The atelier sits on the fourth floor of Palazzo Mignanelli, just off Piazza di Spagna

The atelier sits on the fourth floor of Palazzo Mignanelli, just off Piazza di Spagna. Twenty-three seamstresses work there on any given morning, and most of them have been with Valentino longer than the current creative director. Their names do not appear in press releases. Their hands do appear in every gown that leaves the building.

Maria Grazia Chiuri spent seven years at Valentino before moving to Fendi, then Dior. She knew the women upstairs by name. Pierpaolo Piccioli, who succeeded her as sole creative director in 2016, spent twenty-five years at the house before stepping down in March 2024. He knew them better. When he designed the yellow gown Zendaya wore to the 2021 Oscars—a piece that required 300 hours of embroidery and appeared on approximately four million screens—he credited the petites mains by name in an interview with System. The magazine printed three of them. There were eleven involved.

This is not unusual. What is unusual is that Piccioli said so.

The premier atelier

Valentino operates two ateliers in Rome: one for tailoring, one for haute couture. The latter employs around thirty artisans, most of them women, nearly all of them trained within the house. The training takes three years. You begin by learning to thread a needle in a particular way—not the way your mother taught you, the way Valentino requires. You spend six months on hems. Then you move to darts, then sleeves, then collars. By the end of year two, you are trusted with a toile. By year three, you may touch silk.

This is not romantic. It is simply how the work is structured. A couture gown is not a single object; it is a sequence of tasks performed by different hands, each of them invisible to the next. The woman who sets the first stitch does not see the woman who finishes the hem. They work in shifts. They do not sign their work.

The premier atelier—the couture workshop—sits apart from the ready-to-wear floor. It is quieter. The light is controlled. There are no phones, no music, no conversation beyond what the work requires. When a piece is in progress, it lives on a dress form in the centre of the room. The artisans move around it in rotation, each adding her portion, each checking the work of the woman before her. If something is wrong, it is unpicked. No one argues. The cloth does not care who made the mistake.

The coat

In January 2023, Valentino showed a double-breasted coat in tobacco wool with a notched collar and a single pleat at the back. It appeared in look 47 of the men's autumn/winter collection. The coat was cut by Luca Manzi, who has worked in the tailoring atelier since 1998. The cloth came from Vitale Barberis Canonico, a mill in Biella that has supplied Valentino since the 1960s. The weight was 14oz, heavier than the house typically uses for outerwear, but Manzi argued for it. He wanted the coat to hold its shape without stiffness, to move at the shoulder but stay still everywhere else.

The pattern was drafted by hand. Manzi does not use CAD. He works from a set of blocks he inherited from his predecessor, a man named Giorgio Armellini who retired in 2012 and whose name appears nowhere in the Valentino archive. Armellini trained under the house's first head cutter, a Neapolitan tailor called Vincenzo Attolini—not the Attolini who founded the Neapolitan tailoring dynasty, but his younger brother, who left Naples for Rome in 1959 and never went back.

This is how knowledge moves in tailoring. Not through books, but through men who learned from other men, most of whom are now dead.

The coat took four fittings. The first was on a model whose name does not appear in any show notes. The second was on a wooden form. The third and fourth were on the same model, a week apart. Between fittings, the coat was adjusted by three different hands: Manzi for the shoulder, a woman named Alessandra Conti for the collar, and a junior tailor named Simone Fabbri for the sleeves. Fabbri had been in the atelier for eight months. He was not credited.

The coat appeared on the runway for 40 seconds. It sold in six colourways. Manzi's name appeared nowhere.

The embroiderers

Valentino contracts its embroidery to Maison Lesage in Paris, as most couture houses do. Lesage employs around thirty artisans, all of them trained in the same method: Lunéville crochet, a technique that uses a hooked needle to pull thread through fabric from below. It is faster than hand embroidery, but not by much. A single evening gown can require 200 hours of work. A wedding dress can require 600.

The woman who embroidered the Zendaya gown was named Nathalie. She worked on it for three weeks. Her surname does not appear in any archive. When System asked Piccioli about the piece, he mentioned her by first name only, along with two other embroiderers: Véronique and Chantal. The magazine printed the names in a footnote. Lesage confirmed that all three were employed at the time but declined to provide further details.

This is standard practice. Embroiderers do not speak to press. Their work is considered part of the house's savoir-faire, not their own.

The problem

There is a tension in couture between authorship and labour. A designer's name appears on every piece. A seamstress's name appears nowhere. This is not an oversight. It is a feature of the system. Couture is sold as the vision of a single person, even when that person has not touched the cloth.

Piccioli understood this. In his final years at Valentino, he made a point of crediting the atelier in interviews, of bringing seamstresses onstage during couture presentations, of naming them when publications asked. It did not change the structure. It did not redistribute the profit. But it made visible what had always been invisible.

Alessandro Michele, who took over as creative director in April 2024, has not continued the practice. His first collection for Valentino, shown in September, included 86 looks. The show notes credited Michele, his stylist, his casting director, and his set designer. The atelier was not mentioned.

This is not unusual. It is, in fact, the norm. What was unusual was that Piccioli broke it.

What remains

The artisans are still there. Maria, who has worked in the atelier for thirty-two years, is still setting sleeves. Alessandra is still adjusting collars. Luca Manzi is still cutting coats by hand, using blocks inherited from a man whose name appears nowhere.

They will be there when Michele leaves. They will be there when the next designer arrives. They are the house. The rest is just a name on the door.