Valentino meets Vans: Californian skate and Italian tailoring merge in an unexpected, yet not casual, dialogue. The collaboration, previously unveiled at Paris Fashion Week for FW25, is not merely a stylistic exercise, but a visual narrative about the discontinuity of everyday life, a theme dear to Alessandro Michele. The campaign, built around the sudden irruption of nature into human architecture, sees water as a primordial and transformative force: a powerful metaphor to remind us how the unexpected can shake the illusion of stability.

In a personal letter, Michele describes the project with words that almost sound like a small philosophical treatise: “What happens when the unexpected erupts into our lives? What sensations are produced when what appeared solid dissolves under the onslaught of forces beyond our control?” The campaign’s images and videos, generated in part with AI from materials from the Le Méta-Théâtre Des Intimités fashion show, translate this reflection into dreamlike and surreal frescoes, where nature disrupts orderly surfaces and reassuring technologies.

Thus, sneakers are no longer simple consumer objects, but emblems of resilience and fluidity in an inconstant world. Vans becomes a theater of unexpected wonder, Valentino guides the viewer into a dimension where beauty emerges precisely from the unexpected. Ultimately, Michele reminds us, it is in fragility that the space for the new opens up.