The red is still there, in the archive and on the runway
The red is still there, in the archive and on the runway. But the house that built its name on that particular shade — Pantone 18-1663, registered, protected — now moves through a different grammar entirely. Valentino in 2025 is not the Valentino of gowns trailing down Spanish Steps. It is not even the house Pierpaolo Piccioli left eighteen months ago. It is something unfinished, mid-sentence, still working out what it wants to say.
Valentino Garavani opened his atelier on Via Condotti in 1959. He had trained under Jean Dessès and Guy Laroche, and he returned to Rome with a conviction that couture could be both grand and wearable. His first major commission came in 1962: the white collection he showed in Florence, which Vogue called "the most lyrical show of the season." By 1968, he had dressed Jacqueline Kennedy for her wedding to Aristotle Onassis. The gown was ivory, long-sleeved, precise. It made him.
The house grew on that foundation: eveningwear that moved, colour deployed with discipline, an understanding that opulence works best when it knows where to stop. Valentino Red became the house code, but the real signature was balance. A gown might have volume in the skirt, but the bodice stayed close. A bow might be oversized, but the fabric was always weightless. He retired in 2008, after a final couture show at the Musée Rodin. The house continued without him.
The Piccioli era and its end
Pierpaolo Piccioli arrived at Valentino in 1999, working first as an accessories designer, then as co-creative director alongside Maria Grazia Chiuri. When Chiuri left for Dior in 2016, Piccioli took sole control. What followed was eight years of critical favour and commercial growth. He kept the romance but stripped the reference points. His Valentino was not about looking back to the founder's archive. It was about now: oversized silhouettes, saturated colour, a kind of joyfulness that felt both naïve and entirely intentional.
The Spring 2022 collection, shown in September 2021, marked a peak. The palette ran from fuchsia to electric blue to acid yellow. The silhouettes were huge — cocoon coats, trapeze dresses, trousers wide enough to obscure the shoe. The casting was open, inclusive, and the clothes didn't ask to be understood in terms of what came before. Piccioli called it "the beginning of a new story." Sales followed. By 2022, Valentino's revenue had grown to €1.4 billion, up from €1.2 billion the year prior. The handbag business, relaunched with the Locò and Roman Stud lines, contributed significantly. The clothes were critically lauded, but it was the accessories that paid for them.
Then, in March 2024, Piccioli left. The house announced his departure without drama: a mutual decision, no acrimony, a recognition that cycles end. He had been there twenty-five years. The question became what Valentino would be without him.
Alessandro Michele and the reset
Alessandro Michele was announced as creative director in late March 2024. The appointment surprised no one and made total sense in equal measure. Michele had spent twelve years at Gucci, building a universe of magpie eclecticism, archival plunder, and commercial dominance. He left Gucci in November 2022, after revenue growth slowed and Kering decided it was time for a refresh. Valentino, owned by Mayhoola, the Qatari investment fund, needed someone who could speak to both the house's couture legacy and the demands of a global luxury business. Michele, in theory, could do both.
His first collection for Valentino debuted in September 2024, for Spring/Summer 2025. It was shown in Paris, in a converted industrial space in the 16th arrondissement. The casting included Elton John, who sat front row in a powder-blue suit. The clothes themselves were dense with reference: Edwardian blouses, 1920s drop-waist dresses, 1970s maxi skirts, all layered with lace, broderie anglaise, floral appliqué. There were men in ruffled shirts and wide trousers. There were women in tiered gowns that brushed the floor. It looked like Michele's Gucci, but rendered in a softer palette — less maximalism, more melancholy.
The reviews were mixed. Some critics praised the craft, the handwork, the sheer volume of ideas. Others noted that it felt like a continuation of what Michele had already done, transposed onto a different house. The question was whether Valentino needed another version of Alessandro Michele, or whether it needed something else entirely.
Sales data from the first two quarters of Michele's tenure suggests caution. Valentino's revenue for the first half of 2024, before Michele's collection hit stores, was flat year-on-year. The handbag business, which had driven growth under Piccioli, slowed. The Chinese market, critical for European luxury houses, remained soft. By the time Michele's designs reached retail in early 2025, the broader luxury market had contracted. Valentino was not alone in this — Kering, LVMH, and Richemont all reported weaker results — but it meant Michele's reset was happening in a less forgiving environment than Piccioli's expansion.
Where the house stands now
Valentino in mid-2025 is a house between identities. The Garavani archive is still there, still referenced, still trotted out for retrospectives and museum shows. The Piccioli chapter is closed but not forgotten — his aesthetic still hangs in wardrobes, still circulates on resale platforms, still defines what many people think Valentino looks like. Michele's vision is only beginning to take shape. One collection is not enough to redirect a house. It takes three, maybe four, before the language settles and the market decides whether it wants to speak it.
The commercial reality is that Valentino needs to grow. Mayhoola did not acquire the house in 2012 to keep it at €1.4 billion in revenue. The target, unspoken but understood, is €2 billion and beyond. That requires more than beautiful clothes. It requires handbags that sell at volume, shoes that become signatures, fragrances that move units in airport duty-free. Michele's Gucci succeeded because it had all of those things. His Valentino does not yet.
The brand's image, meanwhile, is in flux. Under Piccioli, Valentino became associated with a kind of optimistic, colour-saturated modernity. Under Michele, it is moving toward something more layered, more referential, more about the past as a place to inhabit rather than escape. Whether that resonates with the customer who bought a pink PP bag in 2022 remains to be seen.
There is also the question of what Valentino's customer actually wants. The couture client, who comes to the atelier on Piazza Mignanelli for a made-to-measure gown, is not the same person buying a logo belt in a Shanghai mall. The house has to serve both, and the tension between those two audiences is not always productive. Piccioli managed it by making the ready-to-wear feel like a democratic version of the couture. Michele's approach is less clear. His first collection leaned heavily into craft and complexity, but it is not obvious how that translates into accessible luxury.
The company has also invested heavily in retail. New flagships have opened in New York, London, and Tokyo over the past eighteen months. The store design, overseen by Michele in collaboration with the architecture firm OMA, is spare and gallery-like — white walls, terrazzo floors, minimal fixtures. It is a departure from the more ornate interiors of the Piccioli era. Whether it helps or hinders sales is still unclear.
What is clear is that Valentino is not in crisis. It is not haemorrhaging revenue or shedding staff. It is simply in a moment of recalibration, which is both more common and more difficult than it sounds. The house has a new creative director, a loyal client base, a strong archive, and a parent company willing to invest. It also has a market that is less buoyant than it was three years ago, and a customer who has more options than ever.
There is a photograph from Michele's first Valentino show that keeps surfacing. It shows a model in a cream lace dress, mid-stride, the hem pooling slightly on the floor. The dress is beautiful. It is also, unmistakably, a dress that requires a certain kind of life to wear — a life with time, with occasion, with somewhere to go that justifies three metres of handworked lace. Whether enough people still live that life, or want to, is the question Valentino is now trying to answer.
