The atelier at Palazzo Mignanelli runs a second shift most weeks

The atelier at Palazzo Mignanelli runs a second shift most weeks. Not because Valentino is behind — though it often is — but because certain hands prefer the quiet. Fewer distractions. No tourists pressing their noses to the glass partition on via Condotti, no clients upstairs revising a sleeve for the third time. Just the hum of industrial irons and the particular silence that comes when fifteen people are doing something difficult very well.

You will not find their names on the label. You will not find them in the show notes, either. But if you pull the lining on a Valentino evening coat — the kind that appears, annually, in some variation of ivory duchesse satin — you will see their work. The hand-stitching at the armscye. The way the interlining stops exactly where it should, so the fabric moves without collapsing. The sleeve head that took four hours to set because the client is five-foot-three and her right shoulder sits a quarter-inch higher than her left.

This is not about Alessandro Michele, though he now steers the ship. It is about the people who make the ship move.

The première

Giuseppina Lofino has been at Valentino for thirty-one years. She started as a petites mains in 1993, the year Valentino Garavani showed his final haute couture collection before the LVMH acquisition talks began in earnest. Lofino's job, then, was to tack hems and reinforce buttonholes. She did this for two years. Then she was promoted to sleeves.

Sleeves are where most ateliers lose people. A badly set sleeve telegraphs itself from across a room. It pulls. It twists. It makes the whole garment look like an expensive mistake. A good sleeve — one that follows the arm's natural pitch, that doesn't bind at the bicep or gape at the wrist — requires a feel for tension that you cannot learn from a pattern. You learn it by setting five hundred sleeves badly, then another five hundred less badly, then a few dozen well.

Lofino is now première d'atelier for flou, which means she oversees all draped and unstructured work. Evening gowns. Anything involving chiffon, organza, or silk faille. Anything that has to move like liquid but photograph like architecture. She does not cut. That is someone else's job. But she translates the cut into three dimensions, and when something does not work — when a drape sags or a train refuses to fall — she is the one who solves it.

She was the one who solved the Valentino red gown Zendaya wore to the 2021 BET Awards. The bodice was structured. The skirt was not. The join between the two had to be invisible, which meant the boning could not extend past the waistline, which meant the skirt had to support its own weight without sagging at the hips. Lofino's solution involved a second, internal waistband in grosgrain, invisibly stitched to the lining, with the chiffon overlay attached at intervals rather than continuously. The gown moved. The structure stayed put.

You would not know this from looking at the dress. That is the point.

The cutter

Valentino's tailleur atelier operates separately from flou, on a different floor. The work is harder in some ways, more forgiving in others. Tailoring has rules. A jacket is a series of solved problems: how to make the collar sit, how to keep the front from pulling, how to ensure the hem doesn't dip at the back when the wearer sits. You can deviate from the rules, but you cannot ignore them.

Fabrizio Carosi has been cutting for Valentino since 2004. He trained at the Accademia Koefia in Rome, which still teaches the old Roman cut — a high armhole, a soft shoulder, a shorter jacket body than the Neapolitan or Milanese traditions. It is a cut that works particularly well for women, because it does not rely on padding to create shape.

Carosi's job is to interpret a sketch. Michele's design team will send down a technical drawing — sometimes with fabric swatches, sometimes not — and Carosi will draft the pattern in muslin first, then in the actual cloth. He does not work from blocks. Every jacket starts from scratch, because every body is different and every cloth behaves differently.

The ivory wool-silk jacket Michele showed for spring 2025 — the one with the exaggerated peak lapels and the nipped waist — took Carosi four attempts. The cloth was too fluid. The lapels wanted to roll when they should have stood. He ended up using a lightweight horsehair canvas in the chest, something you would normally reserve for a heavier worsted, and he underlined the lapels with silk organza to give them just enough body without adding weight. The jacket weighs 380 grams. A comparable piece from most tailoring houses would weigh closer to 600.

Carosi has not met Michele. He has met his assistants. This is normal. The designer does not need to know how the canvas is cut. He needs to know that the jacket looks the way he drew it.

The embroiderer

Valentino's embroidery is contracted out. Most of it goes to Maison Lesage in Paris, some to smaller ateliers in India and Italy. But the planning happens in-house, in a narrow room on the third floor where samples are pinned to corkboard and threads are organized by colour family in shallow wooden drawers.

Lucia Marcelli has worked in this room for nineteen years. Her title is chef d'atelier broderie, but her actual job is closer to project manager. She receives the design, works out the technique, sources the materials, and briefs the embroiderers. She also does the math. A fully embroidered evening gown can require 400 hours of handwork. If the gown is needed in six weeks, that means multiple embroiderers working simultaneously, which means the design has to be divided into sections that can be worked separately and joined invisibly later.

The cape Michele showed in his debut collection — the one covered in tonal ivory paillettes that caught the light like fish scales — was Marcelli's problem to solve. The paillettes had to be sewn in overlapping rows, which meant they could not be applied to a flat length of fabric and then cut and assembled. They had to be applied to the finished cape, which meant the embroiderers had to work on a dress form, which meant Lesage had to build a custom form to match the model's measurements.

It took eleven people five weeks. The cape weighs less than a kilo. When it moved under the runway lights, it looked like water.

Marcelli will not work on Michele's next collection. She is retiring in March. Her replacement is thirty-two. He trained at the same school Marcelli did, thirty years later, and he has been apprenticing under her for the past eighteen months. He knows where the threads are kept. He knows which ateliers can do raised goldwork and which cannot. He does not yet know how to explain to a designer that the thing they have drawn is technically impossible, and then figure out how to do it anyway.

He will learn. They all do.

What remains

Valentino will show its next haute couture collection in January. The atelier is already working on it. Lofino has a gown in progress that involves 40 metres of pleated organza. Carosi is cutting a coat in double-face cashmere that has to look unlined but is, in fact, lined with the same cashmere turned to the reverse. Marcelli's replacement is sourcing vintage jet beads for a piece that may or may not make it to the runway.

None of this is romantic. It is work. Skilled, highly paid work, but work nonetheless. The people who do it are not artists in the tortured genius sense. They are craftspeople. They have mortgages. They take the train. They complain about their knees.

But they also have a feel for cloth that cannot be taught in a classroom, and a pride in their work that does not require their name on the label. The jacket fits because Carosi cut it properly. The gown moves because Lofino engineered the weight distribution. The embroidery catches the light because Marcelli knew which atelier could handle the technique.

Valentino, the man, understood this. Michele, one assumes, understands it too. The question is whether anyone else does.