Valentino vs Mario Valentino: One Name, Two Companies

Two Italian companies sell handbags under the word Valentino, they are not connected, and the confusion is old enough to have generated its own case law. The first is the Roman couture house founded in 1960; the second is a leather goods and footwear business founded in Naples in 1952. Each of them is legitimate, both hold documented rights to the name in their own way, and the line between them was drawn by a private contract in 1979, not by a judge. What follows sets out who each company is, what the agreement requires of each side, what the recent litigation covered and how it concluded, and how a shopper can tell within seconds which company made a given bag. This is a trademark story, not an accusation against either side, and nothing below should be taken as a finding of wrongdoing. Take it in once and you will not misread a listing again.

Two houses, two cities, two businesses

Founded in 1960 by Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti, with a first atelier on Via Condotti, Valentino S.p.A. is the Roman house. Ownership no longer has anything 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 white valentino mini bag 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 based there, and it is a leather goods and footwear house rather than a couture maison. The company operates as Valentino by Mario Valentino, though its claims to have invented the stiletto heel and the women’s moccasin are self-description rather than verified history.

How the 1979 agreement split 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 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. The agreement also prevents that company from combining V and Valentino on leather goods. Running in the other direction, Valentino S.p.A. is contractually required 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 legal reporting corroborates that senior-rights point.

Why GARAVANI has to appear

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 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: accessories carry Valentino Garavani, and ready-to-wear falls under Valentino and Maison Valentino. That is a single 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 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. In April 2021 Mario Valentino’s counterclaims were dismissed. On 14 June 2024 the case itself was settled and dismissed without prejudice, and the terms were never disclosed. The words without prejudice matter here, because either side stays free to bring the matter back. 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 pleaded in the action were:

1. Alleged false advertising and unfair competition.
2. A claimed breach of the 1979 coexistence agreement.
3. An allegation that certain handbags were lookalikes of the couture house’s designs.
4. A claim of unauthorised use of the V mark on leather goods.

The dispute is reported to have escalated from 2017 onward, at the point where handbag advertising began pushing the word VALENTINO by itself. Since the case settled, nothing in it was tested to judgment, and no finding of wrongdoing was made against either company.

A second case, filed in 2022

A separate action ran in the opposite direction and involved 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. 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. That case’s outcome is not verified here, and it should not be reported as settled in either direction. The confusion over the name is not limited 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 that 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, and that alone clears up 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 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 Naples company’s bags are the ones that appear on the shelves of American off-price chains, something verifiable from those retailers‘ own brand filter pages. 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. 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.

Separating the two in thirty seconds

Look inside the bag rather than on the exterior. A couture-house bag has VALENTINO and GARAVANI in capitals on the interior tag, together with MADE IN ITALY, sewn down on all four sides, with consistent font weight and evenly pressed stamping. A serial number usually appears 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 have no date-code system, meaning any guide offering 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. 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 for shopping

Neither company is the 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 read the tag before you read the price. Should 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, which is exactly the ground the 2022 case covered. A pre-owned Valentino bag listed 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.