“The list is at the origin of culture. It is part of the history of art and literature. And what does culture want? To make the infinite comprehensible. It wants to create order—not always, but often. And how, as human beings, do we cope with infinity? How can we grasp the ungraspable? Through lists, catalogs, collections in museums, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. The list does not destroy culture, it creates it.”
(Umberto Eco, The infinity of Lists)
The fascination with lists and the taste for the enumeration of things, people and phenomena have always accompanied the history of humanity. Despite its apparent simplicity, the rhetorical figure of the list has rarely been delved into by scholars in relation to its narrative and poetic potential. Umberto Eco, unlike others, deserves credit for bringing an evocative interpretation of this topos to the forefront of contemporary debate, gathering and analyzing in detail examples that go through art and literature: from Homer to Joyce, from Ezekiel to Gadda, through Arcimboldo, Calvino and Moreau.
According to the Italian semiologist, every list shifts between two opposite and complementary tendencies. On one side, it’s an attempt to confine the infinite extension of the existing within a meaningful framework. A way to bring some order to the chaos of the universe. Such attempts of enumeration mainly serve a practical function, as in the compilation of testamentary assets, library inventories or museum archives. On the other side, the list can transcend into poetry becoming a visionary, aesthetic and narrative instrument. In this case the list, bowing before the unspeakable, vortically alludes to the infinite. It doesn’t aim to tame the chaos, rather to contemplate it.
These two dimensions often coexist, arranging secret rendezvous. As Bernard Sève reminds us: “the list is bringing order and inciting to dispersion at the same time; the list is indifferently closed and open, static and dynamic, finite and infinite, ordered and disordered, without ever ceasing to be a list”. Because of that duplicity, being both an instrument for order and a source of disorientation, the list generates rapture and daze.
More specifically, Eco mentions “the vertigo of the list” to evoke that particular sensation produced by the tumultuous, unrestrained and obsessive listing that often stops on the verge of an etcetera. That etcetera creates a suspension before something that can potentially stretch to infinity, that cannot be contained or confined. The vertigo arises, in fact, from the unfinished nature of any possible cataloguing; lying in the thirst for infinity that dwells within any finite thing.
These considerations kept me company during the preparation of my first Haute Couture show. And they pushed me to imagine every unique, finite and unrepeatable dress, as an uninterrupted and potentially infinite catalogue of words: an ungrammatical list that proceeds through accumulation and juxtaposition. Forty-eight dresses: forty-eight lists. In each list both material and immaterial elements coexist: measurable proportions, emotional threads, pictorial references, commodity notes, biographical quilts, cinematic weaves, chromatic geometries, philosophical seams, musical marks, symbolic warps, linguistic embroideries, botanical fragments, visual archetypes, historic fabrics, narrative intarsia, relational knots, etcetera.
As if every dress evoked, through association, a plurality of interconnected worlds: a feverish and incessant stratification of references that makes its uniqueness explode. Calvino would call such list “a zodiac of ghosts”: a poetics of the etcetera where every thread, every seam, every trace of colour transfigures into a multiplicity of words that transcend the boundaries of the visible. A constellation of visions that trembles and dissolves into the whirl of enumeration.
Each dress is not just an object, it’s rather the knot of a net of significance: a living cartography that keeps traces of visual and symbolic memories. It’s a narrative archive where improbable combinations find harmony, recalls cross eras, cultures and echoes of past stories resonate with the present. It’s a list that unfolds into a burst of combinations, recalls, echoes to the very edge of the speakable. It’s the journey into the vertigo of an unfinished multiplicity.
Alessandro
Alessandro Michele Valentino valentino haute couture Valentino Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2025 Valentino Vertigineux