Guests at Valentino’s spring 2027 show, held under the iron arches of the Sainte-Geneviève Library in the Latin Quarter, were asked to bring a book for donation.

Alexander Skarsgård chose a collection of Icelandic sagas that is a classic of Scandinavian literature. “It’s basically the ‘Iliad’ of the Norse culture,” he explained. Thai singer and actor Jeff Satur selected a manual for manifesting.

Creative director Alessandro Michele said he was inspired by the term “Antilibrary,” coined by the late Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco to designate a collection of unread books. Michele has scores, and compared them to all the clothes sitting idle in his wardrobe.

“There is something that I like in the idea of having in my closet that beautiful piece that I’m probably never going to wear,” he said in a preview.

It felt like a curious premise for a fashion show. After all, isn’t the hope that these clothes will be lived in?

Admittedly, it takes a certain type of individual to inhabit Michele’s maximalist designs. Here, the closest he got to everyday clothes was double-pleated jeans, plaid shirts and baseball caps that read “Villain Teen.”

The Roman designer is wedded to a nostalgic interpretation of Valentino that oscillates between statement ballgowns, like a fuchsia satin column with a huge pleated pink rosette train, and an off-kilter take on bourgeois daywear.

Think ‘80s power blazers, but worn with lace cycling shorts, and satin bustiers in jewel tones that were mismatched with tasseled and embroidered skirts.

Michele’s choice of venue felt especially poignant in light of reports this summer that Anthropic destructively scanned 2 million books in order to train its large language model Claude.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ll know the designer is ambivalent about high tech. Michele’s frozen reaction to the robots that walked down the runway at a recent Vogue World event in Milan spawned dozens of memes.

“I was petrified and I was trying to understand what was going on,” he recalled. “I’m not against technology, but life is about me and the things that surround me. I don’t want to lose everything. I don’t need a second brain.”

In that light, his collection could be read as an ode to the human touch. Would an AI agent ever pair a webby mohair cardigan with knobbly wool pants and gold-tipped shoes, or tuck harem pants in a purple tree-bark fabric into a pair of elaborately sequined boots?

Those kind of random associations might not be the most obvious way to right a listing ship. (Valentino slipped from an operating profit of 31 million euros in 2024 to a loss of 103 million euros in the most recent full fiscal year.) But in the battle against AI slop, Michele scored points.

“I don’t want to live fashion just as something that belongs to numbers. I want to give back to fashion what fashion has always given me,” he explained. “I would love to push people to inject something more, because otherwise we risk falling asleep.”