Valentino vs Mario Valentino: Two Different Companies Sharing a Single Name

Two Italian companies sell handbags under the word Valentino, the two are unrelated, and the confusion has run on long enough to generate its own case law. One of them is the Roman couture house founded in 1960; the other is a Naples leather goods and footwear business founded in 1952. Both are entirely legitimate, both have 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. This piece explains who each company is, what that agreement requires, which ground the recent litigation covered and how it finished, and how a shopper can tell within seconds which company made a given bag. What follows is a trademark story rather than an accusation aimed at either side, and none of it should be read as a finding of wrongdoing. Read this once and listings stop being hard to read.

Two names, two cities, two businesses

Valentino S.p.A. is the Roman house founded in 1960 by Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti, with its first atelier on Via Condotti. The ownership story has nothing to do with the founder: he sold the company in 1998, Mayhoola for Investments took control 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 stepped back from design in 2007, presented his last couture collection valentino mini 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 a different 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 rather than a couture maison. The company operates 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 agreement that split the name

A coexistence agreement signed in 1979 established which marks each side could apply to which goods, and it remains the reference point for everything that followed. It permits Mario Valentino to 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 stops that company from combining V and Valentino on leather goods. In the opposite direction, the contract requires Valentino S.p.A. to use GARAVANI in addition to VALENTINO on its leather goods and in the advertising for them. There is also a separate United States position: Mario Valentino says 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 one company is obliged to write GARAVANI

The surname on the interior tag of a Roman-house bag is a contractual obligation, not a styling choice. Given 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. It is the addition of GARAVANI that keeps the mark distinguishable, which is why VALENTINO GARAVANI appears in capitals on the tag and in the advertising for bags. 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

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. Mario Valentino’s counterclaims were dismissed in April 2021. On 14 June 2024 the case itself was settled and dismissed without prejudice, and the terms were never disclosed. Dismissal without prejudice matters, since it leaves either side free to raise the matter again. According to reporting, more than ten proceedings, including arbitrations, were still live in Italy, so the 2024 dismissal ended one American case rather than the whole disagreement. The claims set out in that action were:

1. False advertising and unfair competition.
2. Breach of the 1979 coexistence agreement.
3. Handbags claimed to imitate the couture house’s designs.
4. Use of the V mark on leather goods, said to be unauthorised.

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 it was tested to judgment, and no finding of wrongdoing was entered against either side.

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. brought a claim against Fashionphile Group LLC in the Southern District of New York, docketed 1:22-cv-08984. The complaint alleged that around 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 confusion over the name is not limited to the two companies: it spreads 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.

Which shelves each brand actually reaches

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 one legitimate off-price channel is THE OUTNET, the off-price arm of Net-a-Porter, though the depth of discount there is not something to state with confidence. It is the Naples company’s bags 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 very rarely what a shopper searching for the couture house has in mind. Nothing improper is involved on either side: both are simply 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.

Separating the two 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, stitched 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 it is not universal, older pieces may carry none, and its absence alone 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 exterior reads only Valentino and the interior says Mario Valentino, you are holding a genuine Naples-made bag from the other company. That trap cuts both ways: an authentic Mario Valentino bag fails a Garavani checklist despite being entirely genuine, so establish which company made a bag before asking whether it is real.

What this means when you shop

Neither of these companies is the counterfeit, and treating this as fake versus real misses what is actually going on. If you want the Roman house, search for Valentino Garavani rather than Valentino alone, and read the tag before the price. If the Naples company’s leather goods suit you, buy them knowingly and enjoy the lower price, a price that reflects a different business, not a compromised version of the same one. The harm occurs in resale listings and third-party marketplaces that use one word to describe both, precisely the territory covered by the 2022 case. 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 collapses into a two-second check.