Clothes like fireflies: Valentino and the salvific and luminous power of beauty

The fashion system often operates in a bubble that risks making it irrelevant, or criminally careless and superficial. This was most evident in the Paris fashion week: with what is happening in the world, there are few designers who somehow point out the distressing distortions of the status quo. Of course, the risk of glamorising protest, or critical thinking, by defusing them, is high, but taking a stand is also a gesture of humanity.

Alessandro Michele, from Valentino, does so by entrusting urgent and necessary reflections to the text that accompanies the show, and which gives it its title, 'Fireflies: heartfelt words', taken from a youthful letter by Pier Paolo Pasolini, written as a student at the height of the darkness of the fascist regime, in which the writer praises fireflies as the ability to resist the dark night.

Words that resonate with the new obscurantism, with the conformism that runs rampant, with the inhumanity that imposes itself; thoughts that perhaps have little to do with what he presents on the catwalk, but that somehow give context to a new Valentino, purer and drier, in which the redeeming power of beauty is celebrated in subtraction rather than accumulation.

Michele-style subtraction, let's be clear: imbued with poignant nostalgia not only for certain forms of the past, but also for the ways of wearing them - blouse and skirt, blouse and trousers, robe manteau, jumpsuit and cape. Alessandro Michele's love for what has been, his idealisation in an aesthetic Parnassus of images that are not of today is more evident than ever, but the taste for synthesis, which is then a way of glorifying clothes as object and product, has a truly political freshness: it renounces the foam, which is distracting or escapist, to concentrate on the substance, which is presence in the moment.

Michael Rider, from Celine, imagines a moment of suspension: the Sunday walk in the park, the reconnection with nature. The show takes place en plein air, in the Saint Cloud park so dear to Parisians, and is a continuation of last July's debut rehearsal: identical are the jackets with strong shoulders and the button-downs that bring them close to the bust; identical are the multi-piece trousers with high waists and narrow bottoms; identical is the attention to the scarf, which also becomes a lining, and the taste for metalwork as decoration. Rider's Celine is closer to that of Phoebe Philo - with whom the American designer used to work - than to that of Hedi Slimane, but it also has an all-American ease of spirit, almost as if Rider had brought here his long experience at Polo Ralph Lauren. Here again, the product is central: beautiful clothes with multiple uses, without unwanted intellectualism.