Within the aristocratic halls of the Mignanelli palace, Maison Valentino’s historic headquarters, a yet highfalutin scene unfolds. To the sound of Italian film director Federico Fellini’s addressing actress Anna Magnani at the end of the film Roma as it washes over a crescendoing opera, models sit pretty. They pet pearl-wearing pugs, engage in pleasantries at the dinner table in the company of both a priest and a puma, or lounge in a perfectly made king bed. A collision of contrasts – the high and the low, the profane and the sacred – every glamorously-garbed character wears Alessandro Michele’s debut collection for the house (spring 2025). A decedent display of the latest and greatest of Michele’s vision for Valentino, the film and accompanying imagery mark the designer’s triumphant advertorial debut.

The campaign, lensed by Glen Luchford, is aptly entitled Avant Les Débuts (meaning Before the Beginnings in English), referring to Michele’s research into the lore of Valentino from its very founding as a means to inform the collection. Even the pugs link back the to figure of Valentino Garavani. Also tapping into cinematic aesthetics, the creative director was inspired by the neorealism of Luchino Visconti, Ingmar Bergman’s visual symbolism and the fantastical realism of Fellini. “I wanted the result to truly appear as a fragment of a film where the Dionysian atmosphere of a bacchanalia of the ancient Rome relived in the splendour of the seventies, getting to contaminate our present,” Michele writes in a press release. “A present that is untimely, misaligned, anachronistic and, because of that, extremely contemporary.” Discover Avant Les Débuts below.

Photography by Glen Luchford.

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