You have to understand what Maison Veneri was in the March of that year, because otherwise none of it makes sense.
It was ninety-one years old. It was founded in Milan in 1934 by a man called Aldo Veneri who made shirts, and it became what it is because of his daughter, and everybody in fashion knows Renata Veneri's name and about four hundred people alive have any idea what she actually did.
She cut a shoulder in 1987 that changed the decade.
She made about forty things that will be in museums in two hundred years, and she made nine hundred that were not very good, which nobody says.
She did not speak to her son for the last eleven years of her life because he moved the atelier out of Milan.
The son was Marco Veneri and he ran the house from 1998 until he died in the November of 2021.
He was not a designer. He was a very good businessman with an extremely good name who understood, from about 2004, that the entire value of Maison Veneri was in its archive and not in anything anybody in that building was currently making, and he acted accordingly for twenty-three years.
There is not one garment from the Marco Veneri era in any museum anywhere.
Luca Veneri got the house at twenty-nine.
He had been at Central Saint Martins and then two years at a house in Paris that everybody in the industry rates and nobody outside it has heard of, and he had been at Veneri since he was twenty-six doing accessories, which is where the family put people they are not sure about.
And then his father died on a Tuesday in November and there were four people in a room in Milan and Luca Veneri came out of it as creative director of a house that had lost eleven million euros in three years.
He was extremely good at about half of the job.
That is the honest assessment and it is his own: he was very good in a fitting and very good with the atelier and completely hopeless in a room with money in it, and he knew both of those about himself by the second season and had never once said either out loud.
By the March we are talking about, the house had two collections left.
Elena Veneri — Marco's sister, fifty-eight, who had run the business side since 2009 and had never in her life been photographed — had bought her nephew three seasons at a board meeting in Milan in the January of 2023.
Two of them had gone.
There were investors, and there had been a meeting in the January of this year at which a man of about forty-five had used the phrase legacy asset eleven times, and everybody in that room understood what it meant.
It means: we will keep the name and the archive, and we will close the room on the fourth floor.