With Antibiblioteca, Alessandro Michele raises a question that seems hardly commercial: can a garment have value before it has even been worn?
Unread books sometimes take up more room than those we know. For Antibiblioteca, its spring-summer 2027 collection, Valentino turns this reserve into a way of thinking about fashion. In the text signed Alessandro, the house takes up Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s antilibrary, developed from Umberto Eco’s library.
A wardrobe of possibilities
The principle does not celebrate accumulation for its own sake. The volumes still closed remind us of what remains to be discovered. Michele transposes this idea to clothes: some will cross the runway, others will survive in photographs, in memories or in wardrobes where they will be rarely worn.
Their interest, according to this proposal, is therefore not limited to their use. They form a repertoire of shapes and of possible ways of inhabiting a body. The show becomes the place where these possibilities are made perceptible, before any decision to buy.
Desire versus use
This position sheds light on a contradiction of luxury. A piece can matter in the collective imagination without becoming an everyday object. Its existence as an image can also contribute to the desire for an entire collection. But acknowledging this cultural value does not exempt us from examining the precision of a cut, the necessity of a form or the conditions of manufacture.
Antibiblioteca thus offers a framework for reading, not automatic proof of success. Its interest lies in the question it leaves open: what does a garment make us imagine, beyond the person we would be in wearing it?
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