Michele’s Valentino campaign channels Rome and Fellini for AW24

Valentino’s campaigns are always eagerly awaited but given Alessandro Michele’s arrival at the label, they’re even more in the spotlight today. And the company has just unveiled its latest creative for AW24.

Michele is clearly influenced by the past for the campaign that he creatively directed with Rome also taking a starring role and a big nod to Federico Fellini.

He said: “I tried to reimagine Maison Valentino, starting from the mythical Mignanelli palace, historical headquarters of the brand. The front door of this ancient Roman palace becomes the portal leading to a house populated by eccentric, uninhibited, eclectic humanity.

“Here we meet visionary and worldly artists, glamorous women in cinema with their eternal and magnetic allure, grotesque prelates and the fascinating heiresses of a declining nobility. These are all actors in a living comedy embodying the vibrant and libertarian soul of a city, Rome, to which I wanted to pay tribute, stemming from the love that has always bound Rome and Valentino Garavani.”

And he added that he “couldn’t avoid stealing Federico Fellini’s words to Anna Magnani, when he salutes her on the doorstep at the end of the film Roma”, 

In that nighttime scene, the voice of the director “fondly caresses the Roman actress, celebrating her as ‘the symbol of the city: Rome, seen both as a she-wolf and a vestal, aristocratic and ragged, gloomy and clownish’.”

With Rome as much the star as the clothes are, Michele said he wanted to recreate the scene. 

“The camera lingers on a girl going back home as she walks along the wall of an ancient Roman palace, followed by some pugs: fraternal creatures so symbolically tied to the figure of Valentino Garavani. Together they pass through that legendary front door that the founder of the maison must have crossed a thousand times. On that threshold, the street makes contact with the glitter of the aristocracy, the low with the high, the profane with the sacred, the outside with the inside. It’s the entire city that joyfully bursts into a domestic space”.

He also 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”. 

With that in mind, we hear Fellini’s voiceover and the credits for the campaign include “a special thank you to the heirs of Federico Fellini and the heirs of Bernardino Zapponi, for granting the rework of the scene from the film”.

As well as the inspiration and key players from the past, Michele’s present day collaborators included director and photographer Glen Luchford, cinematographer Jack Webb, art director Christopher Simmonds and stylist Jonathan Kaye.