Valentino: a house, in brief

There is a photograph from 1968: Valentino Garavani, thirty-six years old, adjusting the hem of a white organdie gown in his atelier on Via Condotti. The model stands still. He is on his knees. The gown will appear in Vogue three weeks later, credited simply as 'Valentino', and the world will understand that a certain kind of Roman elegance—not showy, not minimal, but pitched somewhere between ceremony and restraint—has arrived.

That gown was not the first he made. It was not even the first white gown. But it was the one that clarified what Valentino meant when he said he wanted women to feel 'protected' by his clothes. Not armoured. Not disguised. Protected in the way good cloth protects: by sitting close, by moving when you move, by refusing to announce itself before you do.

The founding and the red

Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani opened his couture house in Rome in 1960, aged twenty-eight, after apprenticeships in Paris under Jean Dessès and Guy Laroche. He had money—his father owned a successful electrical components business in Voghera—and he had Giancarlo Giammetti, who would become his business partner and the operational mind behind the atelier's expansion. What he did not have, at first, was a signature.

That came in 1962, at the Pitti Palace in Florence, where he showed a collection that included several evening gowns in a particular shade of red. Not scarlet. Not crimson. Something between the two, with enough orange in it to read as warm under tungsten light and enough blue to hold its own in daylight. Valentino called it 'rosso Valentino'. The press called it a stroke of luck. It was neither. He had been mixing that red, or versions of it, since his Paris days, trying to find a colour that would photograph as richly as it appeared in person. He found it. Then he kept using it.

The red became shorthand for the house, but it was never the whole story. Valentino's work in the 1960s and 70s was about construction: how to engineer a bodice so it held without boning, how to set a sleeve so the armhole didn't pull when you lifted your arm, how to weight a skirt so it moved in one piece rather than in sections. He used organza, faille, gazar—cloths with body. His embroidery, often executed by Lesage in Paris, was dense but never stiff. When he put beads on tulle, he beaded the tulle until it behaved like cloth.

By 1970, Valentino had dressed Jacqueline Kennedy for her wedding to Aristotle Onassis. The dress was ivory, long-sleeved, with a pleated skirt and a high neckline. It was not, by any measure, a fashion statement. It was a piece of couture that understood its job: to let the woman wearing it be seen, not the seams.

The Giammetti era and the exit

Valentino retired in 2007, after forty-five years. The farewell show, held at the Musée Rodin in Paris, featured fifty models and three hundred looks spanning five decades. It was, by all accounts, excessive. It was also final. Valentino and Giammetti had sold the business to HdP in 1998, then to Permira in 2007, and the founder's departure left the house in a position most heritage maisons know well: how to continue without the person whose name is on the door.

Alessandra Facchinetti lasted sixteen months. Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli arrived in 2008 as co-creative directors, a structure that worked until Chiuri left for Dior in 2016. Piccioli stayed. For eight years, he ran Valentino alone, and what he did with it was clarify a language that had, under the founder, been about protection and ceremony. Piccioli made it about colour and volume.

His collections from 2016 onwards leaned into fuchsia, acid yellow, cobalt, and a particular shade of pink—Pantone 17-3240, which the house called 'Pink PP' after his initials. He used organza and tulle not for structure but for accumulation: skirts built from thirty layers, coats cut so wide they moved like capes, dresses that required no waist because the body was somewhere inside all that cloth. The silhouette was not fitted. It was inhabited.

Piccioli's Valentino was successful. Revenues grew. The pink became as recognisable as the red had been. But it was also divisive within the industry, where some critics felt the work had moved too far from the house's tailoring heritage and too close to a kind of poetic maximalism that read better in editorials than in the wardrobe. Others argued that Piccioli had done exactly what a creative director should: he had moved the house forward without pretending the founder had never existed.

He left in March 2024. Alessandro Michele, formerly of Gucci, was appointed two weeks later.

Michele and the return to ornament

Michele's first collection for Valentino, shown in September 2024, opened with a black coat over a white shirt and wide trousers. The coat had a fur collar. The shirt had a lace jabot. The trousers pooled at the ankle. It was not Piccioli's Valentino. It was not the founder's either. It was Michele doing what he does: treating fashion history as a costume shop and pulling pieces from different centuries until they sit together in a way that should not work but does.

His Valentino is more ornamented than Piccioli's, more referential, more willing to pile on lace and brocade and velvet and fur in a single look. It is also quieter in colour—lots of black, cream, burgundy, forest green. The pink is gone. The red appears occasionally, but it is not rosso Valentino. It is darker, closer to maroon.

What Michele has kept from the house's archive is the sense that these are clothes for people who want to be looked at but not examined. The embroidery is there. The volume is there. But the silhouette is softer, less architectural. A Michele coat does not hold its shape when you take it off. It collapses. That is not a flaw. It is a choice. He is making clothes that require a body, not a hanger.

Whether this works for Valentino long-term is unclear. Michele's aesthetic is strong, and it has commercial precedent—his tenure at Gucci proved that. But Valentino is not Gucci. It does not have the same appetite for irony or the same tolerance for excess. It is a house that, at its best, has always understood restraint. Not minimalism. Restraint. The difference is in how much work the cloth does versus how much the styling does.

What remains

There is another photograph, this one from 2023, taken at the Valentino archives in Milan. It shows a white gown from 1968—possibly the same one Garavani adjusted in that earlier image—hanging on a dress form. The organdie is still crisp. The seams are still invisible. It has been fifty-five years, and the gown has not aged because it was never young. It was always exactly what it was: a piece of couture that knew its job.

That is the test for any house that survives its founder. Not whether it can replicate what came before, but whether it can remember why the work mattered in the first place. Valentino mattered because it made clothes that protected without concealing, that moved with the body rather than against it, that understood ceremony as something you wear, not something you perform. The red was part of that. So was the white. So was the way a hem fell when no one was looking.

Michele's Valentino does not look like Piccioli's, and neither looks much like the founder's. But all three share this: they are houses built on the belief that cloth, cut properly and weighted correctly, can do most of the work. The rest is just colour.