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Valentino vs Mario Valentino: Two Different Companies Sharing a Single Name
The word Valentino appears on handbags from two different Italian companies, there is no relationship between them, and the resulting confusion is old enough to have produced its own case law. One is the Roman couture house founded in 1960; the second is a leather goods and footwear business founded in Naples in 1952. Both are legitimate, both hold documented rights to the name in their own way, and it was a private contract in 1979, rather than a judge, that drew the line between them. What follows sets out who each company is, what the agreement requires of each side, which ground the recent litigation covered and how it finished, and how a shopper can work out in seconds which company made a given bag. What follows is a trademark story rather than an accusation aimed at either side, and nothing below should be taken as a finding of wrongdoing. Read this once and listings stop being confusing.
Two cities, two houses, two companies
Valentino S.p.A. is the Roman house founded in 1960 by Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti, with its first atelier on Via Condotti. Ownership has nothing to do with the founder: he sold the company in 1998, control passed to Mayhoola for Investments in 2012 for around 700 million euros, and in July 2023 Kering acquired thirty per cent, with the stated intention of buying the company outright by 2028. Valentino Garavani himself stepped back from design in 2007, presented his last 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 business altogether, founded in Naples in 1952 by a man of that name and still headquartered there, and it is 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 history.
The 1979 agreement that divided the name
A coexistence agreement signed in 1979 set out which marks each side could put on which goods, and it remains the reference point white valentino mini bag for everything that followed. Under it, Mario Valentino may use Mario Valentino, M. Valentino, Valentino, MV or V on the exterior, provided the full name appears inside the item and on the packaging. That same agreement prevents the 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. There is a distinct United States angle as well: 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 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. On account of the way the 1979 agreement divided the marks, and because of the senior US rights position on handbags, Valentino S.p.A. never presents its leather goods under the word Valentino alone. It is the addition of GARAVANI that keeps the mark separable, and that is why VALENTINO GARAVANI shows up in capitals on the tag and in bag advertising. 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 a single company applying one set of standards, not a lower tier and a higher one. The practical consequence is the most useful fact in the whole subject: the couture house’s bags say GARAVANI, while a bag marked only Valentino on the outside with Mario Valentino inside is a genuine Mario Valentino, a separate 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. Mario Valentino’s counterclaims 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, so the 2024 dismissal ended one American case rather than the whole disagreement. The claims set out in that action were:
- Alleged false advertising and unfair competition.
- Alleged breach of the 1979 coexistence agreement.
- Handbags said to be lookalikes of the couture house’s designs.
- Unauthorised use of the V mark on leather goods.
The disagreement is reported to have escalated from 2017 onward, at the point where handbag advertising began pushing the word VALENTINO by itself. Because the case settled, none of the claims was tested to judgment, and no finding of wrongdoing was entered against either side.
A second case, brought in 2022
A separate action ran in the opposite direction and involved a third party. In October 2022 Mario Valentino S.p.A. brought a claim against Fashionphile Group LLC in the Southern District of New York, docketed 1:22-cv-08984. The complaint alleged that roughly 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 extends to resale platforms, marketplace listings and everyone who describes a bag with one word. The lesson for a buyer is that the title of a listing 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 directly through its own webstore and boutiques and through 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 one legitimate off-price channel 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 Naples company’s bags are the ones that appear on the shelves of American off-price chains, which is verifiable from those retailers’ own brand filter pages. That is why a Valentino bag sale at an off-price chain is seldom what a shopper looking for the couture house actually means. Nothing improper is involved on either side: these are two 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, 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 | 1960, Rome | Naples, 1952 |
| Name used on bags | Valentino Garavani | Valentino by Mario Valentino |
| Marking inside | VALENTINO, GARAVANI, MADE IN ITALY | Mario Valentino inside the item and on the packaging |
| Where it is usually sold | Own boutiques, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Mytheresa, Farfetch | Off-price chains, among them Nordstrom Rack, Saks OFF 5TH and TJ Maxx |
Telling 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 genuine Mario Valentino bag will fail a Garavani checklist and still be completely authentic, so work out which company made the bag before asking whether it is real.
What this means for shopping
Neither one is a counterfeit here, and casting it as fake against real misses the point entirely. If the Roman house is what you want, search for Valentino Garavani instead of Valentino alone, and check the tag before you look at the price. If the Naples company’s leather goods suit you, buy them knowingly and enjoy the lower price, which reflects a different business rather than a watered-down version of the same one. The damage happens in resale listings and third-party marketplaces that use a single word for both, which is precisely the territory the 2022 case covered. A pre-owned Valentino bag described only as Valentino needs clear photographs of the interior tag before any money changes hands. Ask for those photographs, and a decades-old tangle turns into a two-second check.