Loo La La! Why the Toilet Is Fashion’s Most Essential Space.

The Courtauldian
1 hour ago
4 min read

By Lexie Patterson

‘Who is the real you?’ Alessandro Michele ponders aloud on Bella Freud’s YouTube series Fashion Neurosis. ‘Maybe it’s the one who comes out of the toilet, not the one inside.’

Just months earlier, on 10 March 2025, he had staged his Valentino show inside a blood-red public bathroom- mirrors, cubicles, tiles and all. Feverish and burning hot. It channeled the bold glamour that Valentino, the iconic Italian fashion house known for its red-carpet elegance it has so long embodied. At the helm was Michele, the brand’s creative director, celebrated for his theatrical and introspective approach to

fashion. For him, the bathroom is fashion’s most honest room. Under strip lighting, the space took on a strange, but familiar glamour, transforming the public toilet into an exciting, electric theatre of identity. As the models walk past the sinks and mirrors, it is clear that they are ‘out out’. The flicker of bathroom judgement, the pause in front of the mirror, those moments we take before we step back into the world.

In the loo, just moments before the bathroom becomes a catwalk. Photo: Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images

For interviewer and designer Freud, ‘all the best information is exchanged in the toilets… backstage, parties, clubs’. But for Michele, the bathroom carries something far more introspective. While magazines such as Dazed have long suggested the ladies room is where we become ourselves, swapping lip liners and mascara, for this designer, they have become somewhere closer to the confessional, even spiritual. It’s a space removed from the main event. It’s a place to confront who we are before re-entering the performance outside. For some, clothes become an extension of themselves, shaping how they inhabit their own bodies. In the toilet, we are in our rawest state. Michele suggests that sometimes the person who steps out may be the truer version, the one that has survived scrutiny, and has chosen what to reveal and what to bury. For some, the selves we perform are the selves we end up becoming.

‘Fashion’, he insists, ‘is always in very specific places’, those liminal zones where intimacy and performance rub together. It’s a stage, a sanctuary, a dressing room, a confessional, a space where glamour and vulnerability both co-exist and depend on each other. The bathroom is where people slip away to fall apart, to hide, to cry. And also, to check themselves out.

It pricked a nerve for some. One YouTube viewer wrote, ‘I don’t understand… what was once beauty has been flushed down the loo.’ Another commented, ‘This is not Valentino… this is a WC.’ For some, it felt as if the valentine had been taken out of the Valentino, far less romantic and far more stark.

Oh dear… the moment of self-reflection in the bathroom mirror. Photo: Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images

Under the cold, flat glare of fluorescent light, faces loose their mask, and the self is pared back to something exposed and unfiltered. In and out of the bathrooms, opening and closing like theatrical curtains the garments acted as fragile armour for ever-shifting identities. At Valentino, the clothes were on full display, yet the liminal setting and the illuminated mirrors made the models seem as though they moved with an acute awareness of their own image. It was raw and unfiltered, a reminder of a life beyond the runway.

Later in the interview, Michele turns his ironic eye to vanity. Though he claims to dislike it, he admits it ‘keeps the world buzzing’ and that without it, no one would have gone to the moon. He challenges the belief that beauty is necessary, declaring, ‘People think you need beautiful things. You don’t.’ ‘Sexiness is old-fashioned’, he adds. Instead, he turns to the Greek concept of Eros, God of love, desire and procreation, seeking to Eros-itise life itself, infusing sexiness into moments and objects not literally sexual, showing that it can appear in many unexpected forms. This Eros-itised bathroom becomes a place of ego and self-actualisation.

Ultimately, cubicles are where we can let it all drop, and the bathroom is where we maintain the performance, reapplying the mask that slowly slips off. It’s a space where we confront the sometimes brutal reality of how others have been seeing us before we even looked in the mirror. It’s where appearances are kept up, negotiated and tested. In the womb-like blood-red world Michele presented, the bathroom becomes a place of rebirth where one can go to retreat. Yet, it can also be edgy and even unsettling. Freed from surveillance, it is one of the few spaces where discretion reigns, where we can act without being watched. Behind closed doors, we never quite know what we will find, or what we will reveal. But, no matter how tightly zipped into the Versace dress or how A-list the status, everyone eventually has to go. It is somewhere we collide and collect. The smallest room is maybe the most important of all.