Valentino is scrapping its bi-annual menswear shows as well as its spring-summer haute couture outing. The Roman fashion house will now stage co-ed ready-to-wear shows during the Paris womenswear season, as well as switching to a once-yearly outing for couture.
The future of Valentino’s dedicated menswear shows has been in question since Alessandro Michele was named creative director in March: the designer favoured co-ed, gender-fluid shows during most of his tenure at Gucci.
Less-frequent couture shows will “pave the way for true and unbounded artistic inspiration,” Valentino said in a statement. “The workmanship that haute couture requires will now be venerated even further by lending it the luxury of time.”
After cancelling some fashion shows and shifting others to Italy during the height of the pandemic, Valentino returned to its historic rhythm of showing 6 times per year, usually in Paris, in 2022 and 2023. That helped to underscore Valentino’s couture identity and create frequent marketing moments, but the pace sometimes felt like overload.
Time will tell whether a scaled back calendar will provide enough opportunities to keep Valentino top of mind for customers and industry insiders.
At Gucci, big co-ed shows helped to express Michele’s worldview: a kind of radical identity fluidity. But the twice-yearly timing also reinforced his tendency toward comprehensive, iterative collections rather than more succinct, propulsive fashion statements.
The brand’s owners, Mayhoola and Kering, may be breathing a sigh of relief. As luxury demand slows across nearly all major markets, the new calendar will likely come with significant cost savings.
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