Valentino, Italy’s Fashion ‘Emperor,’ Has Died

“Valentino: Live a hundred years!” That was the fervent wish of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the designer’s most famous client, in 1966.

He almost made it. Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani died today at the age of 93. He managed to outlive Jackie, and also his rivals Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, with whom he was so often linked. Women’s Wear Daily had names for them all. Yves the King, Karl the Kaiser, Valentino the Chic. But the documentary that was released about him in 2008, the year he retired, bequeathed Valentino another, more enduring title: the Last Emperor. It was the perfect sobriquet for a man whose life had a distinctly imperial gloss, though he himself blanched at the notion. He thought Valentino hardly sounded like an emperor’s name.

And yet he lived like one. Grand collections of art and objects were housed in a palazzo on the Piazza Mignanelli and a villa on the Appian Way in Rome; a 19th century mansion in London; a chalet in Gstaad; a penthouse in New York, and, just outside Paris, the Château de Wideville, once home to one of Louis XVII’s mistresses. Valentino’s 152-foot yacht the T.M.Blue One was a familiar sight around the Mediterranean in the summer.

Then there were the parties: the 50th birthday celebration at Studio 54 with Valentino in red tails as the ringmaster of a Fellini circus; the three-day 30th anniversary celebrations in Rome in 1991; the 45th anniversary extravaganza, also three days, also in Rome, in July 2007. This one was captured for posterity by The Last Emperor. Honing the imperial connotations, Ancient Rome was called into play as a backdrop, with the schedule of events including a dinner at the Temple of Venus and a fashion show at the Colosseum bathed in a Valentino red glow. “We could never have anticipated how symbolic the excess of the €40 million bacchanalia in Rome would seem after the global financial collapse arrived 15 months later,” producer/director Matt Tyrnauer mused some time after the fact. “It makes 2007 in the film look like 1928.”

In The Last Emperor, Valentino’s partner Giancarlo Giammetti is seen planning what he calls “the largest, most important event in the history of fashion.” Their relationship of 50 years was one of fashion’s great love stories. They were perfect complements. Giammetti made the business wheels turn, while Valentino created one of fashion’s most defined signatures. He was a master couturier, so the cut and cloth of his signature double-faced coats and suits was peerless. “A woman must cause heads to turn when she enters a room,” he insisted. The boldface names he dressed would have turned heads whether or not they were wearing Valentino, but they looked to him, especially for breathtakingly beautiful eveningwear. Fashion sybil Diana Vreeland captured the intent of a Valentino gown. “It must lift the dead,” she raved. “His woman must startle.” It helped that his favourite colour was red. It had been so ever since 17-year-old Valentino was thoroughly seduced by a performance of “Carmen” he saw in Barcelona: the red of the costumes, the red of the theatre’s interior, and the Spanish women all dressed in red and leaning out of their opera boxes “like geraniums on balconies.” From his very first collection onwards, there was always at least one red dress for good luck.

“I want to hear people saying, ‘This is just too much,’” Valentino once said of his clothes. He courted a similar response with his own peerless vanity. “I am the Rolls Royce of fashion,” he announced to Eugenia Sheppard of the International Herald Tribune. The immaculate wardrobe, the helmet of hair with never one strand out of place, the face nipped and tucked into implacable serenity, the deep perma-tan, redolent of Capri in summer and Gstaad in winter: all of it spoke of a man with precision-tooled self-esteem. (The dalliance with Elvis-like sideburns can be blamed on the 70s.) But the vanity was tempered by a supremely dry sense of humour. When he first laid eyes on Andy Warhol’s portrait of him, he declared, in mock indignation, “It’s me? I thought it was Fellini.”

For all the pomp and circumstance of the lifestyle, Valentino was, in his own way, a loyal and devoted family man. He and Giammetti parted ways as lovers in 1972, though it wasn’t until a Vanity Fair profile in 2004 that they spoke publicly about their relationship, which caused a sensation in the Italian press. Following his split with Giammetti, Valentino met a young Brazilian named Carlos Souza. They were together for ten years, until Souza married socialite Charlene Shorto. Valentino and Giammetti were godparents to their two sons. In the early 80s, the designer met his last boyfriend Bruce Hoeksema, once a model for Valentino. All of them would holiday en famille, with a tight-knit circle of longtime friends. And Valentino’s mother Teresa, whom he always considered the most important person in his life, lived with him in Rome till she passed away, looking out for him to the very end. (When one of his pet flamingos died mysteriously, she insisted on autopsying it herself, to ensure it hadn’t been poisoned. It would later transpire that the bird had electrocuted itself by pecking at an electric cable.)

Legend has it Teresa named her son after the silent screen star, but it was actually her grandfather’s name. Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani was born on May 11, 1932 in Voghera, a small town between Milan and Turin in northern Italy. Father Mauro did well as a supplier of electrical goods, which was fortunate because the young Garavani had expensive tastes. And, as the only son, he got what he asked for. “I was the only little boy in Voghera who went to a shoemaker to have his shoes custom-made,” Valentino recalled. He also insisted on cashmere sweaters custom-made to his own specifications. In adulthood, he mused, “Beautiful things have been following me since I was ten years old.”

