Valentino Garavani: the icon, the legacy and the red-carpet king

And I remember clearly how distracted I was by the opulence of his apartment, so over-stuffed with masterpieces that I dared not touch anything as we sat on his couch, facing a painting by Fernand Léger. I recognised it a decade later in a Vanity Fair feature, along with a tiger sculpture that turned out to be from the Ming dynasty.

Visiting Valentino often felt like visiting a museum. His name alone was a universal symbol for a standard of jet-set extravagance that was tempered by gracious manners and exquisite taste, a description that also characterised his unfailingly elegant designs. But I often felt I was looking at a subject under glass, even in situations where he could have let his guard down. He once invited me to a taping of Martha Stewart’s talk show where he demonstrated, while wearing a taupe-coloured suit, his unique version of a recipe for pesto, which he claimed to have invented while his yacht was docked in Portofino, telling his cook to add tomatoes.

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On another occasion, we were in the midtown apartment of his business partner Giancarlo Giammetti, this time in front of a very large Basquiat, I believe, talking with Sarah Jessica Parker about dresses he had created for the New York City Ballet, when he started complaining about women who cannot follow his lead on the dance floor. [Both Parker and Valentino studied ballet in their youth.] In 2011, when he unveiled his Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum, he did so in a darkened theatre at the Museum of Modern Art with a formal press conference attended by Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman, all dressed for a movie premiere.

I’ve thought about those moments since Valentino’s death on January 19 at the age of 93. He rarely removed his glamorous mask, though he did to some degree shortly after his retirement, when his professional finale was captured with an end-of-an-era appreciation in Matt Tyrnauer’s hit 2008 documentary, Valentino: The Last Emperor. That film revealed the intricacies of an eccentric designer at his twilight, one who valued the company of his five pugs above the trappings of fashion, and whose judgment included such gems as this: “An evening dress that reveals a woman’s ankles while she’s walking is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.” He hated the movie until he saw the audience’s reaction; then he loved it.

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With typical understatement, Valentino once said, “There are only three things I can do: make a dress, decorate a house and entertain people.” In each of those efforts he was undeniably prolific. Since the beginning of his fashion house in Rome in 1960, Valentino created as many as 500 designs every year between his couture, ready-to-wear, menswear, licensed products and secondary collections. His style remained remarkably unchanged over the decades: killer dresses, tailored suits and coats, and entrance-making looks that often were shown in his signature shade of Valentino red, which represented his vision of an ideal femininity.

That Valentino was never moved by trends, nor a designer known to set them, may have at times sent fashion critics into a state of restlessness, but his consistency was ultimately a virtue most prized by his famous clientele. Valentino said his purpose in life was to make women feel beautiful, and in that regard, he truly could be considered one of the world’s greatest artists.

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