Review of Valentino Fall 2025 Ad Campaign by Valentino Creative Director Alessandro Michele with Photographer Glen Luchford & Art Director Christopher Simmonds
For Fall 2025, Alessandro Michele delivers a quietly subversive tableau for Valentino Garavani—one that reframes nostalgia through a lens of narrative subtlety and surreal stillness. Photographed by Glen Luchford, the series unfolds in front of a static, pastel-toned ice cream parlor, its Americana kitsch serving as a whimsical counterpoint to Valentino’s ornate craftsmanship. Yet rather than delivering maximalism through volume or spectacle, Michele orchestrates something richer: a slow-burn meditation on stillness, nostalgia, and narrative subtlety, replete with unexpected guests—a parrot, a Rubik’s cube, a horse, and a melting ice cream cone.
At first glance, the vignettes appear disarmingly mundane: a woman with a yo-yo, a man perched on horseback, another leaning into a soft-serve cone. But look closer—each frozen frame reveals micro-narratives quietly buzzing beneath the surface. Meisel’s fixed camera acts as both observer and archivist, letting the viewer linger, scan, and interpret. The mise-en-scène feels at once cinematic and surreal, as if we’ve stepped into a David Lynch dreamscape reimagined through a Roman lens. Michele’s styling blends eras and archetypes—a baroque jacket here, a varsity sweater there—subverting traditional roles and aesthetics with every glance.
The genius of this campaign lies in its deceptive simplicity. The setup—a single location, a fixed perspective—might suggest creative constraint, but under Michele’s vision, it becomes a playground of eccentricities and poetic detail. This is storytelling by accumulation: of moments, gestures, and textures that invite curiosity rather than demand attention. The deliberate slowness feels almost radical in an age of visual noise, aligning perfectly with Michele’s manifesto-like press release, which reads more like a cultural critique than a brand statement. That said, the campaign does ask for a degree of patience—not every viewer may be willing to lean in and decode, especially in fast-paced digital feeds. But those who do are rewarded with something rare: a fashion ad that doesn’t just show, but teaches us how to see again.
In a season of soundbites and scrolls, Valentino’s Fall 2025 campaign whispers—and in doing so, makes you listen. Michele doesn’t chase virality; he cultivates intimacy. And in these quiet, quirk-filled stills, we’re reminded that sometimes, fashion’s loudest statements are the ones that linger in silence.
Valentino Creative Director | Alessandro Michele
Photographer | Glen Luchford
Art Director | Christopher Simmonds
Models | Kai Schreiber, Scarlett White, Amelia Gray, Sophie Thatcher, Marie Sophie Wilson, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Yuri Fukuhara, Sanique, Yilan Hua, Aimee Patricia Byrne, Yar Aguer, Franklin Smith, Bukwop, Luukas Niskanen, Suyong Jung, Hank Akerlund, Glory
Stylist | Jonathan Kaye
Hair | Paul Hanlon
Makeup | Yadim Carranza
Manicurist | Lauren Michelle
Casting Director | Rachel Chandler
Set Designer | Gideon Ponte
Video Music | Imaginer l’Amour Written and performed by Juliette Armanet © ℗ 2021, Romance Musique, Published by Universal Music Publishing & Armanet Songs