The Italian designer Valentino died on Monday at his residence in Rome. He was 93 years old.
His foundation announced his death on Instagram.
Nicknamed the “international arbiter of good taste” by Vogue, notable women wore his designs to funerals and weddings, as well as on the red carpet. He dressed figures like Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Onassis, as well as modern stars from Anna Wintour to Gwyneth Paltrow and Zendaya. An icon of style and luxurious living, Valentino’s signature features included impeccable suits and a “crème brûlée” complexion — due to his passion for tanning. He was strongly inspired by the stars he saw on the big screen and had a lifelong fixation with glamour.
“I love a beautiful lady, 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 him.
In the world of haute couture, Valentino embraced sophistication, elegance, and traditional femininity through his dresses and trademarked a vibrant shade of red. His work embodied romance, luxury, and an aristocratic lifestyle.
He was born Valentino Garavani and named after the silent film star Rudolph Valentino. A self-proclaimed spoiled child, the designer acquired a taste for the expensive from a young age; his shoes were bespoke, and the stripe, color, and buttons of his blazers were designed to his specifications.
His father, a prosperous electrical supplies vendor, and his mother, who appreciated the value of a well-made piece, indulged their young son’s refined palate and later supported his fashion endeavors, sending him to school and funding his early work.
Raised in the small town of Voghera, Italy, he learned sewing from his aunt Rosa in Lombardy. After high school, he moved to Paris to study fashion and do apprenticeships.
Valentino owes much of his success to his ex-lover and business partner, 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, the duo 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. It generated $1.36 billion in revenue in 2021, according to Reuters.
Even after retiring in 2008, he couldn’t fully leave fashion and continued to create dresses for opera productions.
Once the fashion world became more accessible to the public, millions of aspiring fashionistas bought jeans, bags, shoes, umbrellas, and even Lincoln Continentals 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