Why the Venturini-Michele team didn't work this time

The last time I met Jacopo Venturini, CEO of Valentino who is about to leave after the Alessandro Michele operation led to a collapse in turnover but who is officially on sick leave and, although I want to respect his privacy, it is not the first time this has happened and we hope for the best, it was the end of January and the maison was presenting the first couture collection signed by the new creative director in Paris. On my way to the post-show meeting with the designer on the upper floors of the old Palais Brogniart, home of the ancient Stock Exchange, I met the saleswoman from a geographical area historically very receptive to Valentino collections, I won't say which one because the climate in the company is very tense, who confessed to being very worried because "at least thirty percent of the customers" had preferred to decline the invitation, fearing having to make purchases . In couture, the most important clients, ladies who spend two million euros a year and up, are in fact invited to Paris at the company's expense and participate not only in the fashion show, but also in private dinners, visits, breakfasts with the designer of the collections but also with actors and celebrities hired for the occasion, in short leading what is now defined, banally but inescapably, as an "experience". Being invited without ordering anything, which also means doing fittings and therefore investing additional time and money, in this specific case in Rome, is obviously not possible and therefore, in order not to be put in the position of having to spend a mountain of money on clothes they did not want to wear, the clients in the high-spending geographical area stayed at home . Or, perhaps, they accepted someone else's invitation since at Armani they had to organize as many as two fashion shows and at Dior not a pin dropped to the floor .

As I wrote a few weeks ago, the difficult times that pret-à-porter is experiencing now have in fact turned out to be excellent and interesting for haute couture , which has returned to that kind of clientele tired of paying a thousand euros for a t-shirt with four machine-embroidered details around the neckline reproduced in thousands of copies, but still rich enough to want a well-made garment, exclusively for themselves. Crossing paths with Venturini at the entrance to the salon where Michele couldn't help but confess that the premières had made him see green mice for months, continuously testing his – moreover and honestly declared – sartorial incompetence, I addressed him with one of those kind phrases that anyone expects to receive after such an important debut, and he replied that it was only the beginning. In reality it was, and still seems to be, the end.

English: Two weeks ago, Michele “released” – a poor translation of the English verb “to release” which means to spread but which the fashion world translates literally – the collection for next spring, in the same time, manner and style as last year and in reality the same winter collection presented last March in Paris, which will go down in history as “the fashion show in the red bathrooms” (incidentally: how it was possible that the Institut du Monde Arabe agreed to host that presentation, despite the power of Valentino’s parent company, Qatar’s sovereign fund Mayhoola, is still a mystery). In any case, a beautiful digital presentation landed in the emails of a few tens of thousands of people during the men’s fashion shows in Paris, which I must say was brilliant in form (the girls are filmed lying on beds, a leitmotif of the season) but identical in substance to the dozens of Michele collections we have seen since his debut as creative director at Gucci, in January 2015, to today. Wherever he goes, whatever archive he deals with, this fifty-year-old who is closer to a stylist or a costume designer than to a designer continues to propose clogs with the logo on display, patent leather baby shoes, short dresses with big collars, bandanas, shoulder bags, big Sixties glasses, embroidered socks. In short, Michele continues to like what Michele likes, which is fine if, as happened in the Gucci years, one has the good fortune of being able to apply one's aesthetic, one's taste, to a favorable and receptive historical-social moment . When this doesn't happen, as at Valentino where the clientele isn't satisfied with a belt and wants the "core", that is, beautiful, flattering clothes - the corset is even back in fashion, the tacky Sanchez-Bezos wedding was all a squeeze - the result is a turnover drop of 22 percent, some internal voices say that the percentage is even higher . To these rumors - that Rome is a small city after all - are added others that speak of internal disagreements, of an excluding climate for those who are not part of the team, numerous in any case, that Michele had hired upon his arrival, of difficult relations with one of the founders, Giancarlo Giammetti , who a few weeks ago, on the very popular fashion account Fashion Cricket, responded with a resentful post to a public observation by the designer on the subject of beauty.

In the capital, the creative director's exit is also considered very possible and imminent ; after which, it is assumed, there will be a deluge. If many, at the end of May, had noticed Michele's absence at the dinner celebrating the opening of PM23, the foundation named after Giammetti and Valentino Garavani that overlooks the same square as the fashion house, unlike his predecessors Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri, almost no one knows, instead, that Venturini had been living closed first in the Milan office, and now at home, for many months. It is very unfortunate to witness such a rapid downward spiral in a fashion house that in the world's imagination is substantially superimposable to the very idea of ​​Made in Italy, and it is strange to see how the repetition of the same dynamics is impossible from one year and from one brand to the next: the reconstitution of the Michele-Venturini dream team that, excluding CEO Marco Bizzarri, had characterized the irresistible rise of Gucci in the middle of the last decade, proved to be a failure at Valentino, and this despite the fact that for Venturini it was the third hire in the maison founded sixty years ago. Why? For many reasons, not only social-cultural and not even exclusively linked to the current crisis in fashion. Gucci was born as an accessories house and is still experienced as such; and excluding the Tom Ford period, its sales have always been determined by bags and shoes, not by clothing; Valentino, on the other hand, is the fashion house that dressed Jackie for her wedding to Aristotle Onassis with a dress that is still reproduced today, which gave life to its own shade of Pantone red and which, after an intense repositioning effort among the younger age group, had once again become an object of desire for eighteen-year-olds.

At the time of the “release” of Michele’s first collection, we wrote in the “Foglio della Moda” that if Valentino thought they could generate revenue with hair clips and lace stockings, they had not understood the context: Michele’s entire community, so interesting and alternative, is not enough to cover the lack of rich women in the high-spending geographical area who do not get on a plane even if you ask, and success on social media does not automatically translate into sales. When Piccioli, now appointed creative director of Balenciaga to general satisfaction, was removed from Valentino, in March 2024, the results were slightly in the red but the prospects were excellent. Years of expert work on the collections and careful communication had multiplied the value of the maison to the point that, in July 2023, Kering had secured 30 percent for 1.7 billion, with the commitment to acquire all the rest of the capital by 2028, for a figure that now weighs intolerably on the strategies of the group in crisis in which the former number one of Renault Luca de Meo has just been appointed as CEO, it is said with strong pressure from the French government. The accounts will now have to be reviewed, as will "the product", as they say in jargon. That things were going, or rather are going, very badly, was understood when, for the first time in history, the windows of the historic boutique in Piazza di Spagna were decorated with only bags. According to rumors, Venturini could be succeeded by Riccardo Bellini, former CEO of Chloé and Maison Margiela, who joined Mayhoola last January, but it is clear that this appointment will also have to be approved by Kering.

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