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Valentino vs Mario Valentino: One Name, Two Companies

Two separate Italian companies sell handbags under the word Valentino, the two are unrelated, 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 line between them was drawn by a private contract in 1979, not by a judge. This article 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. This is a trademark story, not an accusation against either side, and nothing below should be read as a finding of wrongdoing. Take it in once and you will not misread a listing again.

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. Ownership no longer has anything 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 acquired thirty per cent in July 2023, intending valentino crossbody to buy the company outright by 2028. Valentino Garavani himself retired from design in 2007, presented his last 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 operates as a leather goods and footwear house rather than 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 history.

The 1979 agreement that split 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 for everything that followed. Under it, Mario Valentino may use Mario Valentino, M. Valentino, Valentino, MV or V on the exterior, provided that the full name appears inside the item and on its packaging. The agreement also prevents 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 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.

Why one company is obliged to write GARAVANI

The surname on the interior tag of a bag from the Roman house is a contractual obligation rather than a styling choice. Given how the 1979 agreement allocated the marks, and given 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 distinct, 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: accessories carry Valentino Garavani, and ready-to-wear falls under Valentino and Maison Valentino. That is one 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 2019 lawsuit, and how it concluded

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. The case itself was settled and dismissed without prejudice on 14 June 2024, with 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 action pleaded the following claims:

1. Unfair competition and false advertising.
2. Alleged breach of the 1979 coexistence agreement.
3. Handbags alleged to be lookalikes of the couture house’s designs.
4. 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 separate case, filed in 2022

A separate action pointed the other way and drew in 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. 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. 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 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 one 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 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.

Telling them apart in thirty seconds

Look inside the bag rather than on the exterior. 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. 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 of these companies is the counterfeit, and framing this as fake against real misses what is happening. Want the Roman house? Search Valentino Garavani rather than Valentino on its own, and read the tag before 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, not a compromised version of the same one. The damage happens in resale listings and third-party marketplaces that use a single word for both, 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 them, and a decades-old tangle reduces to a two-second check.