For autumn-winter 2026, Camille Miceli imagines a Pucci collection haunted by the centuries-old rivalries of Siena’s districts, staged in the nocturnal gloss of a Parisian club.
There is something oxymoronic about this new Pucci collection. On one side, the echo of an Italian tradition several centuries old, rooted in the earth and stone of Siena. On the other, the hushed yet electric atmosphere of a Parisian nightclub, a world of glass, smoke and exchanged glances. Camille Miceli, the house’s artistic director, has soberly titled her autumn-winter 2026 collection « Il Palio », a direct reference to the famous horse race that, since the Middle Ages, has pitted the city’s historic districts, the celebrated contrade, against one another in Siena.
Each of these contrade lays claim to a territory, a coat of arms and a memory handed down from generation to generation, through animal emblems that give the districts their names. On race day, these colours become a language in their own right, almost martial, in which belonging can be read before the start has even been given. It is this economy of signs — colour as declaration, motif as allegiance — that Camille Miceli transposes into the Pucci wardrobe, through prints crossed by animal figures and deep, almost saturated shades that borrow less from tourist folklore than from the tribal fervour of the Sienese festival.
For Pucci has never been a stranger to that Italy. The house, founded in the aftermath of the war by Emilio Pucci, was itself built on another way of making motif and identity speak to each other: the Florentine marquis’s kaleidoscopic prints already told, in their own way, a story of belonging — that of an Italian aristocracy reinventing its codes for the postwar years. By choosing Siena and its contrade as a starting point, Camille Miceli does not summon a folklore external to the house: she reactivates a part of its Italian memory, that of a proud, tribal province which Pucci has always looked upon with particular tenderness, somewhere between the family archive and the fashion motif.
But the collection does not stop at the gates of Tuscany. The campaign that accompanies it, signed by photographer Carlijn Jacobs, carries this imagery of rivalry and belonging into a very different setting: that of a Parisian club in its golden age, a hushed world where seduction plays out in small touches and sidelong glances. Model Grace Elisabeth embodies a party-goer there, moving through the scenes with an openly assumed freedom and sensuality, as if the tribal colours of Siena had been turned, for the length of a night, into armour for seduction rather than a district banner.
The choice of a Parisian night as the setting for this collection is far from incidental: it is also there, in the shady circles of the Paris night of past decades, that a certain idea of exiled Italian elegance long found refuge and a stage. By photographing Grace Elisabeth in this setting rather than on the stands of the Campo, Camille Miceli moves Sienese folklore far from any postcard: she keeps its intensity and its clan instinct, but sets them running under the artificial lights of a city that is not theirs, like a rite that has changed continents without losing its fever.
Between the Piazza del Campo, where crowds gather twice a year to watch the horses of the contrade gallop, and the dance floor of a Parisian club imagined for the occasion, the distance seems immense. Perhaps it is not so great: in both settings, it is above all a matter of dressing in order to belong, of wearing a colour as one raises a banner, and of turning clothing into a pledge of allegiance — to a district, to a night, or simply to oneself.
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