PARIS — Valentino has given its Avenue Montaigne flagship a couture makeover.

The shop has moved up the celebrated thoroughfare to number 35, the previous home of the Canadian embassy in Paris, from its previous location at number 17-19, between the Hôtel Plaza Athénée and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

The brand new three-story boutique is across the road from the Dior megastore that has reenergized the road, which is seeing quite a lot of tenants moving or expanding their premises to surf on the luxurious artery’s positive momentum.

“We actually consider that Avenue Montaigne is the natural place to be for Valentino, and particularly this location is de facto the right one,” chief executive officer Jacopo Venturini said in a joint interview with creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli.

With 7,100 square feet of selling space, versus 5,715 square feet on the previous location, the shop offers a VIP room and extra space for handbags and menswear, a category that Valentino is boosting, with plans to stage a dedicated men’s show in Milan next month after three years of coed displays.

Menswear, which accounts for 20 percent of sales, should represent 30 percent to 35 percent of revenues inside the subsequent three or 4 years, with further dedicated stores for men or separate floors for the category within the pipeline, Venturini said.

For added visibility, the brand will rejoice the opening with an event during Paris Men’s Fashion Week, coinciding with a short lived exhibition by Italian artist Gioele Amaro. Known for his digital color fields printed on canvas, Amaro has also created a murals that can feature on a billboard on Avenue de l’Opéra from June 15.

The Avenue Montaigne boutique is the primary fundamental flagship to feature Valentino’s recent retail concept, inaugurated last yr and rolled out in 52 stores to this point.

The Paris location carries extra significance, on condition that the Italian brand has had a presence within the French capital since 1975, with a couture salon on Place Vendôme since 1998.

“We’ve got a special relationship with Paris and this place, I feel, reflects our love for Paris and our relationship. It’s like Place Vendôme meeting Rome, meeting Avenue Montaigne and the culture of Paris,” Piccioli said.

That is obvious within the decor of the space, with a sweeping staircase in a patchwork of various marbles that unfurls just like the train of a red-carpet dress. This contrasts with black-and-white spaces punctuated with Valentino’s signature shade of red, including a boudoir-like room lined in scarlet velvet.

Bags and shoes are on the bottom floor, menswear is positioned within the basement, while womenswear and the VIP room are situated on the primary floor. The shop, which opened on Saturday, carries limited-edition versions of the VSling and Loco handbags for the occasion.

Since taking up as CEO in 2020, Venturini has built his strategy on Valentino’s identity as essentially the most established Italian couture house.

Only a handful of brands still produce high fashion, the technical term that designates made-to-measure clothing with stratospheric price tags. With its highly expert premières d’atelier, the name given to the top seamstresses charged with interpreting a designer’s sketches, the craft is on the core of the brand’s recent client-centric and colleague-centric approach.

“Couture, aside from an obsession for the main points, can be concerning the relationship that there’s between the première and the client, that after all is a really intimate relationship. This must be translated also into the shop,” Venturini said.

As reported, Valentino has revised its organization, eliminating department managers in favor of team managers, which allows client advisers to sell all categories. The concept is to empower sales associates, effectively turning them into ambassadors for the brand.

“I feel that within the last 20 years, on account of the very high growth that the luxurious market had, the role of the client adviser has grow to be just a little bit an excessive amount of a sort of commodity, so nowadays, we’re really specializing in having those who have really the fervour for the work they do,” the chief explained.

“It strengthens the concept even should you work in a store, you possibly can express yourself and you possibly can express your sensibility,” Venturini added.

Reflecting the identical notions of fluidity and flexibility, stores should evolve to reflect the brand’s collections, said Piccioli, who plans to unveil his fall 2023 couture line on July 5 on the Château de Chantilly, a 14th-century castle 30 miles north of Paris.

“While you log on, you simply see the products of our brand. While you go into the shop, you will have to enter into the world of the brand,” he said. “To translate the world of couture and the culture of couture into the stores implies that you will have to embrace people and provides them an experience.”

He noted that the Paris boutique differs from those opened previously in cities corresponding to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Geneva, Switzerland; Madrid; Florence, and Chengdu, China, and people who will bow in Shanghai in July and Recent York City in October — the latter also with a dedicated men’s floor.

Valentino expects to finish the yr with 225 directly operated stores, up from 199 at the top of 2022.

“There’s not a really rigid store concept, which can be a solution to express our way of managing the corporate,” Piccioli said.

“The culture of this company is unquestionably the culture of couture: the care, the humanity that’s linked to the couture, but in addition the values that the corporate expresses each day today, so inclusivity, quality, treating all of the people the identical way,” he added. “These values need to be a part of the environment of the shop.”

With references spanning from the Nineteen Thirties to the Seventies, the decor features Roman touches corresponding to marbles, onyx and checkered patterns. The spirit of couture is reflected in finely crafted details corresponding to ceramic door handles designed by Massimiliano Pipolo, sculpted plaster chandeliers by Parisian artist Alexandre Logé, and Fabio Cinti’s decorative objects made from brass.

The aim is to make the space as welcoming as possible, Venturini said. “You need to really feel at home and you must really feel understood,” he explained. “We’ve got customers that spend three or 4 or five hours in the shop with our client advisers, and this is definitely our aim.”

In parallel, the brand is revamping its online experience to cater to those clients who moved away from large cities through the pandemic.

“We actually reinvented the experience in the shop, considering the repositioning of the brand, what the brand deserves to be, but we really want to do the identical job, and that’s what we’re doing on this moment, within the e-commerce,” Venturini said.

The CEO said it was hard to present a deadline for the project as changes won’t all occur without delay. Actually, he thinks any strategy must be permanently fine-tuned, based on feedback from the staff interacting with customers.

“That you must set a technique and it’s essential to determine who you would like to be and wherein way you would like to serve your customer and what must be your added value. But then I feel it’s very essential to have a dynamic approach,” he said. “It’s a world where it’s essential to evolve on really a day by day basis.”