Valentino’s final lesson for luxury: Play the infinite game

Last week, the world lost the last true icon of fashion. The passing of Valentino Garavani is a moment of mourning. It is also a moment of stark clarity for the luxury business. As a co-founder of the Italian Mind Foundation, I have spent the past few years facilitating the resurgence of Italian cultural relevance and meeting some of the most influential figures in the fashion world. To me, Valentino’s legacy is a blueprint that many companies are failing to read. He managed something extraordinary. He didn’t just build a brand; he executed a strategy of absolute dominance. The lost art of luxury restraint Consider the landscape he navigated. Trends shifted significantly over the decades, yet he remained immovable. This was his winning condition. While others scrambled to adapt to the grunge of the 1990s or the streetwear wave of the past decade, Valentino staked his claim on a singular, non-negotiable definition of beauty. He effectively removed choice from the client. He owned the color red. It is critical to distinguish the discipline of the man from the merchandising of the maison as we see it today. For Valentino Garavani, red was not a marketing capsule; it was a monopolistic claim on a specific emotion. When a woman needed to command a room, the market offered her only one rational payoff: Valentino. By refusing to play the game of adaptation, he forced the market to adapt to him. This highlights where many luxury brands today get lost in a sea of sameness. Many luxury managers confuse agility with instability. In a race to accommodate every shifting consumer preference, many brands dilute their own core. They chase volume, believing that ubiquity equals relevance. This is a strategic error. Valentino understood that in luxury, value is created through restraint and clarity, not by being everything to everyone. He signaled to the market that his brand was a constant, a fortress of elegance that would not lower its drawbridge for a passing trend. The fact that the brand today might treat his signature color as a seasonal exception rather than a rule is perhaps the clearest evidence of how brands over time drift from their source of power in the pursuit of scale. Importantly, there was no separation between the man and the house. Valentino lived the life he sold. He was on the yacht; he was in the chateau. This congruence created a level of trust that no marketing budget can replicate. Today, there is often a disconnect. Creative directors rotate through houses like mercenaries, often bringing no personal philosophy. Too often, uniqueness is sacrificed to the tactical mandate of boosting short-term revenue. Luxury clients feel this shift. Humans understand when a brand is a bold, authentic expression of a philosophy. They also sense when a brand has been reduced to a product line managed by a committee. Avoiding the luxury lifestyle trap This leads directly to the “Luxury Lifecycle Trap” I introduced in my book Luxury Marketing & Management, a concept I frequently discuss in board meetings. Brands often start with a clear, exclusive client portfolio. As they grow, many managers make the choice to chase a broader audience. They introduce lower-priced or incongruent items, soften their aesthetic to appeal to a wider audience, and expand their retail footprint towards ubiquity. Over time, many luxury and premium brands adopt the tactics of mass-market players. The result is a collapse in desirability. Valentino Garavani resisted this trajectory. He protected his perimeter, understanding that the moment you try to be everything to everyone, you become nothing to the few who actually matter. It is convenient to blame private equity or corporate structures for this. However, brand leaders make the choices. The decision to prioritize short-term volume over long-term brand equity is a failure of strategy. It is a failure to understand that the primary asset of a luxury house is its ability to influence and create desirability not just for the next season, but over the next decades. Valentino possessed the power of influence because he offered extreme value. He did not sell just garments and accessories. His true product was transformation. A woman in his dress was not simply dressed; she was armed and owned the room. This is the extreme value I advise clients to create. It is the ability to inspire a level of desire that overrides logic. The courage of a singular vision The lesson for the luxury industry is profound. To remain relevant, you must stop looking to competitors for cues and start looking at your own definition of excellence. You cannot A/B test your way to a legacy. You must have the courage to define a singular vision, express it through a unique and authentic brand story, and maintain the discipline to reject any distraction that contradicts it. Valentino played an infinite game. He was not competing with other designers. He was competing with his own standard of perfection. That is why he won. For the rest of the industry, the mandate is clear: stop chasing the consumer. Build a world so compelling, so distinct, and so beautiful that the consumer has no choice but to come to you. Thank you, Valentino Garavani, for your decades of excellence and your inspiration for the future of luxury. Your legacy will live on. This is an opinion piece by Daniel Langer, CEO of Équité, recognized as one of the “Global Top Five Luxury Key Opinion Leaders,” and advisor to some of the most iconic luxury brands in the world. He serves as an executive professor of luxury strategy and pricing at Pepperdine University in Malibu and as a professor of luxury at NYU, New York. Daniel has authored best-selling books on luxury management in English and Chinese, and is a respected global keynote speaker. Daniel conducts in-person masterclasses on various luxury topics across the world. As a luxury expert featured on Bloomberg TV, Forbes, The Economist, and others, Daniel holds an MBA and a Ph.D. in luxury management and has received education from Harvard Business School. Sign up for his online luxury masterclasses at the Jing Academy.

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Valentino’s final lesson for luxury: Play the infinite game