All roads lead to Rome. This March 28, Alessandro Michele is appointed artistic director of the Valentino house. The former artistic director of Gucci, absent from the fashion sphere since November 2022, succeeds Pierpaolo Piccioli who announced his departure on March 22. “It’s an incredible honor,” Alessandro Michele tells
Vogue Business
exclusively
. And to continue: “I feel an immense joy and an immense responsibility to join a fashion house where the word “beauty” is engraved on a collective history made of distinctive elegance, refinement and extreme grace.” The designer will thus join his new office, nestled in the Palazzo Mignanelli in the historic center of Rome.
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Alessandro Michele during his Gucci spring-summer 2020 show. Imaxtree
“I am looking for words to designate joy, to consider it, to really convey what I feel; the smiles that spring from the chest, the happiness of gratitude that lights up the eyes, this precious moment when necessity and beauty meet. But joy is such a living thing that I am afraid of hurting it if I dare to pronounce its name,” continues Alessandro Michele, not without humility. His first collection for Valentino will be presented in Paris in September during Fashion Week Spring-Summer 2025.
Extreme creativity
For his part, Jacopo Venturini, the general director of Valentino, did not fail to specify that he was “very happy” to return to work with his former colleague. Indeed, the two men worked together for seven consecutive years at Gucci: Alessandro Michele as artistic director, and Jacopo Venturini as vice-president of merchandising and global markets.
Alessandro Michele, Lana Del Rey and Jared Leto at the 2018 Met Gala. (New York, May 7, 2018.) ANGELA WEISS / AFP
The news, relayed by the Instagram account @stylenotcom, has the fashion world in turmoil. And for good reason: during his time at Gucci, Alessandro Michele stood out with a very strong stylistic signature, daring to mix genres and blur the boundaries between eras. Always with an eccentricity that gave the Gucci house a new lease of life and a revival of popularity. His highly recognizable creations have been widely adopted by superstars on red carpets such as Harry Styles, Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish. Enough to allow Gucci to triple its turnover, going from 3.5 billion euros in 2014 to 9.73 billion euros in 2022.