is opening another door into his imaginative world through the launch of his first ad campaign to promote the “Avant les Débuts” collection that was unveiled in June. To this end, he turned to none other than legendary director Federico Fellini. “Starting this new phase, I wanted to return to a language that would echo the neorealism of Luchino Visconti, the visual symbolism of Ingmar Bergman and the magic realism of Federico Fellini,” explained Michele in an exclusive interview.
The voiceover in the video for the campaign conceived by the designer with is Fellini’s from his 1972 film “Roma.” In the movie, Fellini with his camera followed actress Anna Magnani returning home at Palazzo Altieri, as he described Rome and all its contradictions. “I pretend to follow a girl in my new home, Palazzo Mignanelli [Valentino’s headquarters in Rome], playing with the transposition of space and time,” said Michele.
Fellini celebrated Magnani as “the symbol of the city: Rome, seen both as a she-wolf and a vestal, aristocratic and ragged, gloomy and clownish.” Michele added: “Federico Fellini couldn’t have been more accurate, because Rome has this precise paradoxical nature.” The designer wanted the film and the photographs of the campaign “to have a patina as if they dated back to Valentino Garavani’s heyday,” he explained.
In fact, the photos in the printed layout look like Polaroids, he pointed out. “We are so used to scrolling images that we are a.