While half the fashion industry races to see who can get AI into their campaigns fastest, Alessandro Michele took the house of Valentino to a library. Not a set that looks like a library, but the real Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris's Latin Quarter. He presented the spring-summer 2027 collection among the long tables and shelves, and made his point without a microphone: this is a place where books are still read, not ground up.

He calls the concept the "anti-library". He borrows the idea from Umberto Eco's thinking and from the Japanese habit known as tsundoku - collecting books you never get round to reading. For Michele, unread volumes, like unworn pieces of clothing, are not a failure but a reserve of possibilities. The value of that endless library of unread texts, as the collection frames it, lies not in showing off erudition but in the boundless potential of what we don't yet know.

A runway as an answer to the machines

Choosing an analogue space was also a cultural statement. The reference is directly to how AI companies destroyed and scanned millions of books to train their algorithms. A fashion house that sells dresses for thousands of euros is not the obvious defender of the printed word, but the image works: clothes among books, at a time when both are increasingly "generated".

The collection itself fuses two worlds that, at first glance, can't stand each other. On one side, breathtaking eveningwear - including a fuchsia satin column gown with a huge train of pleated roses. On the other, eccentric daywear that deliberately clashes: eighties blazers with lace cycling shorts, satin corsets in jewel tones with fringed skirts, wide jeans with baseball caps reading "Villain Teen".

This is Michele as we know him - a maximalist, a nostalgist, a designer who turns a wardrobe into a collage. The collection follows on from his previous one, "Interferences" for autumn-winter 2026-2027, and continues the aesthetic he brought to Valentino.

The message on the runway, the bill in the boutique

A reader in the Balkans knows how to keep those two things apart. The message is likeable and timely: protect what a machine can't read for you. But we are unlikely to see the fuchsia gown with its train of roses at a wedding in Skopje, while the "Villain Teen" baseball cap stands every chance of turning up as a knock-off at our markets soon enough. Fashion has always sold ideas at the price of fabric. This time, at least, the idea is worth thinking about.

And if the fashion house is serious about books, the question is how many of the guests in the front rows even looked at the shelf behind them - and how many went home with a new book rather than a new photo.