SPECULA MUNDI

 

    original image and video courtesy ©Valentino

Valentino Garavani passed on January 19, at ninety-three, and nine days later his voice inhabited the Tennis Club de Paris. Alessandro Michele summoned the founder through documentary footage, that analogue ghost speaking of cinema, of sisters in darkened theatres, of how moving images taught him to dress bodies for dreams. This opening gesture contained everything: the past made present through deliberate framing, beauty preserved by understanding how to look at it. 

Michele built twelve wooden chapels in that Paris space, each one a Kaiserpanorama, that strange Victorian peepshow machine where vision became ritual. Guests perched on stools facing away from the spectacle, leaning forward to peer through small rectangular windows at what turned slowly within. The device belonged to the moment just before cinema, when seeing still demanded patience and the body bent toward revelation. Walter Benjamin knew it staged something essential about consciousness, how meaning arrives in sequence rather than simultaneity, how distance between viewer and viewed allows wonder. Michele translated this nineteenth-century technology into twenty-first-century proposition: what if garments could reclaim the weight of hierophany, could demand the kind of attention we once gave to sacred things? 

The red dress that opened the procession carried Valentino's signature crimson like a relic, a drop-waisted gown with the liquid drape recalling 1930s silhouettes, cardinal-bright against the white chamber. Then came the rest. Hollywood's golden age filtered through something older, more pagan. What criticism often misses: the screen goddesses of the thirties and forties wore costumes drawn from priestess robes, temple ceremonies, and myths in which women mediated between the human and divine realms. Garbo, Dietrich, Crawford, they moved through Biblical epics and Grecian dramas draped like Salammbô, crowned like Salomé, sculpted like Maria in Metropolis. Cinema simply gave ancient archetypes electric light and celluloid immortality. 

The silhouettes that rotated past those peepholes shimmered with chain mail and feathers, with ruffs suggesting both medieval and Elizabethan excess, with embroidery so intricate it became scripture written in beads and crystals. Columnar gowns suggested caryatids come to life. Satin trains pooled like offerings. Pleated sleeves opened like petals or wings. The palette moved through Valentino red, black, white, gold, ivory, fuchsia, turquoise, butter-yellow, each colour carrying symbolic weight, each hue intensified to maximum saturation. 

Metallic threadwork caught light like constellations across bodices and skirts. Bead-laden surfaces carried devotional intensity. Micro-crystals and laminates built compositions that suggested religious iconography without literal representation. Feathered headdresses crowned models like ancient priestesses. Oversized ruffs framed faces as sacred paintings demand elaborate frames. Claw gloves in black satin extended past elbows, suggesting both elegance and something slightly predatory. Each garment testified to hundreds of hours of hands working thread through fabric, building magnificence stitch by stitch. This level of craft exists outside contemporary timescales; the garments carry their making-time as an intrinsic quality, as proof that some things refuse acceleration, as also written in this article about Matthieu Blazy´s debut collection at Chanel.

The Tennis Club transformed into a temple space, those white circular structures holding each look like a monstrance holds the host. Techno beats pulsed with liturgical gravity, then Shostakovich swept through, Gluck's strings ascending, Saint-Saëns building toward crescendo. The soundtrack recognised what Michele's architecture already insisted upon: this ceremony enacted worship, the garments serving as vessels for something larger than fashion. Each viewer watched alone, isolated in their peephole, yet everyone participated in a collective ritual, public solitude, communal isolation, the strange democracy of identical but separate visions deployed against our contemporary condition, where infinite images scroll past at such speed that seeing dissolves into mere registering. 

The show occurred days after the founder's departure, which gave everything elegiac weight. Yet Michele avoided nostalgia. He chose stewardship over revolution, understanding that Valentino's romanticism, that particular synthesis of red and classicism and body-conscious sculpture, required protection rather than dismantling. The collection mourned by making, honoured by continuing, remembered by transforming. Valentino's voice echoed through the space, speaking of Old Hollywood, of how images taught him everything. Michele answered by offering images that teach how to see, by slowing vision down until it becomes contemplation, by building theatre from restraint, and by turning spectacle into something earned rather than given. 

Specula Mundi achieved what observers noted as Michele's most accomplished balance between house codes and personal vision, perhaps because the moment demanded it, perhaps because grief clarifies purpose. The collection articulated philosophy through form, made material choices bear conceptual weight, and proved that fashion can think. Hollywood divinities once dwelled in light and distance and excess, withdrawn from the ordinary into secular worship. They possessed mythic presence because cinema controlled how audiences accessed them, through darkness, projection, and the ritual of theatre-going. Michele recognised haute couture as the contemporary site where such a presence might still emerge. The chapel-structures, the peepholes, the rotation of garments like stations of the cross, all this served to create conditions under which clothes could appear as apparitions rather than products, where fashion could reclaim its capacity for the numinous. 

The title translates as "mirror of the world," and Michele understood that mirrors only work when positioned at the right distance, when the viewer assumes the correct posture. Twelve wooden structures throughout the Tennis Club, each one a small chamber of wonders, each window a frame for epiphany. The collection asked viewers to work for their vision, to earn their glimpses, to understand that beauty reveals itself only to those willing to wait. Guests bent toward those rectangular apertures, bodies curved in the posture of devotion, and watched dresses rotate in measured sequence. The simple act became a ceremony. Vision became offering. Fashion became prayer.