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Valentino vs Mario Valentino: One Name, Two Companies

The word Valentino appears on handbags from two different Italian companies, they are not connected, and the resulting confusion is old enough to have produced its own case law. The first is the Roman couture house founded in 1960; the other is a Naples leather goods and footwear business founded in 1952. Both are legitimate, each has documented rights to the name in its own way, and it was a private contract in 1979, rather than a judge, that drew the dividing line between them. This article sets out who each company is, what the agreement requires of each side, what the recent litigation covered and how it ended, and how a shopper can work out in seconds which company made a given bag. It is a trademark story rather than an accusation against either side, and nothing below should be read as a finding of wrongdoing. Read this once and listings stop being hard to read.

Two cities, two houses, two companies

Valentino S.p.A. is the Roman house that Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti founded in 1960, its first atelier on Via Condotti. Ownership no longer has anything to do with the founder: he sold the company in 1998, control passed www.valetino.net to Mayhoola for Investments in 2012 for around 700 million euros, and Kering took thirty per cent in July 2023, planning to buy the company outright by 2028. Valentino Garavani himself retired from design in 2007, showed his final couture collection in January 2008 and died on 19 January 2026 at the age of 93, so none of the current bag collection is his design. Mario Valentino S.p.A. is a different company, founded in Naples in 1952 by a man of that name and still headquartered there, and it operates as a leather goods and footwear house rather than a couture maison. It sells as Valentino by Mario Valentino, and its claims to have invented the stiletto heel and the women’s moccasin are self-description rather than verified fact.

The 1979 contract that carved up the name

A coexistence agreement signed in 1979 established which marks each side could apply to which goods, and it is still the document everything else refers back to. Under its terms, Mario Valentino may use Mario Valentino, M. Valentino, Valentino, MV or V on the exterior, so long as the full name appears inside the item and on the packaging. The same agreement bars that company from using V and Valentino together on leather goods. Running the other way, Valentino S.p.A. is contractually obliged to use GARAVANI in addition to VALENTINO on its leather goods and in the advertising for them. A separate United States position also applies: Mario Valentino’s stated position is that it has held the American trademark Valentino for handbags and leather goods since 26 April 1971, and that senior-rights point is corroborated in legal reporting.

Why GARAVANI has to appear

The surname on the interior tag of a bag from the Roman house is a contractual obligation rather than a styling choice. On account of the way the 1979 agreement divided the marks, and in light of the senior US rights position on handbags, Valentino S.p.A. does not present its leather goods under the single word Valentino. Adding GARAVANI is what keeps the mark distinguishable, and that is why VALENTINO GARAVANI shows up in capitals on the tag and in bag advertising. Within the Roman house the same wording also works as a naming convention: Valentino Garavani is used for accessories while Valentino and Maison Valentino cover ready-to-wear. That is one company applying one set of standards, not a lower tier and a higher one. In practical terms, this yields the single most useful fact in the whole subject: a bag from the couture house says GARAVANI, and a bag that reads only Valentino outside and Mario Valentino inside is a genuine Mario Valentino, a different company selling at a different price point.

The lawsuit filed in 2019, and its ending

Valentino S.p.A. sued Mario Valentino in July 2019 in the US District Court for the Central District of California, under docket 2:19-cv-6306. The counterclaims brought by Mario Valentino were dismissed in April 2021. The case itself settled and was dismissed without prejudice on 14 June 2024, on terms that were never disclosed. Dismissal without prejudice matters, since it leaves either side free to raise the matter again. Reporting also suggests that more than ten proceedings, arbitrations among them, remained live in Italy, meaning the 2024 dismissal wrapped up a single American case rather than the entire disagreement. The claims pleaded in the action were:

1. Unfair competition and false advertising.
2. Breach of the terms of the 1979 coexistence agreement.
3. Handbags alleged to be lookalikes of the couture house’s designs.
4. Alleged unauthorised use of the V mark on leather goods.

Reporting places the escalation of the dispute from 2017 onward, when handbag advertising began foregrounding the word VALENTINO on its own. Because the case settled, none of it was tested to judgment, and no finding of wrongdoing was made against either company.

The second case, filed in 2022

A separate action pointed the other way and drew in a third party. In October 2022 Mario Valentino S.p.A. filed suit against Fashionphile Group LLC in the Southern District of New York, docketed 1:22-cv-08984. According to the complaint, approximately four hundred handbags had been listed on the resale platform as VALENTINO when they were in fact goods of Valentino S.p.A. The outcome of that case is unverified here and should not be described as resolved in either direction. The naming problem is not confined to the two companies: it carries over to resale platforms, marketplace listings and everyone who describes a bag with one word. For a buyer, the lesson is simple: a listing title is the least reliable part of any resale page.

Where each of them is actually sold

The two companies reach shoppers through different channels, which resolves much of the confusion. The Roman house sells through its own webstore and boutiques, plus a defined set of authorised retailers including Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Mytheresa, Net-a-Porter, Farfetch, Selfridges, Harrods and Tessabit. Its legitimate off-price channel is THE OUTNET, the off-price arm of Net-a-Porter, although the depth of the reductions there cannot be stated with confidence. The bags on the shelves of American off-price chains come from the Naples company, which is verifiable from those retailers’ own brand filter pages. Which is why a Valentino bag sale at an off-price chain is very rarely what someone searching for the couture house has in mind. Neither case involves any impropriety: these are two separate companies selling their own goods through their own distribution. In 2026 the couture house’s leather goods were observed at market prices running from about $650 for a VLogo Signature clutch in grainy calfskin to $7,900 for an embroidered Panthea, all made in Italy, and Rebag’s data puts the house’s average resale retention near 41 per cent.

Comparison point	Valentino S.p.A.	Mario Valentino S.p.A.
Founding	1960, Rome	Naples, in 1952
Bag branding	Valentino Garavani	Valentino by Mario Valentino
Interior marking	VALENTINO, GARAVANI, MADE IN ITALY	Mario Valentino inside and on packaging
Typical retail channels	Its own boutiques, plus Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Mytheresa and Farfetch	Off-price chains, among them Nordstrom Rack, Saks OFF 5TH and TJ Maxx

Telling them apart in thirty seconds

Look inside the bag first, not outside. On a couture-house bag the interior tag carries VALENTINO and GARAVANI in capitals along with MADE IN ITALY, stitched down on all four sides, with consistent font weight and evenly pressed stamping. There is usually a serial number on a tag inside an interior pocket, but not always: older pieces may carry none, and its absence on its own proves nothing. These bags carry no date-code system at all, so any guide promising to decode a manufacturing date from the digits is describing something that does not exist. Exterior reading only Valentino, interior reading Mario Valentino: that is a genuine Naples-made bag from the other company. That trap cuts both ways: a real Mario Valentino bag will fail a Garavani checklist while being completely authentic, so work out which company made the bag before asking whether it is real.

What it all means when you buy

Neither one is a counterfeit here, and casting it as fake against real misses the point entirely. Want the Roman house? Search Valentino Garavani rather than Valentino on its own, and check the tag before you look at the price. If the Naples company’s leather goods suit you, buy them with your eyes open and enjoy the lower price, which reflects a different business rather than a watered-down version of the same one. Where it goes wrong is in resale listings and third-party marketplaces that describe both with one word, which is precisely the territory the 2022 case covered. Any pre-owned Valentino bag described only as Valentino calls for clear photographs of the interior tag before money changes hands. Request the photographs and a decades-old tangle shrinks to a two-second check.