There's a gown in the Met's archives—red, naturally—that still photographs badly
There's a gown in the Met's archives—red, naturally—that still photographs badly. Not because the dress lacks definition. The opposite. Under museum light, the silk gazar reads so intensely crimson that digital sensors clip the data. What remains on-screen is a flat, almost synthetic red, nothing like the dimensional scarlet you see in person. Valentino Garavani cut that dress in 1968, and fifty-six years later, it still refuses to behave for the camera.
That tension—between what a house projects and what it actually is—runs through Valentino's history. The name conjures red carpets and gala entrances, which is accurate enough. But the house built its reputation on something more specific: an understanding of volume that doesn't announce itself, and a kind of couture pragmatism that let clients move through rooms without catching on furniture.
Garavani and Giammetti, 1960–2007
Valentino Garavani opened his atelier on Via Condotti in 1960, backed by his father and a Milanese financier. He'd spent five years training in Paris, first at the Chambre Syndicale school, then in Jean Dessès's workrooms. The early collections leaned on that French formation—controlled silhouettes, structured bodices—but the palette was already his own. He used white the way other couturiers used black, as a neutral that carried weight.
The red came later, formalised in 1959 but not truly codified until the mid-sixties. Garavini has told the story often enough: a performance at the Barcelona Opera, six women in crimson velvet against gilded boxes, the colour holding under stage light in a way that theatre reds usually don't. He mixed eighteen pigments to get there. The resulting shade, eventually trademarked as Rosso Valentino 18-1663TP, sits somewhere between vermillion and a cooler arterial red. It doesn't photograph well because it's engineered for movement and real light, not for reproduction.
By 1968, Valentino had dressed Jacqueline Kennedy for her wedding to Aristotle Onassis. The commission—an ivory lace minidress with long sleeves—arrived with two weeks' notice and no fittings. The atelier worked from photographs and a cabled list of measurements. The dress fit. That kind of technical confidence, built on pattern-cutting rather than endless toiles, became the house's foundation. Clients came because the clothes worked, not because they required a personality to carry them.
Giancarlo Giammetti, Garavani's partner in business and in life, handled everything that wasn't the atelier. He structured the licensing deals that funded the couture, opened the ready-to-wear line in 1969, and later negotiated the 1998 sale to HdP (now Mayhoola). The partnership worked because the division of labour was absolute. Garavani cut. Giammetti built the infrastructure around it.
The house's peak—commercially and creatively—ran through the eighties and nineties. Garavani showed in Paris but kept the ateliers in Rome, which gave the work a different kind of formality. French couture leans architectural. Italian couture, at least in Valentino's hands, leaned sculptural. The difference is in how the cloth sits. A Dior jacket from the same period holds its shape off the body. A Valentino coat collapses into it, which makes it harder to photograph on a hanger and easier to wear for six hours.
Garavani retired in 2007, after forty-five years. The final couture show, held at the Musée Rodin, featured sixty-seven looks in cream and Rosso Valentino. No prints, no distractions. Just cut and colour. It was, in retrospect, the last time the house could define itself entirely on its own terms.
The Piccioli Era, 2008–2024
Alessandra Facchinetti lasted seventeen months as sole creative director. Her collections—spare, intellectual, determinedly not red—were well-reviewed and poorly received by clients who wanted what they'd always bought. Valentino replaced her in 2008 with Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, both promoted from accessories. They'd worked under Garavani since 1999 and understood the house codes, which they interpreted as permission rather than restriction.
The Chiuri-Piccioli partnership ran for eight years and repositioned Valentino as a contemporary luxury brand without entirely abandoning its couture roots. They kept the red but added cobalt, fuchsia, acid yellow. They brought in street-casting and younger clients. The collections felt less like preservation and more like translation, which worked until Chiuri left for Dior in 2016.
Piccioli, now alone, leaned harder into colour and away from the sculptural restraint that had defined Garavani's work. His first solo collection, for autumn/winter 2016, opened with a floor-length cape in Rosso Valentino over a simple black column. The gesture was clear: continuity, but on new terms. What followed over the next eight years was a sustained exploration of how much decoration a garment could carry before it collapsed under its own ambition.
At its best—spring 2019, autumn 2022—Piccioli's Valentino delivered gowns that felt operatic without being costumes. At its most diffuse, the collections read as mood boards, full of ideas that didn't quite cohere into a single argument. He worked with Pierpaolo Piccioli, brought fine art references into the runway presentations, and made Valentino relevant to a generation that hadn't grown up with Garavani. Whether that relevance translated into a coherent creative vision is still debated.
The house's commercial performance under Piccioli was strong. Revenue grew. The handbag line, particularly the Rockstud and later the Roman Stud, became a significant driver. But by 2024, Mayhoola was ready for another shift. Piccioli's exit was announced in March, handled with the kind of corporate discretion that suggests the decision had been made months earlier.
Michele and What Comes Next
Alessandro Michele took over in April 2024, his first role since leaving Gucci fifteen months prior. The appointment surprised no one who'd watched Mayhoola's strategy over the previous decade. Michele built his reputation on maximalism, archival reference, and a kind of magpie eclecticism that turned Gucci into the industry's most-watched house between 2015 and 2022. Whether that approach translates to Valentino is the question his first collections will answer.
Michele's debut, for autumn/winter 2024, showed in Paris in September. The collection referenced Garavani's sixties work—the white, the bows, the controlled volume—but filtered through Michele's own sensibility. Which is to say: more ornamented, more layered, more willing to pile references on top of each other until the result felt deliberately overstuffed. The Rosso Valentino appeared, but so did olive green, mustard, powder blue. The collection was reviewed as a reset, though it's too early to say whether it's a reset toward something or just away from Piccioli.
The challenge Michele faces isn't creative—he's demonstrated he can generate attention and move product—but structural. Valentino, unlike Gucci, still operates haute couture ateliers. The house has always balanced ready-to-wear commerce with couture craft, and that balance requires a different kind of rigour than pure ready-to-wear design. Michele has never worked in couture. Whether he can learn its grammar while maintaining his own voice will define the next chapter.
What's certain is that Valentino, sixty-four years in, no longer belongs to its founder. The house has survived two creative transitions and will survive this one. The red remains, trademarked and reproducible. The ateliers remain, still in Rome, still staffed by petites mains who trained under Garavani's system. What changes is the story the house tells about itself, and who it tells that story to.
There's a photograph from Michele's first fitting at Valentino, published in System last autumn. He's standing in the atelier, surrounded by toiles and half-finished muslins, holding a length of red silk gazar up to the light. The cloth, predictably, photographs flat. But Michele is squinting at it the way you squint at something that refuses to behave the way you expect. Which is, if you've been paying attention, exactly how Valentino has always worked.
