For his Spring/Summer 2026 collection for Valentino, titled “Fireflies,” Alessandro Michele began with a story. He wrote about a letter from 1941, penned by a young Pier Paolo Pasolini. In it, Pasolini described a night filled with fireflies, their “amorous flights and lights” creating small woods of fire. In the darkness of war, they were a symbol of life and desire, a form of resistance.

Thirty-four years later, Pasolini wrote again. He argued that while the old fascism was gone, a new darkness had arrived: a cultural conformity that was devouring difference. He called this “the disappearance of the fireflies.”

But the story does not end there. The art historian Georges Didi-Huberman responded. He shared Pasolini’s fear but refused to believe the fireflies were gone. He suggested that the light still exists, but our gaze has grown weak. We have become blind to the small, persistent sparks of hope. As the writer Italo Calvino put it, the challenge is to find what, in the middle of hell, is not hell, and give it space.
For Michele, this is where fashion finds its purpose. It can be a tool to reawaken our sight. Its task is to seek out these shy signs of the future, to find the fleeting beauty that resists standardization. It can profane the ordinary and emit small, radiant signals.

These are the fireflies. Not dead, but waiting for us to see them again. They are glimmers in the dark, showing gateways to other possibilities and nourishing the imagination.

Check out the collection below: