“Hope is a dangerous thing,” my friend always says. Because hope, dear reader, can feel like a tremendously difficult thing to hold onto during dark times. And we’re living through some dark, dark times, alright.
But even more lonesome and isolating than being in the dark is being the one bearing the light – the one keeping our hopes aflame.
It is perhaps for this reason that the idea of a firefly has long captivated our collective psyches. Studio Ghibli’s most profound – and by far, most tragic – production, Grave of the Fireflies (1988), hinges on the firefly’s flickering ephemera: “Why do fireflies have to die so soon?”
In 1941, similarly, Italian filmmaker, poet, and author Pier Paolo Pasolini penned letters paying tribute to the firefly’s short-lived sheen, a metaphor for choosing hope during the dark decade of Fascist rule in the country.
“The night I told you about, we saw an immense amount of fireflies, they made little woods of fire inside little woods of bushes and we envied them because they loved each other, because they longed for each other through amorous flights and lights,” read the letter.
It was this letter, read by Pamela Anderson, that soundtracked Valentino Garavani’s SS26 presentation last month at Paris Fashion Week. And the show itself – fittingly titled “Fireflies” – appeared to be an earnest plea from designer Alessandro Michele to the world – how does the opulence of art and fashion survive in even the darkest political climates?
The Roman From Rome
Now, Alessandro Michele is no stranger to criticism.
Having grown up amid the traditionally masculine milieu of Rome in the ’70s (see: The Godfather), rummaging through his mother’s closet – herself a particularly glamorous executive assistant at a film-production company – Michele’s work has always eschewed the rigid norms of gender presentation.
In fact, he clocks one gown of his mom’s – full-length and high-necked, the front a chic, period-appropriate black, the back an explosion of an enormous, embroidered pink and lilac butterfly – as being of immense inspiration.
It’s “like she was telling me,” he recalled in a later interview, “‘I wore it in a world that now no longer exists.’”
As such, his previous stint at Gucci, where his creative directorship spanned 8 years, was peppered with headline-making pop-culture caricatures, like Harry Styles’ subversive menswear moment (in a dress!) on the cover of Vogue, or models walking down the brand’s Fall 2018 runway with life-sized replicas of their severed heads, that in turn drew their fair share of vitriol.
“I think people feel themselves to be not free,” opined Michele in a later interview, “And if you are managing your freedom, they are like, ‘Why are you doing what you want, and I can’t do what I want?’ That’s interesting.”
In many ways, therefore, Valentino’s Fireflies – marking his first anniversary at the heritage Italian label – was more than just a moving presentation; it was Michele’s personal manifesto, questioning our own complicated relationship with the notion of freedom.
Leave it to Michele to make a statement every time.
When in Rome Paris
More than a creator, however, Michele sees himself as a consummate curator, honing a kind of déshabillé, bohemian aesthetic during his years at Gucci that combines the shabby-chic of a garment you’d procure from English church-hall sales, or the cast-off wardrobes of Italian nobility, with his razor-focus, magpie-like vision for accessories (that originally got him into Gucci).
Being let loose into the Valentino archive following his appointment as the brand’s artistic director in 2024, therefore, felt to him like a homecoming, a return to his mother’s closet four decades ago, only now it was a sartorial treasure trove of Valentino-isms that he was free to pick and choose from.
After all, Valentino Garavani – the man – had himself a somewhat similar trajectory in fashion, having interned in Paris at the likes of Balenciaga, Jean Dessès, and Guy Laroche in the ’50s, witnessing firsthand the period we now know as the “high noon of haute couture.”
Even his namesake, launched in 1960, bore the essence of his Franco-Roman influences, a “blend of light-handed barocco,” describes Fashionista, “that is known as Rococo. If you define the essence of Valentino’s work, it is also the definition of Rococo: exquisite flourishes developed from a sculpted base.”
In the 2008 documentary, Valentino: The Last Emperor, Garavani was dubbed “the last link in a chain of high-fashion history” and “the keeper of couture’s purest flame” – “the only couturier who has been apprenticed to the past and is still in absolute creative control of a house that he himself founded.”
And he remains front and center within the fashion world to date, despite his ostensible retirement that same year!
It has been interesting, therefore, to watch how Valentino’s original brand of classical glamour has evolved under Michele over the past year, while remaining under Garavani’s watchful eye from the catwalk sidelines.
Keeper of the Flame
“No one’s ever going to criticize someone wearing a Valentino dress, unless they’re saying, ‘Oh, God, she just looks perfect again in Valentino,’” Gwyneth Paltrow once said, “He thinks that a woman should look beautiful in a dress, and that’s the end of the story; that fashion isn’t a place for concept and art.”
Indeed, the designer’s mantra is: “I always wanted to make women beautiful.”
However, if Valentino Garavani is credited with ushering in Old Hollywood glamour from the jet set to the private plane era, Alessandro Michele has adapted the founder’s eye for classical beauty to the age of the Alo Yoga airport fits.
Collections were unveiled not in chic locales like Florence’s Pitti Palace, but on the démodé peripheries of Paris. Spring 2025 saw guests and friends of Michele, such as Elton John, Harry Styles, and Hari Nef, sitting on dusty armchairs atop cracked-mirror flooring.
Come fall, guests were escorted into an Italian-style public restroom, rendered in the iconic Valentino red, or rosso, as models serenaded down the runway in “rich brocades, draping furs, billowing chiffon, delicate lace, glittering sequins, and tumbling ruffles.”
And like any Michele lineup, there’s been bags galore. The Vain, the Viva Superstar, the 9to5, and the Bella Hadid-approved Nellcôte is now practically everywhere (“Can Valentino — or any brand — force its own ‘It’ bags through savvy marketing?” asked Amy Odell. The answer? Probably).
But my personal favorite – and the undisputed star of the Spring 2026 presentation – is the Panthea, which feels appropriately dressed up thanks to its eponymous Swarovski-encrusted panther heads, yet with an unmistakably intimate, worn quality, like a purse you unearthed from your mom’s closet.
In fact, in an industry teeming with imitations and augmentations, Michele’s kooky glamour at Valentino feels like a flicker of hope.
And as we saw models emerge on the Spring 2026 runway at Paris’ Place Vendôme like fireflies emerging from the chrysalis, we were looking at more than just fashion – we were looking at a love-letter to those little dusty corners of our parents’ wardrobes (and our own) that so often escape the eye.
As French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman argues, “Fireflies haven’t disappeared, we’re just too blind to see them.”
