Valentino Turns Paris Fashion Week into an Antibibrary
Valentino creative director Alessandro Michele staged his Spring/Summer 2027 ready-to-wear runway show during Paris Fashion Week inside the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, requiring invited guests to bring a book of their own. Michele drew inspiration from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan, which explores the term “antibibrary” based on writer Umberto Eco’s extensive library of 30,000 volumes, where unread books hold greater value than read ones.
Inside the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève Runway
The historical Paris library provided a quiet backdrop for a loud, rule-breaking wardrobe. Models walked past rows of library shelves wearing eclectic pieces that deliberately clashed patterns and textures, featuring looks where a sport shirt’s check pattern is paired with a gold skirt trimmed in faux fur and worn with high fuchsia suede boots.
Lightweight pleated trousers tucked into precious boots, lace biker shorts matched with 1980s jackets featuring oversized shoulders and gold buttons, maxi bows, wide belts, and baseball caps worn with evening gowns completed the chaotic aesthetic.
Translating Umberto Eco’s Library Into Luxury Wear
Michele compared his runway creations to the unread books populating Umberto Eco’s shelves. Some appear only once during a runway show, others live on primarily through photographs, and a few end up stored in closets like relics, functioning as objects that inhabit lives without necessarily being worn.
Michele stated that these objects inhabit lives without necessarily being worn, functioning as cognitive reserves rather than mere consumer goods. “Even the clothes we will never wear—not unlike those books still closed on the shelves—continue to speak to us of the lives we could have lived,” Michele said, as reported by ANSA. He added that the presence of such possibilities expands human imagination.
Challenging the Utility of Modern Fashion
The collection draws directly from Taleb’s philosophical framework regarding cognitive capital and potential discoveries. By framing the runway as a visual antibibrary, Michele sought to push clothing beyond standard utility and consumption.
ANSA reported that the designer wanted guests to contemplate whether the value of a garment relies entirely on its physical use. The resulting pieces range from slip dresses anchored by heavy outerwear to eveningwear paired with casual caps, while the designer concluded that human happiness partly stems from the capacity to continuously expand one’s imagination and inhabit worlds that do not yet exist or perhaps never will.
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