Valentino vs Mario Valentino: Two Different Companies Sharing a Single Name
Two Italian companies sell handbags under the word Valentino, they are not connected, and the resulting confusion is old enough to have produced its own case law. One of them is the Roman couture house founded in 1960; the second is a leather goods and footwear firm founded in Naples in 1952. Both are legitimate, both hold documented rights to the name in their own way, and the boundary between them was drawn by a private contract in 1979 rather than by a judge. This piece explains who each company is, what the agreement requires of each side, which ground the recent litigation covered and how it finished, and how anyone shopping can tell in seconds which company made a particular bag. What follows is a trademark story rather than an accusation aimed at either side, and nothing below should be read as a finding of wrongdoing. Read it once and no listing will fool you again.
Two cities, two houses, two companies
Founded in 1960 by Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti, with a first atelier on Via Condotti, Valentino S.p.A. is the Roman house. The ownership story has nothing to do with the founder: he sold the company in 1998, Mayhoola for Investments took control in 2012 for roughly 700 million euros, and Kering acquired thirty per cent in July 2023, intending to buy the company outright by 2028. Valentino Garavani himself stepped back from design in 2007, showed his final couture collection in January 2008 and died on 19 January 2026 at the age of 93, so nothing in the current bag collection was designed by him. Mario Valentino S.p.A. is an entirely separate company, founded in Naples in 1952 by a man of that name, and still based there, and it is a leather goods and footwear house, not a couture maison. The company trades 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 valentino rockstud coexistence agreement signed in 1979 set out which marks each side could put on 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 its packaging. The agreement also stops that company from combining V and Valentino 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 states it has held the American trademark Valentino for handbags and leather goods since 26 April 1971, and that senior-rights claim is corroborated in legal reporting.
The reason one company must add GARAVANI
On a Roman-house bag, the surname on the interior tag is there by contract, not by design preference. Because of how the 1979 agreement allocated the marks, and given the senior US rights position on handbags, Valentino S.p.A. never presents its leather goods under the word Valentino alone. Adding GARAVANI is what keeps the mark distinct, which is why the tag and the advertising for bags carry VALENTINO GARAVANI in capitals. Inside the Roman house the same wording doubles 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 carries GARAVANI, and a bag reading only Valentino outside with Mario Valentino inside is a genuine Mario Valentino, a different company at a different price point.
The lawsuit filed in 2019, and its ending
In July 2019 Valentino S.p.A. sued Mario Valentino in the US District Court for the Central District of California, docketed 2:19-cv-6306. In April 2021 Mario Valentino’s counterclaims were dismissed. The case itself settled and was dismissed without prejudice on 14 June 2024, on terms that were never disclosed. Dismissal without prejudice matters, because it leaves either side free to bring the matter back. According to reporting, more than ten proceedings, including arbitrations, were still live in Italy, meaning the 2024 dismissal wrapped up a single American case rather than the entire disagreement. The claims pleaded in that action were:
- Unfair competition and false advertising.
- A claimed breach of the 1979 coexistence agreement.
- An allegation that certain handbags were lookalikes of the couture house’s designs.
- A claim of unauthorised use of the V mark on leather goods.
The dispute is reported to have escalated 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 ran in the opposite direction and involved a third party. Mario Valentino S.p.A. filed suit against Fashionphile Group LLC in the Southern District of New York in October 2022, under docket 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 reaches resale platforms, marketplace listings and anyone who describes a bag with a single word. For a buyer, the lesson is simple: a listing title is the least reliable part of any resale page.
Which shelves each brand actually reaches
Different channels carry the two companies, which removes a good deal 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. The legitimate off-price outlet is THE OUTNET, the off-price arm of Net-a-Porter, though how deep the discounting goes there is not something to state with confidence. The bags on the shelves of American off-price chains come from the Naples company, as those retailers’ own brand filter pages confirm. That is why a Valentino bag sale at an off-price chain is very rarely what a shopper searching for the couture house has in mind. Neither situation involves anything improper: these are two separate companies selling their own goods through their own distribution. Observed 2026 market prices for the couture house’s leather goods ran from about $650 for a VLogo Signature clutch in grainy calfskin to $7,900 for an embroidered Panthea, all made in Italy, with Rebag’s data putting average resale retention for the house near 41 per cent.
| Point of comparison | Valentino S.p.A. | Mario Valentino S.p.A. |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | Rome, 1960 | Naples, in 1952 |
| Name carried on bags | Valentino Garavani | Valentino by Mario Valentino |
| What the inside says | VALENTINO, GARAVANI, MADE IN ITALY | Mario Valentino inside and on packaging |
| Where it is usually sold | Own boutiques, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Mytheresa, Farfetch | Off-price chains: Nordstrom Rack, Saks OFF 5TH, TJ Maxx |
How to tell them apart in thirty seconds
Start inside the bag rather than outside it. A couture-house bag has VALENTINO and GARAVANI in capitals on the interior tag, together with MADE IN ITALY, sewn on all four sides, the font weight consistent and the stamping evenly pressed. A serial number is usually found on a tag inside an interior pocket, though it is not universal, older pieces may have none, and an absent number by itself 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. If the outside reads only Valentino while the inside says Mario Valentino, you have a genuine Naples-made bag from the other company. The trap runs both ways: a real Mario Valentino bag will fail a Garavani checklist while being completely authentic, so establish which company made a bag before asking whether it is real.
What this means when you shop
Neither company is the counterfeit here, and treating this as fake versus real misses what is actually going on. If the Roman house is what you want, search for Valentino Garavani instead of Valentino alone, and read the tag before you read the price. If the Naples company’s leather goods suit you, buy them knowingly and enjoy the lower price, which reflects a different business, not a compromised version of the same one. Where it goes wrong is in resale listings and third-party marketplaces that describe both with one word, precisely the territory covered by the 2022 case. Any pre-owned Valentino bag described only as Valentino calls for clear photographs of the interior tag before money changes hands. Ask for those photographs, and a decades-old tangle turns into a two-second check.