«Valentino? It was a choice of love”

«I am not a creative direction. I am first of all Alessandro.” Packed room, emotional fashion school students: huge crowd for Alessandro Michele who talks about his debut at Valentino, his book and fashion in general at the Vogue Forces of Fashion in the former slaughterhouse of his hometown Rome.

Valentino’s choice? «It was something like love – he explained – It seemed like a very different bet from my previous work and a quite unique place, very intimate, very eccentric: a place full of life.

If I thought of Valentino I didn’t think of a brand but of a place where things had happened: it seemed like a film. Valentino is mythology and how mythology is handed down. In fact, let’s say that mine is a co-direction: you have to be careful to respect the karma of this mythological story.”

Baseball cap, shirt with puffed sleeves and jeans, Alessandro Michele is also an almost mythological character as evidenced by the packed house at his talk hosted by Vogue Italia director Francesca Ragazzi. «It’s a real illness, I like to work, learn, still feel like an adolescent at work – he says – It’s like stopping living if you’re not yet an adolescent, if you’re not always in a learning phase, I who was born on horseback of two gigantic eras with extraordinary technological changes.”

There is also a veiled reference to the criticisms leveled at him after his first fashion show for the maison: too much in his style and not enough in Valentino’s, someone said. But «the clothes I touched at Valentino were the relics of other people’s lives and I thought that that idea of ​​life should be celebrated – says the creative director – In the Paris show someone thought there was something melancholic. But for me it was to stage the idea of ​​that frivolity that almost becomes a religious song, a necessity from which we cannot escape.”

Having said that, we are what we are, and Alessandro Michele is the emblem of this: «Give yourselves to life, be gamblers, let’s not let false myths confuse us and cloud our souls – First of all we are ‘. Before numbers, there are people and passions, especially work.”