Review of Valentino “Le Méta-Théâtre Des Intimités” Fall 2025 Ad Campaign by Art Director of Christopher Simmonds and Photographer Glen Luchford with models Clairo, Kembra Pfahler, Aimée Byrne, Isabella, Shane Stevens, Hana J., Sanique, Weiyi Fang, Bokwop Kir, Paul Scally, and Giuseppe Cirillo
Alessandro Michele doesn’t so much pivot as he lingers—and in this Fall 2025 campaign for Valentino Garavani, that lingering becomes a poetic act of resistance. Shot by Glen Luchford and styled by Jonathan Kaye, the campaign returns to the public bathroom first introduced in Michele’s Le Méta Théâtre Des Intimités show, not to exhaust it, but to excavate it. What results is less a recap than a reckoning: an uncanny, crimson-lit chorus of scenes where intimacy becomes spectacle and selfhood becomes shadowplay.
The campaign unfolds like a theatrical afterlife. Mirrors loom, sinks gleam, and the tiles drip with metaphors. Clairo, Kembra Pfahler, Aimée Byrne, and a defiantly un-retouched ensemble of talents become not just models, but characters trapped in an eternal intermission. And that’s precisely the point. Michele isn’t staging a new chapter—he’s stretching the moment. He dares to pause in a culture obsessed with acceleration. In doing so, he doubles down on the original provocation: identity is not static, and neither is style.
There’s a philosophical undercurrent here that runs deeper than the mise-en-scène. Drawing from Arendt’s notion that being and appearing coincide, Michele crafts a visual essay on fashion as ontology—clothing not as cover, but as conduit. The bathroom, with all its Freudian complexity, becomes the site where public and private collapse, where performance bleeds into vulnerability. Characters adjust themselves, confront their reflections, or even cut their hair in moments that feel more existential than editorial.
Stylistically, the work is unmistakably Michele: lace gloves, tailored coats, Renaissance blush tones, and rich, almost sepulchral palettes. But it’s Luchford’s lens that tempers the maximalism, bathing everything in cinematic intimacy. The campaign feels less like a high-gloss lookbook and more like stills from a lost Fassbinder film—eerily beautiful, slightly off-kilter, and thick with implication.
There is no singular protagonist here, no hero shot. Instead, we get a communal haunting. Each subject flickers between confidence and confession, and every garment feels like a script waiting to be read aloud. The accessories, especially the Garavani bags, don’t shout for attention—they participate in the dialogue of self-styling, performing their own silent monologues in gold chains and sculptural lines.
In an industry that thrives on the tyranny of the new, Michele’s campaign invites us to dwell—to marinate in the strange afterglow of a show, to question what else might unfold if we simply stayed with the image. It’s not nostalgia, but a deeper kind of futurism: one that understands how fashion moves not only forward, but inward.
Valentino Creative Director | Alessandro Michele
Art Director | Christopher Simmonds
Photographer | Glen Luchford
Models | Clairo, Kembra Pfahler, Aimée Byrne, Isabella, Shane Stevens, Hana J., Sanique, Weiyi Fang, Bokwop Kir, Paul Scally, and Giuseppe Cirillo
Stylist | Jonathan Kaye
Hair | Paul Hanlon
Makeup | Yadim Carranza
Set Designer | Gideon Ponte
Music | Club 20 Performed by OTHA – Written & Composed by Othalie Husøy and Tyler Neil Johnson © & ℗
2024, OTHA