## The Red Room

The Red Room

Valentino Garavani stood in a fitting room on Via Condotti in 1960, pinning silk to a mannequin that would not cooperate. He had opened his first atelier three months earlier with money borrowed from his father and a single assistant. The mannequin kept tipping. The silk kept slipping. He had apprenticed in Paris under Jean Dessès and Guy Laroche, learned how to drape jersey so it moved like water, learned how to cut a sleeve so it sat without a wrinkle. None of that training had prepared him for the business of running a house.

His business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, was twenty-two and had no background in fashion. They had met two years earlier on the Spanish Steps. Giammetti had been studying architecture. Within a year he was managing the books, negotiating with fabric suppliers, and learning how to speak to clients who expected the deference of a courtier and the discretion of a priest.

The house they built together would last sixty years. What remains now is a question worth asking.

Paris, Then Rome

Garavani left Voghera, a small town south of Milan, at seventeen. His mother had been a dressmaker. He sketched constantly, filled notebooks with gowns he had no means to make. In 1950 he enrolled at the Accademia dell'Arte in Milan, stayed a year, then moved to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. He apprenticed at Dessès, where he learned to handle chiffon and construct evening wear that required an engineer's patience. By the time he moved to Laroche in 1958, he could cut a coat that needed no alteration.

He returned to Rome in 1959 because Paris was crowded and because Italian fashion was beginning to cohere into something that was not simply French technique performed south of the Alps. The first Valentino collection debuted in July 1960 at the Pitti Palace in Florence. It was well received. The second, shown in Rome in 1962, established him as a designer who understood how to dress women who wanted to be seen but not examined.

The breakthrough came in 1967. Jacqueline Kennedy wore a Valentino dress to the opera in Rome. The photographs circulated widely. The dress was ivory silk, simple in line, with a hemline that grazed the knee. It was not revolutionary. It was, however, exactly what a woman in her position could wear without provoking comment or appearing to court it. That kind of discretion is harder to achieve than spectacle.

Rosso Valentino

The red came a year later. Garavani had been using variations of it since the early collections, but in 1968 he committed to a single shade and gave it a name. Rosso Valentino is not scarlet, not crimson, not vermillion. It sits somewhere between arterial and operatic, a red that photographs well and holds its own under stage lighting. He used it on everything: evening gowns, day suits, coats lined in silk faille. It became a house signature in the way that few colours do, recognisable at a distance, impossible to mistake for another designer's palette.

The construction underneath was what mattered. A Valentino gown from the 1970s required between eighty and two hundred hours of atelier work depending on the embroidery. The house employed lacemakers, embroiderers, and seamstresses who had trained in the Roman ateliers that still operated as they had in the 1920s. Garavani preferred a fitted bodice with a skirt that moved independently, a silhouette that required precise balance. Too much weight in the skirt and it pulled the bodice down. Too little and it looked unfinished.

He dressed Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, and later, Diana, Princess of Wales. The work was consistent: clean lines, rich fabrics, embroidery that enhanced rather than overwhelmed. He avoided trends. A Valentino gown from 1975 does not look dated in the way that a Halston or a Saint Laurent from the same year might. It looks formal, expensive, and slightly remote.

The Sale

Garavani sold the house in 1998 to HdP, an Italian conglomerate, for approximately $300 million. He stayed on as creative director. The house changed hands again in 2002, this time to Marzotto. In 2007, Permira, a private equity firm, acquired it for $4 billion. Garavani retired in 2008. He was seventy-six. Giammetti retired with him.

The final couture show took place at the Musée Rodin in Paris. The collection was a retrospective, a parade of every silhouette and every shade of red the house had produced over forty-eight years. The models walked through the sculpture garden at dusk. Garavani and Giammetti took their bow together, then left the stage.

What followed was a succession of creative directors tasked with interpreting a legacy that had been built on a very specific idea of femininity. Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli arrived in 2008 as co-creative directors. They had both worked at Fendi and understood how to translate archival codes into contemporary product. Chiuri left in 2016 for Dior. Piccioli continued alone until 2024, when the house announced his departure and the appointment of Alessandro Michele, formerly of Gucci.

What Remains

Michele's first collection for Valentino debuted in September 2024. It was, predictably, divisive. He layered references to the house archive with his own vocabulary: lace over tweed, embroidered motifs on tailored suiting, a colour palette that ranged from Rosso Valentino to moss green to powder blue. The silhouette was looser than Piccioli's, the styling more cluttered. It looked like Michele, which meant it did not look like Valentino.

The question is whether that matters. A house founded on the vision of one designer rarely survives that designer's departure without becoming something else entirely. Chanel is not Coco Chanel. Dior is not Christian Dior. What remains is a name, a set of visual codes, and a business structure designed to extract value from both.

Valentino the house still produces couture, still employs ateliers in Rome, still uses Rosso Valentino as a signature. But the work no longer carries the particular tension that defined Garavani's output: the balance between restraint and opulence, between being seen and being examined. That tension was personal. It cannot be taught, and it cannot be replicated by a designer who learned their craft in a different era under different pressures.

Garavani and Giammetti still live in Rome. They are rarely photographed. The house they built continues without them, as houses do. The question is not whether it survives, but whether survival is the same as continuity.