Valentino Garavani attends the Valentino show as part of Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Spring/Summer 2017.
Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images
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Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images
Valentino Garavani attends the Valentino show as part of Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Spring/Summer 2017.
Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images
Italian fashion designer Valentino died on Monday at his Roman residence. He was 93 years old.
His foundation announced his death On Instagram.
He has been called the “arbiter of international taste.” Vogue magazineProminent women wore his designs to funerals and weddings, as well as on the red carpet. He has dressed the likes of Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Onassis, as well as contemporary stars from Anna Wintour to Gwyneth Paltrow and Zendaya.
The picture of elegance and lavish living, Valentino’s signature traits included elegant suits and a “crème brûlée” complexion – due to his enthusiasm for tanning. He was deeply inspired by the stars he saw on the silver screen and was obsessed with magic for life.
“I love a beautiful lady, I love a beautiful dog, I love a beautiful piece of furniture. I love beauty, and it’s not my fault,” he said. The last emperora documentary film about him in 2008.
In the world of high fashion, Valentino embraced sophistication, elegance and traditional femininity through his dresses, distinguished by the vibrant red color. His work embodies romanticism, luxury and an aristocratic lifestyle.
Valentino Garavani was born and named after silent film star Rudolph Valentino. A self-described spoiled brat, the designer acquired a taste for expensive things from a young age; His shoes were custom-made, and the stripes, colors, and buttons of his jackets were tailored to his specifications.
His father, a wealthy electrical supplier, and his mother, who appreciated the value of well-made clothing, catered to their young son’s taste and later supported his fashion endeavors, sending him to school and financing his early work.
He grew up in the small town of Foghera, Italy, and learned to sew from his aunt Rosa in Lombardy. After high school, he moved to Paris to study fashion and apprenticeship.
Valentino owes much of his success to his former lover and business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti. The two met in a café on Rome’s famous Via Condotti in 1960, where Valentino opened his first fashion design studio.
They founded Valentino in the same year, opening their first ready-to-wear store in Milan in 1969. Together the duo built a fashion empire over five decades.
They broke up 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 parts of a whole – Giammetti the commercial mind, and Valentino the creative force.
“Valentino has an ideal vision of how a woman should dress,” Giammetti told Charlie Rose in 2009. “He’s looking for beauty. Women should be more beautiful. His job is to make women more beautiful.”
They sold Valentino in 1998 for approx 300 million dollars. It achieved revenues of $1.36 billion in 2021, according to Reuters.
Even after his retirement in 2008, he could not leave fashion completely and continued to design dresses for opera productions.
Once the world of fashion became accessible to the public, millions of aspiring fashionistas bought jeans, handbags, shoes, umbrellas, and even a Lincoln Continental with a shiny V. By the height of his career, Valentino’s popularity rivaled that of the Pope in Rome.