Valentino: a house, in brief

There is a dress in the Metropolitan Museum's collection, circa 1968, cut from ivory gazar and embroidered with coral branches in silk floss. The bodice is fitted but not tight. The skirt falls to mid-calf. It weighs almost nothing. When you stand in front of it, you understand immediately that Valentino Garavani was not interested in making women look powerful. He was interested in making them look like they had never needed power in the first place.

That distinction—between armour and ease—runs through the entire history of the house. Valentino has never been about disruption. It has been about a very particular kind of certainty, one that assumes you already know where you are going and simply need the right thing to wear when you arrive.

Valentino Garavani and the invention of Roman red

Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani opened his atelier on Via Condotti in 1960, backed by his father and an architect named Giancarlo Giammetti, who would become his business partner and the operational spine of the house for the next five decades. Garavani had trained under Jean Dessès in Paris and returned to Rome with a conviction that couture could be both rigorous and tender. His first collection showed in Florence. By 1962, he was dressing Elizabeth Taylor, and by 1968, Jacqueline Kennedy wore Valentino to her wedding to Aristotle Onassis.

The red came early. Garavani has said he saw it first at the opera in Barcelona—a woman in a particular shade that sat somewhere between vermillion and lacquer. He called it Rosso Valentino and used it relentlessly: evening coats, day dresses, shoes, even the carpets in his ateliers. It was not a red that shouted. It was a red that made you look twice because it seemed to have been there all along.

What Garavani built in those first two decades was a house that understood grandeur as a form of manners. His clients were not trying to be noticed. They were trying to move through the world without friction, and his clothes facilitated that. The construction was precise—boned bodices, hand-finished hems, sleeves set with a pitch that allowed the arm to fall naturally—but the effect was never stiff. A Valentino gown from 1975 photographs like a watercolour. Up close, it is twelve hours of handwork per square foot.

He retired in 2007, selling the business to Mayhoola, a private equity vehicle backed by the Qatari royal family, in 2012. By then, Valentino had become something larger than a couturier. It was a reference point, the house you named when you wanted to describe a certain kind of femininity that no longer existed but had never entirely disappeared.

Pierpaolo Piccioli and the amplification of gesture

Pierpaolo Piccioli arrived at Valentino in 1999 as co-creative director alongside Maria Grazia Chiuri. When Chiuri left for Dior in 2016, Piccioli stayed and began to do something unusual. He took Garavani's vocabulary—the red, the volume, the insistence on craft—and made it louder.

His first solo collection, autumn/winter 2017, was a study in scale. Coats fell past the knee. Sleeves ballooned at the shoulder and tapered sharply at the wrist. The palette was mostly black, punctuated by that red and a particular shade of fuchsia that became as recognisable as the house codes it sat beside. The silhouette was not new—Garavani had used volume throughout the Seventies—but Piccioli pushed it past elegance into something closer to architecture.

What made the work compelling was its refusal to apologise. Piccioli was not interested in making clothes that disappeared into the background. He was interested in making clothes that reframed the room. A cape from his spring 2019 collection, cut from layers of organza and dyed in gradients from pale pink to deep magenta, required sixteen metres of cloth and weighed less than a kilogram. It was not practical. It was not meant to be. It was meant to make you reconsider what a dress could do when it stopped trying to be wearable and started trying to be a painting.

He also expanded the house's idea of who could wear it. His campaigns featured models of different ages, sizes, and backgrounds, often styled in ways that emphasised individuality over house aesthetic. A Valentino show under Piccioli felt less like a parade of clothes and more like a casting call for a film that had not been written yet. The clothes were still immaculate—ateliers do not unlearn their training—but the context had shifted. Valentino was no longer just for women who moved through the world without friction. It was for anyone who wanted to be seen.

Piccioli left in March 2024. His final collection, autumn/winter 2024, was shown in a raw concrete space in Milan. The palette was muted—grey, navy, black, with flashes of that red. The silhouettes were quieter than they had been in years. It felt like a full stop.

Alessandro Michele and the question of what comes next

Alessandro Michele's appointment as creative director was announced two months later. If Piccioli had amplified Garavani's vocabulary, Michele seemed poised to dismantle it entirely. His work at Gucci from 2015 to 2022 had been defined by maximalism, eclecticism, and a kind of magpie approach to reference that treated fashion history as a costume box rather than a canon. Valentino, by contrast, had always been about restraint—or at least about a very controlled kind of extravagance.

Michele's first collection for the house, spring 2025, showed in September 2024. It was not what anyone expected. The silhouettes were narrow, almost Edwardian. The palette was soft—cream, pale blue, blush pink, with very little of the house red. There were high collars, long sleeves, skirts that grazed the ankle. The models wore their hair pulled back severely. The effect was oddly monastic, as if Michele had looked at Garavani's archive and decided the most radical thing he could do was subtract rather than add.

Whether it works remains to be seen. Michele is not Garavani, and he is not Piccioli. He is a designer who has built a career on pastiche, and Valentino has never been a house that borrowed. It has always been a house that insisted. The tension between those two instincts—between Michele's instinct to reference and Valentino's instinct to assert—will likely define the next chapter.

What remains

There is a photograph from 1967, taken at Valentino's atelier on Via Condotti. Garavani is standing in the centre of the workroom, surrounded by seamstresses. He is holding a length of silk, and everyone is looking at him. The photograph is not staged. It is simply a record of how the work happened: one man with an idea, and a dozen women who knew how to make it real.

That is still how it happens. The atelier is now in a different building, and the man holding the silk is someone else, but the process has not changed. A Valentino dress still begins with a drawing, then a toile, then hours of fitting and adjustment until the cloth does what it is supposed to do. The house has changed hands, changed directions, changed its idea of who it is for. But it has not changed the fact that a dress, when it is made properly, can make you believe in something you did not know you wanted.