The Italian designer Valentino died on Monday at his home in Rome. He was 93 years old.
His foundation announced the death on Instagram.
Nicknamed the “international arbiter of good taste” by Vogue, his creations were worn by notable women at funerals and weddings, as well as on the red carpet. He dressed personalities like Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Onassis, as well as modern stars like Anna Wintour, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Zendaya.
A symbol of style and luxurious living, Valentino’s signature traits included impeccable suits and a “crème brûlée” complexion—due to his passion for tanning. He was strongly inspired by the stars he saw at the cinema and had a lifelong fascination with glamour.
“I love a beautiful woman, I love a beautiful dog, I love a beautiful piece of furniture. I love beauty, it’s not my fault,” he said in The Last Emperor, a 2008 documentary about his life.
In the world of haute couture, Valentino embraced sophistication, elegance, and traditional femininity through his dresses and patented a vibrant shade of red. His work personified romance, luxury, and an aristocratic lifestyle.
He was born Valentino Garavani and named after the silent film star Rudolph Valentino. Describing himself as a spoiled child, the designer acquired a taste for luxury from an early age; his shoes were bespoke, and the lapel, color, and buttons of his blazers were designed to his specifications. His father, a successful electrical materials supplier, and his mother, who appreciated the quality of well-made clothing, cultivated the young son’s refined taste and later supported his fashion endeavors by sending him to school and funding his early work.
Growing up in the small town of Voghera, Italy, he learned to sew from his aunt Rosa in Lombardy. After high school, he moved to Paris to study fashion and do internships.
Valentino owed much of his success to his former partner and business associate, Giancarlo Giammetti. The two met at a café on the famous Via Condotti in Rome in 1960, where Valentino had opened his first haute couture atelier.
They founded the Valentino Company that same year, and their first ready-to-wear store opened in Milan in 1969. Together, they built a fashion empire over five decades.
They separated romantically when Valentino was 30, but remained business partners and close friends. Valentino knew little about business and accounting before meeting Giammetti; together, they formed two halves of a whole—Giammetti, the business mind, and Valentino, the creative force.
“Valentino has a perfect vision of how a woman should dress,” Giammetti told Charlie Rose in 2009. “He seeks beauty. Women should be more beautiful. His job is to make women more beautiful.”
They sold the Valentino company in 1998 for nearly $300 million. The company reported $1.36 billion in revenue in 2021, according to Reuters.
Even after his retirement in 2008, he couldn’t fully step away from fashion and continued creating dresses for opera productions.
As the fashion world became more accessible to the public, millions of aspiring fashionistas bought jeans, bags, shoes, umbrellas, and even Lincoln Continental cars emblazoned with his shiny “V” monogram. At the height of his career, Valentino’s popularity rivaled that of the pope in Rome.
Source: npr.org by Maison Tran