Valentino : histoire d'une maison
There's a photograph from 1968 that still circulates in the archives: Jacqueline Kennedy stepping off a yacht in Capri, wearing a white silk dress with a single line of embroidery at the hem. The dress was Valentino's. So was the coat she wore to marry Aristotle Onassis that October. By the time the decade closed, the designer had built a vocabulary so specific that women who could afford to began asking for "a Valentino white" rather than describing the colour themselves.
Valentino Garavani opened his atelier on Via Condotti in 1960, backed by his father and an architecture student named Giancarlo Giammetti, who would become his business partner for the next fifty years. The timing mattered. Rome was still the axis of Italian cinema, and couture still operated on the logic of private clients rather than ready-to-wear distribution. Garavani had trained under Jean Dessès and Guy Laroche in Paris, but he returned to Rome with a conviction that Italian craft could hold its own against French technique if it leaned into construction rather than decoration.
The early collections were precise, almost austere. High necklines, A-line skirts, fabric cut on the bias to eliminate excess seaming. What set them apart wasn't volume or novelty but fit—specifically, how a dress moved when a woman turned or sat down. By 1962, Garavani was dressing Italy's film actors: Virna Lisi, Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale. The work travelled through them, and the atelier grew.
The red era and the American turn
Valentino introduced his signature red in the spring 1959 collection he showed in Florence, though it didn't acquire its name until the press began referring to it as a shorthand. The shade—somewhere between vermillion and crimson, never orange, never pink—became the house's calling card not because Garavani invented it but because he used it structurally. A red coat wasn't an accent. It was the garment, built to carry nothing else.
The American market opened properly in 1968, the same year as the Kennedy wedding. Garavani showed at the Waldorf Astoria. Bergdorf Goodman took the collection. Within two years, Valentino had a manufacture agreement in place and a foothold in New York that would outlast most of his European peers. The business model was still couture-led, but the revenue increasingly came from licensing: fragrances, accessories, ready-to-wear produced under contract.
It's worth noting what Valentino didn't do during this period. He didn't court the avant-garde. He didn't make conceptual statements about the role of fashion in society. The work remained tied to a client base that wanted eveningwear for specific occasions, and Garavani delivered it without apology. A 1971 gown for Elizabeth Taylor—white silk faille, bateau neckline, no jewellery required—made the cover of Life. The house was now operating at the scale where a single dress could function as advertising.
By the late seventies, Valentino had become the kind of name that appeared in novels as shorthand for wealth. The red dress was a trope. The atelier on Via Condotti was a destination. Garavani himself had become a public figure, photographed at his homes in Rome, Gstaad, and later Château de Wideville outside Paris. The work, paradoxically, became quieter. Less embroidery, more reliance on cut and drape. A 1982 collection featured almost no colour except black, white, and red. It sold out.
The handover and what followed
Garavani retired in 2008, selling the business to Mayhoola, a private equity group based in Qatar, though the deal wasn't finalised until later. The question facing any house at that juncture is whether the name can outlast the founder, and whether it should. Valentino had spent forty-five years building a language around his own taste. What remains when that taste is no longer in the room?
The first answer came through Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, who had worked in accessories at Valentino since the nineties and were named co-creative directors in 2008. Their tenure, particularly the years after Chiuri's departure to Dior in 2016, recalibrated the house toward a younger client without discarding its foundations. Piccioli's collections leaned into colour—not just red, but acid yellow, cobalt, fuchsia—and a kind of volume that felt operatic rather than structural. The 2019 haute couture show, staged at the Cinecittà studios, involved sixty looks and a set designed to evoke Rome in the 1960s. It was as much a thesis on what Valentino had been as a proposal for what it could become.
Piccioli's exit in 2024 closed that chapter. Alessandro Michele, formerly of Gucci, was named creative director shortly after. The appointment made a certain sense on paper—both houses operate in the luxury segment, both have archives dense enough to support reinterpretation—but Michele's aesthetic skews toward accumulation and historical pastiche, while Valentino's has traditionally moved in the opposite direction.
Where the house stands
Michele's first collection for Valentino appeared in September 2024. The runway featured layered prints, high collars, and a level of ornamentation that felt more Victorian than Roman. The clothes were divisive in the way first collections often are, but the real question isn't whether they succeed as garments. It's whether they can coexist with what Valentino has meant for sixty years.
The archive is still there. The atelier on Via Condotti still operates. The red is still in production. But a house is not its past. It's the sum of its past and what it's willing to risk in the present. Garavani built Valentino by trusting his own eye and ignoring fashion's prevailing winds. Piccioli expanded it by asking what colour and volume could do when liberated from couture's old constraints. Michele is now working with both of those legacies, and the outcome remains open.
There's a dress from the spring 1991 collection—white silk, minimal seaming, a single line of topstitching at the hem—that still appears in retrospectives. It looks as though it could have been made yesterday, or thirty years before it was. That's the test. Not whether a piece feels contemporary, but whether it can sit outside time long enough to make time irrelevant. Valentino has managed that more than once. Whether it can manage it again is the work ahead.
