Valentino Pre-Fall 2026 Ad Campaign

Review of Valentino Pre-Fall 2026 Ad Campaign by Creative Director with Photographer Johnny Dufort with models Apolline Rocco Fohrer

There’s a quiet confidence to Valentino Garavani’s Pre-Fall 2026 campaign, shaped under the direction of Alessandro Michele and lensed by Johnny Dufort, that feels attuned to a broader question facing the industry: how does a house evolve its authorship without dissolving its identity? Set within the charged stillness of Cy Twombly’s palazzo, the campaign doesn’t seek to dramatize that tension, it absorbs it. Michele’s poetics settle into Valentino’s legacy with a surprising ease, forming a dialogue that feels considered rather than imposed. One might call it a study in “living memory,” where history isn’t referenced so much as reactivated.

The imagery itself appears almost disarmingly bare. Figures move through sparse interiors, accompanied by sculptural presences that carry the weight of time. Yet this restraint is precisely where the campaign finds its depth. Twombly’s world, with its layered gestures and quiet accumulations, offers a fitting parallel to Valentino’s own lineage, one rooted in elegance, permanence, and the slow cultivation of meaning. The composition does much of the intellectual work here. Bodies don’t simply occupy space, they disturb it slightly, introducing a subtle friction between past and present. A turned head, a suspended gesture, the suggestion of movement within stillness. These are small interventions, but they shift the atmosphere entirely.

What emerges is a recalibration of Michele’s visual language. His instinct for ornament and narrative remains, yet here it feels edited, distilled, and perhaps more in tune with the house’s inherent discipline. Valentino has always carried a certain clarity, a belief in form as a vessel for emotion and identity. This campaign honors that clarity while allowing for a more fluid, almost philosophical inquiry into selfhood. The reference to Twombly extends beyond setting, it becomes a methodology. A line that deviates, a gesture that refuses completion, an identity that resists fixed definition.

If there is a lingering question, it sits in how far this intellectual framing can stretch without asking for more emotional access. The campaign invites contemplation, and rewards it, though it maintains a certain distance. Still, that distance feels intentional, even necessary. It allows the house to articulate a new kind of authorship, one that doesn’t overwrite its past, but lets it surface in quieter, more complex ways. In that sense, Valentino isn’t arriving somewhere new. It’s learning how to move differently within what has always been its own.