Alessandro Michele Brings Valentino and His Vision of the World to L.A.

Alessandro Michele

Photographed by Myles Hendrik

“Beauty has no boundaries, no rules, no colour. Beauty is like a religion.”

Those words belong to Valentino creative director Alessandro Michele, who had them printed to open his newest creation, Specula Mundi, a pink-coated book of photographs by Mark Bothwick featuring Michele’s couture collection of the same name presented in Paris in January. The collection broke free from traditional runway rules to be reconfigured by Michele through the use of a Kaiserpanorama, a round wooden structure that gained prominence in the 19th and early-20th centuries as a precursor to filmed entertainment. It allowed a group of people to peer through windows to view slides or photographs at the same time.

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Specula Mundi translates to mirror of the world, and the reflection Valentino has forever displayed centered on beauty. It’s why Michele opened the show with a voiceover of house founder Valentino Garavani from Matt Tyrnauer’s 2008 documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor: “And I was dreaming, dreaming about movie stars, dreaming about everything beautiful in the world.” Beauty and movie stars are embedded in Valentino’s house codes.

So, it was no surprise that Michele jetted to Los Angeles from Italy for a book launch party held inside the Marciano Art Foundation on Wilshire Boulevard. He loves L.A. for many reasons from the obvious (energy, museums, movie stars) to the less obvious (the light and the weather help him snap out of slight jet lag). And he’s been known to host a starry event or two during his days leading iconic fashion houses — Michele famously shut down Hollywood Boulevard for Gucci’s Love Parade back in 2021 — but Tuesday night’s soiree was the only one featuring a custom Kaiserpanorama positioned in the center of the foundation’s main floor.

Before the first guests peeked through the windows to Michele’s world, the veteran designer sat down with The Hollywood Reporter in a second-floor conference room to discuss carrying on Valentino’s storied history with Hollywood, the first film he fell in love with as a child and seeing his favorite couture creation on the Oscars red carpet thanks to Anne Hathaway.

Michele’s Specula Mundi book, left, and Michele with Borthwick. Conceived as a collector’s piece and produced in Italy in a limited edition of 1,500 numbered copies, Specula Mundi features 422 images across 260 pages. It will retail at $350 and be available beginning May 11 in select Valentino boutiques worldwide.

Valentino/Matt Weinberger

Congratulations on the book, it’s so beautiful. Why did you decide to open the book with that quote?

We made this book to try to speak another language, to make relevant the idea of couture. That quote is like a poem; it’s about beauty, it’s about life, it’s about passion. It’s a mutual work of many, many, many people. It’s a way to dream. Beauty is such a complicated word. It’s very hard to define what beauty means. I was quoting beauty as something that you follow as a blind human being. We may not know why we are here, why we are living but why we are alive, why we are breathing but I just felt that beauty could be a mission from the very beginning. To follow beauty means many things. With Mark, we let people touch this beauty and see it from many sides. He’s the best, by the way, to do it. He makes poems [with his work].

You have described him as a poet, and his work like poetry. It’s such a unique and special way to describe a photographer. Can you share more on how you see his work this way?

It’s like giving a camera to a shaman. He takes the moment and steers something to life. I like the way he tried to translate something as a line of a poem. He’s sometimes takes a picture and doesn’t look inside the camera. He has said, “I have something mysterious inside of me that I don’t know.” I like the way he’s in contact with a physical object and he uses his camera as a shaman, as a sensitive person. When given a subject or an object to photograph, he looks at it by sometimes turning it upside down, taking the inside on the outside. Couture is wrapping the body in something special, stunning and beautiful, and it helps define a personality. He doesn’t just take a picture — though he takes many hundreds, thousands of pictures — but he can spy the soul of things and find the hidden sides. We met a long time ago and have done many things together. He has said, “The emptiness is the window of freedom and it’s not just som