Independent fashion & culture

Runway · Style · Beauty · Culture

MIDA Magazine

A Daughter Walks Her Mother’s Old FloorReflectionThe Shoe Returns to Its Namesake StreetField NotePetals as Armor at Noir Kei NinomiyaVisual EssayThe Glitch Noa Raviv Wouldn’t CorrectDesigner Profile

A Campaign Staged Inside a Power Station

Alessandro Michele shot Valentino’s fall campaign inside a former Rome power station full of Roman marble.

Mida Editorial

Alessandro Michele shot Valentino's fall 2026 campaign inside Centrale Montemartini, a former Rome power station where Roman marble statues now stand permanently among the turbines that once ran the building.

Wide shot of the Engine Room at Centrale Montemartini, Roman marble statuary arranged among preserved industrial turbines and machinery
Built as Rome's first public electricity plant, converted in 1997 into a satellite of the Capitoline Museums. The turbines, diesel engines, and steam boiler were never removed — sculpture from excavations spanning the Republican to late Imperial eras was simply installed around them.
A model in Valentino tailoring photographed beside a fragment of a marble temple pediment, industrial machinery visible in the background
"Hybrid nature — suspended between classical statuary and industrial archaeology — constitutes the generative principle of the campaign," wrote [Michele](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Michele), a Rome native trained at the city's Accademia di Costume e di Moda, who spent two decades between Fendi and Gucci before this return to the city that trained him. Photographed by Glen Luchford, the models were placed to look caught mid-wander rather than posed against a backdrop.
Close detail of a garment's fabric or embellishment set directly against worn marble or riveted steel
Michele compared the space to Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas — the German art historian's unfinished project of pairing images from unrelated eras on a single panel, "not so much an archive of memory as an apparatus of montage" meant to generate resonances between things that don't obviously belong together.
A single model standing still in the shadow of the steam boiler, statue visible in soft focus behind
The marble doesn't quite belong to the machinery. The machinery doesn't quite belong to the marble. Neither one is asked to leave.
Share
X
Facebook
LinkedIn
Email

Mida Editorial

Mida Editorial

Related Stories