Valentino was always in pursuit of glamour. Aged 14, he knew he “didn’t want what everybody else could have. I was a big dreamer, a big dreamer. Vivien Leigh, Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner, and Katharine Hepburn – I am a designer today because I would dream of those ladies in fox coats and lamé, coming down those grand staircases they had in the movies.”
On 19 January Valentino’s foundation announced he had died aged 93 at his house in Rome. With exacting pattern-making, his signature poppy red, lace and embroidery, Valentino Garavani was more than just a designer; he was an architect and fierce defender of late 20th-century glamour. As he once said, “I know what women want. They want to be beautiful.”
Born in Lombardy in 1932, Valentino Garavani dreamed himself out of Voghera and onto the world stage. A single man with a single vision, he was remembered at school for being the neatest child. He studied in Milan, then Paris, apprenticing under Dessès, Dior and Guy Laroche, synthesising discipline and ambition.
It is hard to overstate how successful Valentino was. Jackie Kennedy was wearing his design when she married Aristotle Onassis in 1968 and ordered six dresses to mourn the death of her husband, JFK. Farah Diba fled Iran in a Valentino coat after her husband, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was deposed in 1979. When Julia Roberts won the Oscar for Best Actress in 2001 for Erin Brockovich, she wore a Valentino gown; so did Cate Blanchett when, in 2005, she won Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Aviator. “In Italy, there is the Pope – and there is Valentino,” Walter Veltroni, then the mayor of Rome, once said.
Like those he dressed, Valentino was a star, as recognisable as the brand itself. In the many profiles written about him, he was always memorably described: a 2005 New Yorker piece called him “a short, powerfully built man with hair so tightly coiffed it appears to have been baked in a kiln… his skin, the colour of melted caramel, has the texture of a lovingly preserved Etruscan ruin”, while, in 2012, the Observer noted his complexion as “dipped upside down in lacquer”.
Valentino was fabulously dedicated to living an exuberant life. Houses in Rome and Gstaad, one of the largest private houses in London’s Holland Park; a 300-acre estate just outside Paris, each with their own Rothkos and Warhols; a personal chef; holidays on his 152ft yacht which had five staterooms and four flat-screened televisions; his wrist adorned by a monstrously large Cartier watch. As he once put it: “There are only three things I can do – make a dress, decorate a house, and entertain people.”
But with theatricality came an equally forceful meticulousness. Spontaneity and surprises displeased him. Nothing was left to chance – he wanted to know which kind of bedsheets his guests slept in and how often they were changed. “I want to know how many times my staff will approach the room,” he once said.
Such ostentatiousness sometimes threatened to lurch into the distasteful, and some of his ideas now read uncomfortably. He liked his women to be beautiful, the kind who “dresses to please her husband”; he believed the women who wore his couture pieces “do not work – although of course they do a lot of charity work”. His models were ridiculously tall and wafer thin. “I use very slim models without bosoms, to be free to create,” he said. “If the model has a bosom or a little big hips, it gets in the way… They have to have a certain look, a special look. That is why I like the Brazilian girls.” Such beliefs were chauvinistic but perhaps belied a greater truth: that he believed completely in the fantasy, and that fantasy required as much discipline from the women who wore his garments as it did from him.
Valentino’s death marks the loss of one of the last bastions of a time in which the pursuit of elegance was taken seriously, so soon after the passing of another Italian legend, Giorgio Armani, who died in September last year. Valentino dreamed big and, improbably, made those dreams real. He proved that excess could be exacting, that grandeur, paired with rigour, could be a life’s work.
[Further reading: Industry likes money too much]
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