary camera rather than presented as a monument to be admired.
There is also, whether intentional or not, a productive philosophical undertow beneath the visual theater. Classical sculpture established ideals of beauty that Western culture has spent centuries reproducing, questioning and dismantling. Here those supposedly eternal bodies are themselves incomplete – missing heads, missing arms, missing identities – while against them stand living figures dressed in Michele’s deliberately individualistic propositions. The old ideal has literally been fragmented, and contemporary identity occupies the foreground. The campaign doesn’t lecture about it. It just stages the collision and lets the marble lose.
Room to Get Weirder
If there is an opportunity, it lies in pushing that collision even further. The strongest images are those where scale goes strange, and the relationship between model and sculpture approaches the surreal – most memorably, that enormous hand hovering above a reclining figure like a judgment or a blessing. At moments when the compositions settle into the more conventional model-plus-statue arrangement, some of the initial disturbance subsides. Michele’s Valentino can support considerably more visual weirdness, and Luchford can certainly deliver it. A campaign built around interference might benefit from letting the signal break down a little more.
Still, “Interferenze” succeeds because it avoids the most obvious way for an Italian house to invoke Rome. No monuments are presented for admiration, no golden-hour nostalgia, no insistence on heritage as something solemn. Instead, Valentino finds Rome in its fragments, its collisions, and its almost nonchalant relationship with several thousand years of 뷰티. In this city, history is everywhere. Michele and Luchford understand that the more interesting question is what happens when you stop worshipping it and start playing with it.
After all, when Rome gives you a giant marble hand, the least fashionable thing you can do is simply stand there and admire it.
크레딧
- Campaign: Valentino “Interferenze” Fall 2026
- 크리에이티브 디렉터: Alessandro Michele
- Agency: Petronio Associates
- Art Directors: Ezra Petronio, Lana Petrusevych
- Photographer / Director: Glen Luchford
- 모델: Apolline Rocco Fohrer, Dario Tonin, George Anderson, Joe Bottomer, Qiuyue Li
- Stylist: Suzanne Koller
- 머리카락: Esther Langham
- 메이크업: Daniel Sallstrom
Images Courtesy of Valentino
다른 브랜드 캠페인 소식으로는, Gisele Bündchen Fronts Marc O’Polo Fall 2026 Campaign for Fifth Season
