Alessandro Michele: The New Creative Force Behind Valentino

Alessandro Michele is the new creative director of Valentino. Less than a week after the (perhaps not so mutual) split with Pierpaolo Piccioli, the Roman fashion house today announced the name of the new brand leader, causing a real earthquake in the fashion world. Alessandro Michele, the new designer of Valentino after Piccioli's departure: “Immense joy and great responsibility”. The debut in September in Paris. The beginnings Born in Rome on November 25, 1972, Alessandro Michele is 51 years old. The son of an Alitalia technician and a cinema worker who decided to leave her job to dedicate herself to her family, he studied at the Academy of Costume and Fashion in the Capital to pursue his dream of becoming a set designer. An idea, this, that he soon abandons, beginning to work for the Bolognese knitwear brand Les Copains. Recruited by Fendi at the end of the '90s, he began working alongside Karl Lagerfeld and Silvia Venturini Fendi, and was then noticed by Tom Ford, then creative director of Gucci. In 2002, Alessandro Michele then joined the American designer in London, where he began working in the brand's design office, initially taking care of accessories. In 2006 he was promoted to senior designer and five years later he became associate director of the new creative director Frida Giannini, with whom he worked until 2015. In 2014 he also became creative director of Richard Ginori, the historic Florentine porcelain brand acquired by Gucci a year earlier. The experience as creative director of Gucci After the sudden departure of Frida Giannini, in January 2015 he was called by the new CEO Marco Bizzarri for the position of creative director of Gucci, left orphaned of a guide. The test for Alessandro Michele is the Fall-Winter 2015-2016 collection, which the designer prepares in a week at his residence in Civita di Bagnoregio. A debut, his, first discussed and then appreciated, but always supported by the company and the Kering group. A year after his new assignment, in 2016 he curated two of the rooms dedicated to Tom Ford's collections at the Gucci Museum in Florence, just opened. In 2017 he was included (as the only Italian) by "Time" among the "100 most influential People" on earth. In 2018 he also curated the Wooster space in New York, which includes a bookstore in collaboration with Dashwood Books, in line with the aesthetic of the creative director. In October of the same year he curated together with Maurizio Cattelan the exhibition "The Artist is Present" in Shanghai, while in 2019 he launched "Gucci Beauty" and the brand’s first high jewelry line. On November 24, 2022, the news of his departure from the brand was officially announced. The arrival at Valentino A year and a half after leaving Gucci, Alessandro Michele is ready to embark on a new, perhaps even more ambitious adventure. After the departure of Pierpaolo Piccioli and after days of rumors, the Roman fashion house Valentino announced today the arrival of the 51-year-old Roman as the new creative director of the brand. A new beginning for Michele, who shared his excitement for the new role on social media: “An incredible honor, immense joy but also a huge responsibility to become part of a Maison that has engraved the word 'beauty' in a collective history made of sophistication and extreme grace”. Michele's aesthetics Always a fan of London post-punk and New Romantic street style, Alessandro Michele is among the most eccentric and "maximalist" designers in the fashion world. Through influences from theater, cinema, books, and everyday life, Michele's style is rich in different elements and inspirations, to the point that he himself defines himself as "a blender that reprocesses everything he experiences". Among his peculiarities, deviating from the styles of previous creative directors to create a new universe, which mixes together masculinity and femininity, present and past, with post-gender proposals. Private life Alessandro Michele has been in a relationship for a long time with Giovanni Attilli, a director and university lecturer at the Sapienza University of Rome. Among his closest friends are actress Dakota Johnson, actor Jared Leto, and singer Harry Styles, all three spokespeople for Gucci during Michele's creative direction.