At the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles, Valentino introduced Specula Mundi, a couture book now available in selected maison’s boutiques worldwide, with broader global release. The presentation carried the atmosphere of an installation rather than a traditional launch—still, hushed, and charged with visual anticipation.
The Los Angeles presentation extended this logic into space. Within the Marciano Art Foundation, guests—including Teyana Taylor, Patricia Arquette, Tate McRae, Sombr, Maude Apatow, and Dree Hemingway—encountered a glowing installation inspired by the Kaiserpanorama, peering into viewing lenses that revealed the book’s imagery in a continuous visual current.
Couture book as a ritual object
Conceived under the direction of Valentino’s creative director Alessandro Michele, the publication draws on the Spring/Summer 2026 couture collection and places it within the lens-based world of photographer Mark Borthwick. Across its pages, garments drift into haze, gesture, and abstraction, where fashion slips away from definition and settles into mood.
Framed as a limited-edition collector’s object—260 pages and 422 illustrations, produced in just 1,500 copies—Specula Mundi takes its title from Latin, meaning “mirror of the world.” Rather than documenting a collection, it stages couture as a reflective field of images, closer to meditation than archive.
Mark Borthwick and the visual language of contemporary couture
Borthwick’s photographic language resists sharpness in favour of atmosphere. Focus gives way to blur, composition slips off-axis, and narrative emerges in fragments rather than sequence. In dialogue with Michele’s assertion that “fashion is a religion,” the book takes on the cadence of ritual—less catalogue than devotional object.
Courtesy of VALENTINO
