Alessandro Michele is bringing his prolific, almost prodigious creativity to Valentino. Just two months after being appointed creative director, today he’s releasing his first resort collection for the Roman maison, called Avant les Débuts. The 171 ready-to-wear looks, plus 93 images of (rather delightful) shoes, bags, and various accessories, were revealed through an impromptu zoom call with a select group of editors. Speaking from his apartment, surrounded by a display of personal mementos, a relaxed and talkative Michele explained how he fell under the spell of “Valentino’s magical, potent place,” and how a deep dive into the “marvelous treasures of its archive” has been the starting point of his journey. “I’ve been seduced by that place,” he said.” I’m in love with it.”

Michele’s first thought was to put resort directly in stores with no fanfare at all. But in the last few days he changed plans. “I started working at Valentino as if we were an orchestra; everyone was playing his instrument with so much love and dedication that I thought it’d be right to be thankful and grateful to the people who have worked so tirelessly to make it happen. My job is to tune the instruments, and it’s all about sharing, so to keep the collection somehow hidden from view wouldn’t have felt right. This is a beginning born out of love—it wants to be brought to light and be seen and shared.”

When Michele started at Gucci, he had just a couple of weeks to put together the pivotal men’s collection that changed the fashion discourse around gender. Although this collection doesn’t have the same disruptive character, he wasn’t given too much time here either: “Probably I’ll be remembered as the one who has the distinction of doing things quickly,” he joked. His intention was to bring about “a real wardrobe,” made with precision and complexity, connected with a certain elegance that belongs to the image of Valentino Garavani. “I’m deep in conversation with the clothes he created, and with his life, and I’ve often had the impression of having him seated next to me,” he said.

There’s much of Alessandro Michele himself in the vast collection. “What you see is me meeting him, and it is my hands and my eyes that inhabit the atelier now,” he said. Michele has found a certain affinity with Garavani’s penchant for an almost obsessively soigné look, put together to the nines, meticulously ornate. He said they share a gusto for the complexity of composition, an attitude he explored at Gucci, that here he elevated through refinement and composure. Though the collection wasn’t available to be seen in person, it seems apparent that Michele’s flair for the extravagant gesture was contained within a perimeter of sophistication and luxe, without losing its charming quirk. “Valentino was never a minimalist, rather a maximalist, even in the ’70s when he was at his most streamlined,” he pointed out. “There was always a very Roman sense of opulence and excess to his work, distilled through an obsession for beauty.”

As much as he has fallen under the spell of the archival references available to him, Michele said that he didn’t reference any particular decade of Garavani’s work. However, he conceded that he was fascinated by the 1968 Sfilata Bianca. “I stole something of that whiteness, of that grace.” The photos in the lookbook have been given a sort of patina, “as if they had been found.” He hinted also at the hippy chic, feminine refinement of Valentino in the ’70s, but ultimately he let himself go, indulging in the lightness of ruching and volants “for no other reason than to connect with that feeling of grace.” The ’80s were referenced lightly, as “there is still so much to explore about how Valentino approached that decade, that for him wasn’t an ode to hedonism, but rather to extreme softness and sophistication.”

Michele’s practice at Gucci has put the discourse on gender on the map well beyond fashion. How will he work around this issue at Valentino? “It’s still me playing this game, I remain who I am. It’ll be my eyes that look at this new space I’m inhabiting, it’ll be me making those clothes,” he ruminated. “The men and women you’re seeing in the lookbook, it’s the same idea of masculinity and femininity that has always interested me, and it’s still there. My practice is made through my very own hands and eyes, through my imagination and sentiment, it comes from my belly and from an emotional place. I’m my own guarantor,” he went on. “I never had any political agenda at Gucci about the changes that my discourse on gender has triggered. I only followed my idea of beauty, and everything has happened naturally, and also in a rather delicate, gentle way. Here at Valentino, everything that happens will happen naturally—because that’s the way I am.”