excerpt: Valentino. Spring/Summer 2026 - Milan Fashion Week

 

"...Yet, things do look a somewhat back to front, with 20 year olds now rebellion against decades of Middle Class complacency (not the 'boomers', blame Gen X and Y), stagnation and greed, where it was all about stability over change, the counterculture we await, is still elusive under the digital umbrella.  Without it being reduced to a simulacrum of fleeting rebellion, which it has done on the past, it will be interesting to see, aesthetically, what will evolve as a renewed counterculture.  And a start could be, staring at phone screens will become less of a fixation.  In the meantime, Michele has, as he did when he was with Gucci, borrowed stylizations from the 1970s and 1980s thrift, quirky styles, which was the peak of the counterculture years.  

And not to forget, sexuality and sexual expression is, at its core, a counterculture projection, that became taboo and extremely misogynistic through the DVD excesse of the 1990s, to the waves of digitized pornography, at the start of the new millennium, to take it back would let sex become more openingly intimate, maybe even hedonistic, without the commercialized digital relay.  And with Michele's latest collection, he has very much offered that carnal quirkiness of eros as rebellion, quoted as saying, in relation to the collection, "to make people dream, to try to escape, not just from reality, but from the idea that you can do nothing." And Michele's parallel reality dreamlike styles are just what we need..."

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(A.Glass 2025)

Full review:  chiasmusmagazine.blogspot.com/2025/11/valentino-springsummer-2026-milan.html