Valentino Cruise Holiday 2027 Campaign Explores Fashion Transformation

THE DAY AFTER: Holidays and parties usually go hand in hand and Valentino is launching its cruise holiday 2027 campaign fittingly tied to this idea. However, in the images shot by Liv Liberg, rather than showing the models having fun as the party takes place, creative director Alessandro Michele presented them lounging and resting in an antique palazzo once the event is over. And it must have been a wild one, as the floor is strewn with shattered glasses, silver plates, overturned chairs and fallen chandeliers.

“That suspended moment when the euphoria has faded and the space still holds the traces of something that has already happened,” Michele writes in his letter accompanying the campaign. Models George Anderson, Joe Bottomer, Khadim, Libby Taverner and Dario Tonin are seen “immersed in an atmosphere in which beauty seems to have survived the tumult of the night. It is an awakening of sorts,” and “what remains offers itself as material for a story yet to be imagined,” Michele teases.

That said, he is a pensive designer and there is much more emerging from these images, lensed back in July, using them as a metaphor to reflect on fashion’s evolving values, societal shifts and the beauty that endures amid transformation.

“From the very beginning, this representation contained a larger question: What remains of magnificence when its rituals come to an end? What happens when a universe built around the promise of desire encounters its own vulnerability? The party thus becomes a possible metaphor for the transformations sweeping through the world of fashion: a system that has made exceptionality, exclusivity and spectacularization some of its defining codes, and that today faces a redefinition of its languages, values and its relationship with society,” Michele contends.

He further delves into the world around him and the larger significance of changes, referencing the recent protests over the high costs of living and in particular the riots sweeping through Europe.

The damaged shop windows “suddenly began to resonate with the visual universe of the campaign. What had been conceived as the private landscape of a party’s aftermath encountered the images of a rupture that had unfolded in public space. This coincidence changed the way the photographs might be viewed, opening them up to meanings that could not have been anticipated at the time they were shot,” Michele writes.

As a consequence, he questioned whether it was appropriate to unveil the images, “and at one point even considered abandoning the campaign. Then I thought that openly recounting how those photographs had come into being, the intentions that had given rise to them and the questions that had shaped them, might offer an opportunity to reflect upon this unforeseen convergence. And, more broadly, upon the relationship between images and the historical time in which they are produced and viewed. After all, the meaning of images is not exhausted at the moment of their creation: subsequent events raise new questions and change the way they are interpreted. Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the dialectical image come to mind here: that instant when what has been, encounters the present, giving rise to relationships and meanings that were previously difficult to discern.”

Starting from the “uncomfortable associations,” Michele wishes “to begin again: from the beauty that continues to inhabit bodies, and from the responsibility of engaging with the contradictions that run through us.”