For her spring 2026 Emilio Pucci show, Camille Miceli summoned her loyal tribe of friends and family, and anyone else tempted by the promise of Sicilian sunlight, a few cannolis, and plates of pasta alla Norma, to Ortigia, a jewel-box island dangling off Siracusa, where mythology lingers. It unfolded beneath the grand, brooding arches of the Grotta dei Cordari, a setting so theatrical, one expects a Greek chorus to emerge at any moment. Miceli, being half Italian, knows rather well how to wield the charm of the picturesque. But she’s also Parisian, meaning she refuses to be entirely seduced by it. “Let’s be honest,” she deadpanned, “Sicily is a trend. Everyone wants to come here.” After four years steering the Florentine house, Miceli has found her footing. She appears entirely à l’aise, tossing together archival prints and new riffs with a breezy, knowing hand, spiking the whole affair with a cool, bohemian sensuality, and a certain “unpretentiousness.” “Pucci is not pretentious,” she insisted. “We’re not snobby. We’re approachable.” Indeed, hers is not the kind of fashion that requires a decoding manual: You see it, you want it, you reach for it. The clothes are feminine, infused with a buoyant joy that’s often lacking elsewhere. Miceli’s recipe, which is equal parts charm, clarity, and a studied lack of hauteur, appears to be working.

Emilio Pucci obviously got to Sicily first, sketching 1950s prints inspired by the island, immortalized in a now-mythic image shot in Palermo’s Piazza Armerina, where a young woman in a Pucci bathing suit practically merges with the mosaics beneath her. Miceli was drawn by Ortigia’s faded grandeur: balconies looping around palazzos like crinolines, theatrical and slightly crumbling. “I love the disused, decadent side,” she says, which in Sicily is less an aesthetic than a civic commitment.

She called the collection Alba, which is Italian for dawn, only in Miceli’s world, dawn doesn’t so much break as refract. There’s the literal Sicilian sunrise; colors were lifted straight from Mount Etna. There’s also a conceptual sunrise; Olafur Eliasson’s artificial sun at the Tate Modern, which bathed viewers in a kind of glowing transcendence, might’ve inspired a series of sensuous loose-knitted tunics shimmering with a slightly hallucinogenic glow. And then there’s the dawn that arrives after a long night out, when the music fades and the eyeliner smudges. Time for free-spirited, daring Pucci en deshabillé.

Miceli’s heroines oscillated between yogi and rave girl. It’s 2026, and duality is almost a dress code. Fringes of sequins flickered like controlled flames, a house signature reimagined with extra voltage, and “Fiamme” prints rippled across the collection. Elsewhere she explored Pucci staples: foulard dresses, pareos slung across well-honed hips, and tops generously revealing equally disciplined abs, some with a darker undercurrent.

Slip dresses recalled ’90s minimalism and liquid jerseys revived the Marmo print, while fishnet, sequins, and flashes of antique gold kept things anchored firmly in after-dark territory. The finale arrived with Angelina Kendall clad in a top composed entirely of jewelry. Alba, in Miceli’s hands, was less about a gentle new beginning and more about that ambiguous moment between endings and possibilities, when you’re not entirely sure if you’re going home to bed, or starting over with a sun salutation. Pucci, at the moment, does both.