Valentino’s newest Paris Fashion Week show was the ultimate crossover for fashion lovers and book nerds. It took place at one of Paris’s most recognizable libraries: the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, a Latin Quarter landmark that opened in 1851. Lest you think creative director Alessandro Michele chose the venue for its aesthetics alone, rest assured, the literary theme went much deeper than the studious setting. In the show notes, Michele explained that this collection was inspired by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s idea of an “antilibrary” of unread books that symbolize limitless potential.

“Even the garments that we will never wear, no differently than those books sitting unopened on our shelves, still speak to us of the lives we could have lived,” Michele said in a statement. “Not as regrets, but as promises. Because their sheer presence as a possibility makes the world wider, richer, more liveable. After all, perhaps a fragment of happiness stems exactly from this: the profoundly human capacity to continuously expand the realm of what we can imagine and to live, if only for a moment, in worlds that are yet to come. Or might never be.”