The red is a distraction

The red is a distraction.

Valentino Garavani chose 18-1663 TP in 1959, and by the mid-sixties it had become the thing everyone saw first. Red gowns at the opera. Red coats in the society pages. The colour became the house, and the house became the colour, and somewhere in that collapse the other codes went quiet.

But they did not disappear.

The bow, the proportion, the pleat

Valentino Garavani opened his atelier on Via Condotti in 1960 with a single conviction: that a dress should move before the woman does. He built volume into the back of evening gowns so the fabric would arrive at a doorway ahead of the body. He set sleeves low on the shoulder to create a continuous line from clavicle to wrist. And he placed bows — small, structured, never floppy — at the points where a garment needed punctuation. The back of a neckline. The base of a spine. The interior waistband of a skirt, visible only when the wearer sat.

These were not decorative choices. They were architectural. The bow held the eye at a specific coordinate. The dropped shoulder opened the upper body into a plane. The volume at the back created a wake.

By 1968, the white collection had codified the vocabulary. Ivory silk faille. Bows the size of a closed fist. Pleats that released from the hip in a single radiating fan. Jacqueline Kennedy ordered the short ivory dress with the bow at the back and wore it to her second wedding. The photograph shows the bow first, then the woman. That is the garment doing its work.

Garavani retired in 2007. The house passed through Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, then to Piccioli alone in 2016. The red remained. The rockstud arrived and became its own distraction. But underneath, the bows continued. The pleats continued. The low-set sleeve continued, even when the silhouette moved away from gowns and into separates.

What Piccioli kept

Pierpaolo Piccioli's first solo collection for Valentino was fall 2016. The palette was darker than Garavani's — oxblood, forest, black with a high shine. But look at the construction. Coats with volume gathered at the centre back. Blouses with bows at the nape, sized to the width of two fingers. Trousers with a pleat that began at the natural waist and fell straight to the floor, no break.

He was not quoting the archive. He was continuing a method.

The method: identify the point on the body where structure should release into movement. Mark it. Then let the fabric do what it does.

For Garavani, that point was often the shoulder blade. For Piccioli, it migrated. Sometimes the small of the back. Sometimes the hollow of the throat. Sometimes the crook of the elbow, where a sleeve would gather and then flare into a cuff wide enough to frame the hand.

The 2019 haute couture collection made it explicit. Piccioli opened with a series of capes, each one built from a single piece of silk faille, pleated in a sunburst from a collar the diameter of a teacup. The pleats radiated down the back and stopped at the knee. When the model walked, the pleats opened and closed like a fan. When she stood still, they formed a perfect half-circle on the floor.

No red. No studs. Just a pleat and a collar and the physics of weight on bias-cut silk.

The codes that never photograph

Some of Valentino's signatures exist only in three dimensions.

The interior waistband, for instance. Garavani lined his skirts and trousers with grosgrain ribbon, always in a contrast colour, always stitched by hand. The ribbon sat against the skin. It was not visible in photographs, not mentioned in reviews, not part of the house's public language. But it was there, and it performed a function: it kept the waistline from stretching. It also created a private experience of luxury, known only to the wearer.

Piccioli kept this. Walk into a Valentino boutique and ask to see the interior of a tailored pant. The waistband will be finished in grosgrain, stitched at intervals of one centimetre. The thread will be silk. The colour will be something you did not expect — ecru inside black wool, or pale grey inside navy.

Then there is the hem weight. Garavani used lead weights sewn into the hems of evening skirts, placed every eight centimetres, each one the size of a lentil. The weights kept the hemline parallel to the floor, even when the wearer moved. They also made the skirt feel heavier than it looked, which changed the way a woman walked. Slower. More deliberate.

Piccioli does not use lead. He uses nickel-plated steel, lighter and more consistent in diameter. But the principle is identical. The skirt must have its own centre of gravity.

These are the codes that do not sell bags. They do not generate social content. They do not make it into the seasonal lookbook. But they are why a Valentino garment feels different on the body than a garment that only looks like Valentino.

Where the house is now

Alessandro Michele took over as creative director in March 2024. His first collection for Valentino was fall 2024, shown in Paris in a raw concrete space with no music.

The question was whether he would keep the codes or replace them.

He kept them.

The bows were smaller — some no larger than a thumbnail — but they were placed in the Garavani positions. Back of the neck. Interior waistband. Base of a sleeve where it met the cuff. The pleats were narrower, more like knife pleats than sunbursts, but they still released from a single point and moved independently of the body. And the shoulder line dropped. Not as low as Garavani's 1968 line, but low enough to shift the silhouette from structured to fluid.

Michele also brought back something Piccioli had set aside: the use of black and white as a primary palette. Garavani's white collection was a reset, a way to make the house legible without the red. Michele's first collection was two-thirds black and white, with red appearing only in the final twelve exits.

The red, when it came, was not 18-1663 TP. It was darker, closer to maroon. And it was not on gowns. It was on a men's overcoat with a single pleat at the centre back, finished with a grosgrain interior and a bow the size of a euro coin.

The pleat at the back of the coat

A friend who works in the Valentino atelier told me that the pattern-makers still use Garavani's original templates for certain shapes. Not the entire garment — the proportions have changed too much — but specific details. The angle of a pleat. The curve of a bow. The placement of a sleeve head.

She said the template for the centre-back pleat is kept in a flat file in the cutting room, and it has been traced so many times that the paper has worn thin at the edges.

I thought about that when I saw Michele's men's coat. The pleat at the back was narrow, almost invisible when the coat was buttoned. But when the model turned, the pleat opened into a vent that ran from the waist to the hem, and the lining was red.

Not the red. A red. But still.

The coat moved before the man did.