## The Fitting Room on Via Gregoriana

The Fitting Room on Via Gregoriana

Valentino Garavani stood in a first-floor salon on Via Gregoriana in 1959, pinning a sleeve that wouldn't hang right. He was twenty-seven. The room smelled of sizing and steam. His business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, was downstairs negotiating with a fabric supplier who wanted payment up front. They had opened the atelier six months earlier with money borrowed from Garavani's father. The sleeve still wasn't right.

That image — a young couturier alone with a problem of drape — feels impossibly distant from the Valentino that exists now. The house survives, certainly. It makes clothes, holds shows, employs hundreds. But the man who founded it left in 2008, and the question of what remains is less about continuity than about whether a fashion house is a set of gestures or simply a name on a contract.

Voghera to Paris

Garavani was born in Voghera, a small city in Lombardy, in 1932. His parents ran a successful electrical goods business. He showed no interest in electricity. At seventeen he moved to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and later the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. He worked for Jean Dessès, then Guy Laroche. The training was classical: pattern-cutting, draping, an understanding of the female body as a problem of engineering and proportion. Paris in the early fifties was still the centre. Dior's New Look had reset the terms. A young Italian with good hands could learn everything there.

He returned to Italy in 1959, not to Milan but to Rome. The choice mattered. Milan was about industry, ready-to-wear, the future. Rome was about cinema, aristocracy, a certain kind of evening. Garavani opened his maison with Giammetti, whom he had met two years earlier. Giammetti had studied architecture but never practised. He became the business half of the partnership, and the partnership lasted fifty years.

Red, and the Women Who Wore It

The first collection was shown in the Pitti Palace in Florence in 1962. It was well received but not transformative. What changed things was the colour. Garavani had been using a particular shade of red — not scarlet, not crimson, something between the two — since the early sixties. By 1968 it had a name: Rosso Valentino. The shade appeared on evening gowns, day dresses, coats. It photographed well. It looked extraordinary against tanned skin.

The women who wore Valentino in the sixties and seventies were not looking for revolution. They were looking for a dress that made them look like the best version of themselves at a gala, a wedding, a state dinner. Jacqueline Kennedy wore Valentino to her wedding to Aristotle Onassis in 1968. Elizabeth Taylor wore it often. The house became the couturier of choice for women who had already decided what they wanted to look like and needed someone to execute it flawlessly.

The signature was never loud. Garavani favoured clean lines, precise tailoring, and embellishment that enhanced rather than overwhelmed. A Valentino gown from 1971 might have lace appliqué at the bodice and nothing else. The skirt would fall exactly where it needed to. The colour would do the rest.

The Long Reign

Valentino remained independent longer than most. While other couture houses were absorbed by conglomerates in the eighties and nineties, Garavani and Giammetti held on. They sold the business to HdP in 1998, then bought it back in 2002 with backing from a private equity firm. The price was reported at €3.5 billion. Two years later they sold again, this time to Marzotto. In 2007, Permira bought the house for €2.6 billion. The numbers are worth noting because they indicate what the name was worth on paper, even as the designer prepared to leave.

Garavani's final couture show was in January 2008 at the Musée Rodin in Paris. The collection was elegant, controlled, and entirely consistent with everything he had done before. There were no wild departures, no late-career experiments. He had built a vocabulary fifty years earlier and never felt the need to replace it.

What Remains

Since 2008, Valentino has had three creative directors: Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli as a duo from 2008 to 2016, then Piccioli alone until 2024, and now Alessandro Michele. Each brought their own vision. Piccioli's tenure, in particular, was critically lauded. He expanded the colour palette, brought a softer romanticism to the silhouettes, and made Valentino relevant to a generation that had no memory of the founder. His final show in March 2024 was widely praised. Michele's first collection, shown in September 2024, was maximalist, layered, and nothing like what came before.

The question is whether any of this is still Valentino in a meaningful sense. The red remains. The atelier on Piazza Mignanelli still produces couture. The archive is intact. But a fashion house is not a museum. It is a commercial entity that must generate product, revenue, and cultural attention. The clothes Michele designs are accomplished, but they do not descend from Garavani's vocabulary. They descend from Michele's own tenure at Gucci and his particular vision of ornamented excess.

This is not a criticism. It may be the only way a house survives. But it does mean that Valentino now exists in two places: in the archive, where the red gowns and lace overlays remain as evidence of a particular kind of mid-century elegance, and in the present, where the name continues because the business requires it to. The connection between the two is increasingly notional.

Garavani is ninety-two. He lives between London and Gstaad. He has not attended a Valentino show since he left. Giammetti, now eighty-two, occasionally appears at house events but holds no formal role. The atelier they opened on Via Gregoriana closed years ago. The maison's headquarters are elsewhere. The clothes are different. The founder's name is on the label, but his hand is not in the cloth.

What remains of Valentino, then, is what remains of any house once its founder departs: a name, a colour, an archive, and the question of whether any of that constitutes continuity or simply a very expensive form of memory.