Inside Valentino’s Spring/Summer 2026 campaign.
The starting point for Alessandro Michele’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection, Fireflies, begins with a poem by Italian poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini: “The night I told you about, we saw an immense amount of fireflies, they made little woods of fire inside little woods of bushes and we envied them because they loved each other, because they longed for each other through amorous flights and lights.”
In the words of Harper’s BAZAAR Malaysia’s creative director, Aziz Draim, the collection is “less about grand statements and more about reawakening our capacity to spot the delicate, the fleeting, the quietly resistant—those fragile glimmers of grace that refuse to be standardised into oblivion.” Michele elevates familiar silhouettes, from blouses to eveningwear, with intricate details; sparkling sequins mimic the glimmering of fireflies, and ribbons and ruching add a romantic touch. It captures the feeling of watching the flickering lights of fireflies as much as the qualities of the creatures themselves.
Valentino’s Spring/Summer 2026 campaign for the collection is similarly introspective. It explores a similarly abstract concept: the feeling of falling. “Every body knows falling. Not as an accident, but as original condition. Balance, in fact, is not the natural state of being, but only a fragile interval within the becoming of things. Falling happens when the world no longer holds us in the forms we once knew. It takes but a moment: a yielding, a loss, a force that exceeds our capacity for containment,” writes Michele.
Shot by Belgian photographer and director Willy Vanderperre, the campaign is a slow study of movement, lingering on the “instant immediately before the fall: a suspended time, without direction.” In this meaningful exploration, Michele embodies Pasolini’s hopeful poem, providing a visual metaphor for community and how one can share its strength and distribute the weight of life’s burdens.
In a fast-paced world that villainises vulnerability, Valentino’s latest campaign find the beauty in fragility as “a starting point for imagining different forms of coexistence, responsibility, and relation.”
