The real question about Alessandro Michele at Valentino isn’t “is it working?” — it’s “is he managing to do what Gucci ultimately couldn’t sustain?”
When Michele left Gucci in November 2022 after eight years as creative director, the balance sheet was paradoxical. He had transformed Gucci into a global cultural phenomenon — the relentless collaborations, the unabashed maximalism, the collections overflowing with historical references and unexpected camp. He also left behind a brand that, under growth pressure, may have lost the thread of its own coherence. Kering’s results since 2023 confirmed that diagnosis: Gucci in retreat, the house searching for its post-Michele direction.
Valentino, in March 2023, offers a second chance — and a different constraint.
What Valentino offers that Gucci could no longer give
Scale, first. Valentino, with estimated revenues under two billion euros, is a significant house but not remotely comparable to Gucci at peak. This difference is liberating. A large house — under shareholder pressure, the complexity of its supply chain, the mass of its teams — eventually becomes difficult to steer creatively. Growth itself generates inertia.
Valentino is owned by Mayhoola, the Qatari sovereign fund that also owns Balmain. A single long-term shareholder, less subject to the quarterly pressures of a listed group. For the first time in his career as a creative director, Michele has the possibility of building without the urgency of short-term numbers.
The Valentino legacy is also cleaner. Where Gucci was a layering of codes — Tom Ford, Frida Giannini, Alessandro Michele — Valentino carries a clearer central identity: Italian romanticism, hand-stitching, the Valentino red. There is a foundation to work from, rather than a blank slate to rewrite.
The first season: strong signals, calculated ambiguities
The first Valentino collection by Michele — presented at Paris Haute Couture in July 2024 — is a founding act. The maximalism is present, but differently calibrated than at Gucci. Silhouettes are more voluminous, references less ironic, the relationship with femininity less transgressive. Michele seems to be recalibrating his own codes rather than breaking with them.
What stands out: couture is treated as an autonomous artistic act, not as a marketing lever for accessories. The accessory remains central to the house’s economics — the Rockstud bags still generate the bulk of revenue — but the couture collection isn’t content to serve merely as creative alibi for the bag.
The geographical distribution of the early collections is also telling. China, the world’s largest luxury market but in visible slowdown, is approached with restraint. Japan, Southeast Asia, and the United States are prioritized. This is less coincidence than deliberate strategy: better to be desirable where demand is healthy than to be visible everywhere without depth.
The bet on “less but better”
Product density — the number of SKUs, collaborations, drops — is under control at Valentino. Michele hasn’t replicated the Gucci tactic of infinite collaborations with artists, third-party creators, and satellite brands. Valentino 2025-2026 is a collection, not a flow.
This choice carries a short-term visibility cost. In the era of Instagram feeds and TikTok fashion, the scarcity of drops reduces organic content opportunities. But it has a positioning advantage: the house doesn’t dilute itself. Each piece matters more because the collection has fewer of them.
It’s a courageous bet — and not yet economically validated by public data.
The Studi83 sequence
The Studi83 initiative — a creative and editorial space conceived by Michele as an interface between Valentino and culture — is the project that best articulates where he wants to take the house. Not a boutique, not a gallery, not a showroom: a place for the production of meaning, exhibitions, and carefully chosen artistic collaborations.
This type of project is difficult to evaluate in terms of immediate ROI. It is, however, easy to evaluate in terms of positioning: Valentino positions itself as a house that engages with culture, rather than one that consumes it.
The distinction is subtle but real. A house that buys an artist for a capsule collaboration consumes cultural desirability. A house that builds a space for artistic reflection claims to produce it. The claim is risky — it is also the only one capable of generating durable desirability.
What the next two seasons will actually reveal
Two years is insufficient to judge a luxury house repositioning. Construction cycles are long — it takes 5 to 7 years to change a luxury brand’s perception in the global consumer’s mind.
What can be said now: the direction is coherent, the pace is maintained, and the house hasn’t made any major public mistakes. For a creative director’s appointment at a major house, that’s already significant.
The real question remains open: does desirability translate into purchase desire, in a context where mid-market luxury is suffering and only very high price points are holding? The answer will come from the annual results that Mayhoola shares discreetly — or doesn’t share, which is itself information.
Michele proved once that he could reinvent a major house. The real proof will be doing it twice, in a more difficult economic context, with a smaller house that needs to do a lot with a little.