At Paris Fashion Week, Alessandro Michele unveiled his long-awaited debut for Valentino, a show titled FIREFLIES, and with it, a luminous meditation on resilience. The experience began long before the runway: each guest received a vial of glow-in-the-dark fireflies, a fragile, flickering prelude to Michele’s vision of light persisting through shadow. Inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1941 Letter on Fireflies, the collection became a poetic response to the idea of beauty as resistance and illumination as quiet rebellion.

The show opened with a spoken-word performance by Pamela Anderson, her voice invoking art’s power to endure and transform. What followed was a deeply introspective reimagining of the Valentino woman, no longer a figure of untouchable perfection, but one of radiance shaped by experience. Michele’s maximalist romanticism found new restraint here; the ornate excess of his Gucci years softened into a more distilled elegance that breathed with Valentino’s Roman grace.

The silhouette revolved around fluid contrasts: a peacock chiffon blouse tied in tender bows against chartreuse satin trousers; violets brushed against coral, suede against velvet, and translucence against weight. Beauty emerged not from embellishment, but from dialogue between texture and tone, between fabric and light.

Eveningwear, often Michele’s theatre of emotion, unfolded with sculptural simplicity. Jewel-toned satins and liquid silks curved around the body in asymmetric drapes, while tuxedo-inspired gowns in ivory and black played with dualities of formality and freedom. Sequins, once a symbol of spectacle, became whispers of reflection – reserved, deliberate, and luminous.

Throughout, the firefly became the house’s new totem: embroidered onto sheer fabrics, scattered in metallic threads, and mirrored in the show’s choreography. The finale was a tableau of collective brilliance, models gathered beneath synchronized pulses of light that mimicked the nocturnal dance of fireflies. It was both elegy and renewal, a moment where fragility transformed into radiance.

In FIREFLIES, Michele recast Valentino as a house of conviction and emotion where grace meets defiance and beauty carries a pulse of rebellion. His debut was not about reinvention but revelation: a reminder that even the faintest glimmer can pierce the dark.