Alessandro Michele transforms the Sainte-Geneviève Library into an &quot;anti-library&quot; where clothes, like unread books, become promises of lives still possible.

For his Spring/Summer 2027 show, Alessandro Michele took over the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève with Antibiblioteca, a title borrowed from the idea developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb based on Umberto Eco's library. Eco owned some thirty thousand volumes, a large portion of which had not yet been read. Far from being a monument to erudition, this library was a research tool: its value lay precisely in all that remained to be discovered. The unread books thus formed a reservoir of possibilities, a tangible reminder that the world always exceeds what we know of it.
Alessandro Michele translates this intuition into fashion. For what is the value of a garment beyond its use? Some of the designs presented will only cross the runway once; others will continue to exist in images, memories, or archives; still others will enter a wardrobe and remain there almost untouched. Their existence, therefore, is not measured solely by the number of times they are worn. Like the unopened books in the anti-library, they can have value precisely because they remain available, open to lives and interpretations that may never come to pass.
This concept echoes the Japanese practice of&nbsp;tsundoku, the act of buying books and letting them accumulate without reading them. What might seem like excess or procrastination here becomes a way of preserving possibility. Each unopened book reminds us of the existence of ideas, stories, and worlds unknown to us. Similarly, Valentino's silhouettes constitute a joyful reservoir of shapes, colors, and ways of inhabiting the body. The shimmering fringes, feathers, volumes, and chromatic combinations compose less a definitive wardrobe than an inventory of possibilities.

The Sainte-Geneviève Library then becomes much more than a backdrop. Guests arrive with a book under their arm, figures move among the shelves, and Troye Sivan's soundtrack transforms the place of study into a kind of student party. The contrast between the silent rigor of knowledge and the energy of youth gives the collection an almost novelistic dimension: here, learning, transformation, and reinvention seem to be part of the same movement. The library is no longer just the place of what one knows, but of all that one could yet become.
This idea aligns with Giorgio Agamben's concept of power: a possibility does not necessarily lose its force simply by remaining a possibility. It can continue to exist without being realized. The fashion show functions precisely in this way. The clothes we will never wear, the silhouettes too singular to become part of everyday life, the forms that may only survive through a photograph, are not fashion failures. On the contrary, they constitute an essential part of it: they expand the realm of the imaginable. Fashion becomes a visual anti-library, an archive of potentialities where each garment adds a possibility to the world.
Perhaps this is where the beauty of Valentino's Spring/Summer 2027 collection lies: in this celebration of what has yet to come to pass. The clothes we will never wear are not necessarily the traces of lives missed; they can be the sketches of lives dreamed of, the fragments of people we could have been. Like the unopened books on Umberto Eco's shelves, they remind us that our existence is not limited to what we have already lived, known, or possessed. Their mere presence keeps the realm of possibilities open—and with it, that profoundly human capacity to imagine that the world, and perhaps ourselves, can still become something else.

In Valentino Spring/Summer 2027's Collection, Anything is Possible

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