Inside Valentino’s Haute Couture Atelier With Alessandro Michele | Vogue

I'm Alessandro Michele. I'm 52 years old. I'm a fashion designer. So it's a cloudy day, cold in Paris, and I'm here working for my first couture show for Valentino. It's a beginning, you know. Like every beginning, it's beautiful, it's exciting, but it's also stressful.

For the collection, it's an incredible exercise of creativity for me. It's being like trying to play with imagination. And I was also thinking about, you know, the golden age that probably Mr. Valentino lived during the cinema time, looking at all these incredible ateliers they were doing incredible dresses for movies and Federico Fellini. It's like a deep dive into all these crazy worlds. I think that Mr. Valentino means for many people a kind of classical beauty. My way to approach beauty is more savage. I like the wrong things that became beautiful, you know? I try to be wild, to have a strong and in a way different conversation with him. His presence is so big, you must find your own way. Working with the atelier? It's harder. It's harder work.

Again, it started from a kind of quote from Mr. Valentino. And I was thinking about the idea of the coat that is very contemporary, but it's also interesting because there's a piece of the water that came from military things. And so I started to work on that coat as a century dress.

We have like five ateliers and they work just by themselves in a very secret way that is very fascinating. I feel myself like I'm learning because this is so different from being just a fashion designer, you know? Because there is a ritual about this job. You need to know who does that specific thing. I've never seen something like this in my life, believe me. I think that you must really see to understand.

I felt at the beginning very shy to start this work. I met many extraordinary human beings with such a big passion. I've been in China about the way they work by hands on every single piece for hours and hours. There are people that have been here for such a long time, you know. I'm thinking about Antonetta, she's been here 38 years. She's a master, one of the masters of the studio, iconic. She makes these masterpieces for years and years, and she's always so perfect and so fashionable now, better than ever. There are so many people that you can really feel that they care about what they're doing, you know, and through the clothes and through every single stitch, I think that we note the beginning of a friendship. I respect them so much and I hope that they understand what I feel about this job.

When the designer comes up in the room, they cover with paper all the mannequins. There is a ritual that you must follow, you know. Every single atelier, they really work by themselves every time. They do things, it's like a secret.

I love fashion, I love arts, I love freedom and crazy things. This is almost my way to work: giving a sense to that mess.

Hello, good morning, how are you all? I know we were just trying to fix the dress, you know, the volume of the gown. I'm trying to make it like a sculpture. It's the first time that we see it almost finished, you know. Yeah, but it's also beautiful because it could be also 1950s tapestry, it could be the dress of Elizabeth the First, and it could be a joke, it could be a kid that makes a dress with his mom's carpet, you know, in the dining room.

Venice was about freedom, and the aristocrats loved to change their identity. They loved masquerade, wearing masks because they felt free to do everything they wanted. It is such a powerful object, especially now we found a way to wear a mask going through social media and how to change your identity and multiply your identities.

Okay, I don't like time in general. I think it doesn't make sense to put boundaries in the idea of ages. And I was trying to investigate that kind of relation between body, dress, different faces, and yes, probably for most of the people different ages, but doesn't exist really different ages, exist different lives, different ways to live, different experiences. I like people so I don't want to make boundaries between human beings. I'm showing the collection in such a specific moment of our life. So many things are changing politically, culturally. I think that everybody, we need to fight showing more and more incredible expression of creativity and imagination. I hope that people, when they leave the room, are stronger than before, thinking that we are capable to do many things.