Firefly-shaped jewels flickered on the Valentino’s SS26 runaway last season, against royal blues and dense floral prints in Alessandro Michele’s collection, aptly named Fireflies, an attempt in Michele’s own words in the show notes, to “reawaken the gaze” and “nourish imagination with political force”. The collection asked a simple yet undeniably relevant question in the midst of geopolitical tensions and crises: can fashion and art, akin to fireflies, spark hope for the creative resistance in dark political times?
The more difficult question, however, still remains: are luxury brands like Valentino really interested in standing up for artistic resistance or is this nothing other than a co-opted spectacle of defiance in an attempt to sell more luxury gowns? The tension becomes harder to ignore when the industry’s elite is seen cultivating proximity to tech power. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez appeared at Jonathan Anderson’s Dior haute couture show just this past week, Sanchez dressed by Law Roach, underscoring how easily the language of resistance collapses into pageantry when aligned with tech oligarchs.
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Valentino’s SS26 collection was inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini who described fireflies as fragile symbols of beauty and hope in a letter to his friend in 1941, amid the darkness of Italy’s fascist regime. The letter was read aloud by Pamela Anderson, as a “ruched peacock-blue blouse with a pair of satin chartreuse pants” and the sheer dusty pink sets flashed in front of the audience.
The show depicted Pasolini’s own trajectory from hope to despair, reading his essay “The Disappearance of the Fireflies” in the climax of the show. In 1975, thirty years after his hopeful letter, Pasolini declared fireflies extinct, killed by a new form of fascism, that has “no outstanding qualities” and “pragmatic in the American style” and its only goal is “homogenization of the world”.
Today, fifty years after Pasolini’s essay, fascism has materialised in online monoculture with trends recycled time and time again into yet another “core”, and where “aesthetics” are optimised for the breakneck corporate pacing of luxury fashion brands. The convergence, however, doesn’t only happen with our clothes but also our perceptions. Jonathan Haidt described fascism as “hive psychology scaled up to grotesque heights”, a perfect depiction of what we see on social media: echo chambers, “bubbles”, POVs formed by algorithmic feed, it’s a systematic replacement of individualism with a certain collective “hive” thinking.
Valentino’s Fireflies collection, with its diverse palette and fabrics from magenta chiffon to mustard velvet, where no two looks relied on precisely the same logic signaled “refusal to conform—to conventions of texture, shape, and contemporary trends”. There is a contradiction, here, in a billion-euro luxury brand positioning itself as anti-conformist. Michele is aware of the contradiction as he successfully uses it to position Valentino as a fashion house that not only sells and increases shareholder value, but also thinks.
The message of the collection to “reaweaken the gaze” refuses to follow Pasolini’s despair and juxtaposes it with the counter-argument of philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, who believed that fireflies did not disappear; but rather that we merely became “too blind and atrophied” to see their twinkling lights in the night sky. Michele calls fashion a “precious ally” in allowing us to see again. But in a quintessential late capitalism way, hope is offered only to those who can afford it. Acts of resistance, here, must remain wearable and marketable; to stay within the logic of spectacle. The actual resistance must happen in the audience as we learn to see in the dark without the jeweled firefly light to guide us.
Daria Bezuhla is a Berlin-based video-essayist and writer. A cinephile at heart, she explores film, media and fashion trends through her video-essays and writing focusing on how culture, politics, and technology shape our perception. Follow her on YouTube.