The fitting room at Valentino's Via Condotti atelier in 1967 held three women, two mirrors, and a rail of red silk

The fitting room at Valentino's Via Condotti atelier in 1967 held three women, two mirrors, and a rail of red silk. Valentino Garavani stood back while his assistant pinned a bodice on a model whose name the press would not record. The client, however, was Jacqueline Kennedy, and the dress would appear in every photograph of her wedding to Aristotle Onassis the following year.

This was the pattern: one woman in the room, another in the press, a third in the archives. Valentino built an empire on women who moved between those positions, and three in particular—Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, and more recently Zendaya—came to define not just his aesthetic but the way the house speaks about femininity itself.

The widow and the red dress

Jacqueline Kennedy ordered her first Valentino pieces in 1964, three years before the Via Condotti fitting. She was no longer First Lady. The American press had moved on. What she wanted, apparently, was to be left alone, and what Valentino offered was a kind of armour that photographs well: clean lines, structured bodices, nothing that could be described as fussy.

The wedding dress—ivory silk with lace cuffs, higher neckline than you'd expect—was not red. But the evening coat she wore the week after was, and it is that garment, not the wedding gown, that Valentino's atelier still references in mood boards. The red was not scarlet. It was darker, closer to cinnabar, a red that does not ask for attention but does not yield space either.

Kennedy wore Valentino for the next decade. She did not give interviews about it. The relationship was professional, repeat business, the kind of client list that a young couturier in Rome converts into international credibility. What mattered was not that she loved the clothes—though perhaps she did—but that she returned. Valentino's reputation in America rests substantially on that repetition.

The house has leaned into this history unevenly. Under Pierpaolo Piccioli, Kennedy appeared in anniversary campaigns, her image licensed and reproduced. The narrative was always the same: grace, restraint, a woman who knew what she wanted. It is a tidy story. The complication is that Kennedy also knew what she was buying, which was a degree of removal from American scrutiny. Valentino was European, expensive, and far enough from Seventh Avenue that wearing him was a statement about where her life was now located. The clothes were part of that geography.

The friend and the caftan

Elizabeth Taylor, by contrast, was never restrained. She collected Valentino the way she collected husbands and diamonds, which is to say enthusiastically and without much concern for what the accumulation suggested. Her first commission was a caftan in 1967. She ordered twelve more by the end of the year.

Taylor and Valentino were friends in the way that celebrities and designers are friends, which involves late dinners, mutual press benefit, and a genuine affection that does not preclude business. She wore his gowns to the Oscars, his caftans on yachts, his day dresses to divorce proceedings. The clothes were never subtle. Taylor was not interested in subtlety.

What she gave Valentino was volume. Not in the garments—though the caftans were substantial—but in coverage. Every appearance generated photographs, and every photograph included a caption with the designer's name. By 1970, Valentino was the couturier for women who wanted to be seen, which was a different market than the one Kennedy represented but no less lucrative.

The caftans themselves were exercises in surface. Silk, often printed, occasionally beaded, cut to skim rather than cling. They photograph well from a distance, which is where most of Taylor's public existed in relation to her. The garments were not about the body underneath. They were about the fact of Elizabeth Taylor in a room, or on a yacht, or at a party that you were not attending.

Valentino's archives still hold several of those original caftans. They are less impressive in person. The silk has faded, the beading looks heavier than it did in photographs, and the cuts are simple enough that a competent dressmaker could reproduce them in an afternoon. What they represent, however, is a kind of couture that no longer exists: clothes made for a woman who will be photographed constantly and who needs a uniform that signals both availability and distance. Taylor managed that balance. The caftans were part of the toolkit.

The actress and the algorithm

Zendaya is not a muse in the way that Kennedy or Taylor were muses, because the infrastructure of celebrity has changed and because Valentino itself is no longer the house that Garavani ran. Piccioli dressed her consistently from 2021 until his departure in 2024, and the partnership was both more and less than what the term "muse" suggests.

More, because the collaboration was explicit. Zendaya's stylist, Law Roach, worked directly with Piccioli's team on custom pieces that were engineered for specific red carpets. The clothes were not simply pulled from a collection. They were designed with her body, her schedule, and her image strategy in mind.

Less, because the relationship was also content. Every appearance generated social media coverage, and that coverage fed directly into Valentino's digital presence. The clothes were beautiful—Piccioli's final collections for the house were some of his most accomplished—but they were also assets in a broader marketing apparatus. Zendaya was not buying the clothes. She was collaborating on a shared project of visibility.

The 2023 SAG Awards gown is the clearest example: a hot pink column with a structured neckline and a train that required two assistants. It was not a dress you could wear anywhere else, which was the point. The photographs circulated for weeks. Valentino's Instagram account gained 200,000 followers in three days.

What Zendaya gave the house was reach, and what the house gave her was a kind of editorial credibility that other red carpet partnerships do not always provide. Valentino is still Valentino, even under new creative direction. The name carries weight. Whether that weight translates into the kind of legacy that Kennedy and Taylor represent is a different question, and one that probably cannot be answered while the algorithm is still running.

What remains

The through line is not the clothes. Kennedy's gowns, Taylor's caftans, and Zendaya's custom pieces share a certain formality, but the aesthetic is not consistent across decades. What connects them is the way Valentino has always positioned women as the centre of the narrative, not as models or mannequins but as figures with their own momentum.

That sounds like PR copy, but the distinction matters. A muse, in the traditional sense, is passive. She inspires. These three women were clients, collaborators, and in Taylor's case, a friend who drove business. They wore the clothes because the clothes did something for them, not because Valentino needed a face for a campaign.

The house has changed hands twice since Garavani's retirement in 2008. Piccioli's tenure ended last year, and the new creative director has not yet shown a first collection. What remains is the archive, the name, and a reputation built substantially on the women who wore the work when it mattered. Whether that is enough for the next chapter is not a question about design. It is a question about what kind of woman wants to be seen in Valentino now, and whether the house can still offer her a reason to return.