## The Red Room

The Red Room

Valentino Garavani fitted dresses the way other couturiers fitted gloves. He stood behind the model, hands on her shoulders, and adjusted the drape by millimetres. Not with pins—he disliked the idea of puncturing fabric before he was certain—but with his fingers, lifting and releasing until the silk settled where he wanted it. This was 1962, in a rented atelier on Via Condotti, and the collection that emerged that July would establish the house vocabulary for the next sixty years: clean shoulders, controlled volume, and red. A particular red. Pantone 18-1663, eventually. But in 1962 it was simply rosso Valentino, and it appeared on eighteen of the forty looks he showed.

The colour was not an accident. Garavani had spent the previous decade in Paris and Barcelona, first as an apprentice at Jean Dessès, then as an assistant to Guy Laroche. He learned construction under Dessès—how to handle chiffon so it moved without collapsing, how to cut a bodice that required no boning. From Laroche he absorbed a cooler discipline: the importance of a shoulder that did nothing but sit correctly. When he returned to Rome in 1959, he brought both lessons with him, along with a conviction that couture should look effortless even when it required three fittings.

He also brought Giancarlo Giammetti, whom he had met two years earlier on the steps of the Opéra Garnier. Giammetti was twenty, studying architecture, and had no particular interest in fashion. But he understood contracts, landlords, and how to speak to bankers without flinching. Garavani designed. Giammetti built the business around him. It was a functional division, and it lasted fifty years.

The Breakthrough

Valentino's first major commission came in 1967, when Jacqueline Kennedy ordered a white lace dress for her wedding to Aristotle Onassis. The dress was not red. It was not particularly Roman. It was, however, photographed extensively, and it positioned Valentino as the couturier American women called when they wanted something that would not embarrass them in European magazines. The house grew accordingly. By 1970, Valentino employed two hundred people and showed twice a year in the Sala Bianca at Palazzo Pitti, alongside Pucci and Ferragamo.

The silhouette remained consistent: high waists, defined shoulders, skirts that skimmed rather than clung. Garavani disliked excess fabric. He also disliked visible seams, which meant his ateliers spent considerable time on hand-finishing. A Valentino gown from this period might take eighty hours to complete, most of it invisible work—setting sleeves so they required no topstitching, hemming silk so the stitches disappeared into the weave. This was not innovation. It was precision.

The red, meanwhile, became a signature by repetition. Garavani used it for evening coats, day dresses, opera gloves, and eventually a fragrance. The shade itself was a warm, slightly orange-leaning red, closer to vermillion than crimson. It photographed well under tungsten light, which mattered in the 1970s, when most fashion coverage still relied on film. It also stood out on a runway, which mattered more.

The Sale

In 1998, Garavani and Giammetti sold the house to HdP, an Italian conglomerate, for approximately $300 million. The decision was partly financial—Valentino had been operating at a loss for several years—and partly practical. Garavani was sixty-six. He had no children, no obvious successor, and no interest in running a company that now required ready-to-wear, licensing deals, and a presence in Asia. He stayed on as creative director. Giammetti remained as honorary president. The house changed hands twice more before Mayhoola, a Qatari investment fund, acquired it in 2012 for $850 million.

Garavani retired in 2008. His final collection, shown in January at the Musée Rodin, featured forty-two red looks. The front row included Anne Hathaway, Uma Thurman, and several members of European aristocracy who had been clients since the 1970s. The collection itself was not a retrospective. It was simply another Valentino collection: clean, expensive, and red.

What Remains

Valentino today operates under Pierpaolo Piccioli, who joined the house in 1999 and became sole creative director in 2016. Piccioli trained at Istituto Europeo di Design and worked briefly at Fendi before arriving at Valentino. His aesthetic is softer than Garavani's—more volume, more print, less architectural precision. The red persists, but it now shares the runway with fuchsia, chartreuse, and a particular shade of pink that has become Piccioli's own signature.

The house still operates an atelier on Piazza Mignanelli, a ten-minute walk from the original Via Condotti location. The atelier employs sixty-five people, most of them trained in-house. A couture gown still takes eighty hours, sometimes more. The techniques have not changed significantly since 1962. The client base has. Where Garavani dressed European aristocracy and American socialites, Piccioli dresses a broader, younger, and considerably wealthier audience. The average Valentino client today is forty-two, lives in Asia or the Middle East, and buys ready-to-wear as often as couture.

Garavani himself remains in Rome. He no longer attends fashion shows. In a 2019 interview with System magazine, he noted that he had not watched a Valentino runway since his retirement, not because he disapproved, but because he had said what he needed to say. The house, he added, belonged to someone else now. It was a practical observation, not a sentimental one.

The Archive

What remains of the original Valentino is largely held in the house archive, a climate-controlled facility in Paris that contains approximately six thousand garments, dating from 1962 to 2008. The archive is not open to the public, but it is occasionally loaned to museums. A 2022 exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs featured thirty-two pieces, including the white lace dress Kennedy wore in 1968 and a red silk evening coat from 1991 that required four hundred hours of embroidery.

The archive also contains fabric samples, sketches, and client records. These are less frequently exhibited but arguably more revealing. Garavani kept detailed notes on fit adjustments—where a client carried weight, how a sleeve needed to be set, whether a hemline should sit above or below the knee. The notes are technical, not personal. They treat the body as a problem to be solved through cutting, not commentary.

This approach—clinical, exacting, focused entirely on the garment—is what distinguished Valentino from his contemporaries. He was not interested in provocation. He was interested in a shoulder that sat correctly and a skirt that moved without effort. That the result was often red was incidental. That it was often beautiful was not.