Yes, it’s fashion protocol, but pinning one’s mood(s) to a board to telegraph a collection always seems an act of casual faux-creative cruelty not unlike skewering a once-fluttering butterfly in a vitrine. This evening at Valentino, though, the mood board was a beautiful, beautiful thing: because they—there were four densely packed indexes of influences—helped enormously to delineate the outrageous variety of thought mustered by Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli as they mustered this collection. From Burroughs to Kerouac via mixtapes, Pearly Queens (Gucci went there, too), punks, wage slaves, Paul, Mick, John, Sid, Sartre, ethnicity, and several dissertations’ worth more.

So what was the unifying factor?

Chiuri said: “It’s about groups. About On the Road, Into the Wild. It’s about a trip around the world but also into yourself.”

Piccioli added: “It’s starting from the idea of existentialism. As coming out from a safe situation and rethinking the new, a sense of being a man in the world. Existentialism was born between the two World Wars and it became more strong after the Second World War, after dignity was destroyed. You have to find your own individuality, your own way to express yourself.”

The upshot was that this was a valiantly sincere effort to engage with the real problems of now through the entirely insufficient medium of gorgeously made menswear. After a long—borderline worryingly long—black turtleneck section that came spiked with studded businessman but was an ode to the founding fathers of ontological dissonance (Jean-Paul S and Albert C), this collection exploded into mood board–spawned variation. The point was to present man as his own narrative device, his own protagonist, author of his story. Yes, the fact that it was done so within the remit of a fashion show was perhaps unintentionally ironic, but the message stood. Clothes are articulated only by their wearer—but this Valentino show collection gave you something to say, beautifully, straight out of the box.