He may have been even younger than ten when he demanded to be carried from his sickbed through a snowstorm to see his cousin dressed in her finery for the Teatro Sociale in Voghera. Beauty was already an obsession. This child was truly father to the man he became. By his mid-teens, Valentino was furiously sketching dresses every day, working for his aunt Rosa, a local designer, on the side, and flunking his last term at school. After a particularly dull holiday in the mountains with Teresa and Mauro, he decided on the spot to abandon Voghera and follow his fashion star to Paris. His remarkably indulgent parents gave him their full support.

Valentino, then 18, enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1950, following up with courses at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. He immersed himself in a Berlitz French course, eager to lose his Italian accent. After graduation, he apprenticed with couturier Jean Dessès, whose clientele of European royalty and movie stars was an immersion of another kind for Valentino. So were the richness and variety of the fabrics used in the eveningwear that was the mainstay of the house. The young apprentice also did some moonlighting for Parisian socialite Countess Jacqueline de Ribe’s fashion line, cannily making connections that would be valuable in years to come.

When his time at Dessès came to a sudden end after five years, Valentino went to work for Dessès alumnus Guy Laroche. If he learned about fabric at his previous employer, Laroche was an education in form for Valentino. But he was eager to start his own business. He returned to Rome in 1959 and, with backing from Mauro and a friend, he opened his own atelier on the fashionable Via Condotti. Elizabeth Taylor, in town to shoot Cleopatra, was an early customer, which helped generate local media coverage. But Valentino’s profligate spending scared off his father’s friend and he was staring at bankruptcy when, in July 1960, in a bar on the Via Veneto, with la dolce vita in full cry around them, he met Giancarlo Giammetti, then a 21-year-old architecture student. “The Roman newspapers were full of this new name in fashion,” Giammetti remembered later. “I was rather surprised when I saw this wonder boy of 28 years face to face. He was slim, rather shy, a young man with the most extraordinary eyes. He was more like a college student than a fairy-tale hero. But this was Valentino!” Love blossomed, Giammetti dropped out of school to put Valentino’s finances in order, and thus began one of fashion’s most iconic unions of art (V) and commerce (G).

The rest of the world was introduced to Valentino in July 1962, when he showed his collection at the Pritti Palace in Florence, then the hub of the Italian fashion industry. He had the last slot on the last day, but the word was out and press and buyers waited for him. His show was a sensation. An international clientele soon lined up. In September 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy, still in mourning for her husband, was at a function in New York when she ran into a friend whose black organza two-piece caught her eye. She asked who made it. Valentino just happened to be in town presenting his new couture collection, so he wheeled a selection of dresses over to Jackie’s apartment. She ordered six, in black and white.

In 1966, Valentino moved his presentations from Florence back to Rome, and his new salon on the Via Gregoriana. Two years later, he presented an all-white couture collection for Summer ‘68. A radical riposte to Sixties psychedelia, it was a blast of minicapes-and-moonboots modernity, interwoven with a V for Valentino graphic that quite possibly pioneered fashion’s love affair with the logo. Fashion legend has it that it was Jackie Kennedy who persuaded Valentino to take this attention-grabbing step. The Italian fashion press wasn’t convinced. Too commercial, too soon, they carped. They ate their words when Jackie chose a look from the collection to wear when she married Aristotle Onassis on Skorpios in October. The demure ensemble featured an ivory lace mock turtleneck and a knee-length pleated skirt, accessorised with lace stockings, kitten-heeled shoes and a white ribbon taming Jackie’s bouffant. It was almost incongruously girlish given that she was 39 at the time, but in the wake of the nuptials, Valentino apparently received nearly 400 orders for the same outfit.

In 1998, Valentino and Giammetti sold the company to Italian conglomerate HDP for around $300 million. Four years later, HDP sold it on to Milan-based Marzotto Apparel, for $210 million, who then sold a majority stake in 2007 to Permira, a private-equity firm. The 2008 documentary provided some insight into the difficulties that Valentino had adjusting to the turmoil and the bottom-line mindset of the corporate revolving door, but his dissatisfaction was hardly a secret in the industry. So the announcement in September 2007 that he would retire after the Spring couture show the following January came as no surprise. Giorgio Armani sent a red dress down his own runway in tribute.

In retirement, Valentino was able to spend more time at Château de Wideville, where he finally got to see his garden change from spring to summer. He’d always missed the transformation before because he’d been working on his collections in Rome. He also said that, every so often, he would take out a sheet of paper and draw. “I do in one minute a beautiful silhouette. This is what I do, because I love it.” And his career was also celebrated in endless award ceremonies (70, he calculated at one point) and major exhibitions, like “Valentino: Master of Couture”, which opened at Somerset House in London in November 2012.

In a career studded with highlights, Valentino’s own choice for his peak moment was something of a surprise. It was the appearance of Julia Roberts at the 2001 Oscars, the year she won for Best Actress, in a black and white gown from his Autumn/Winter 1992 couture collection. Along with 130 other dresses, Julia’s made it into the Somerset House show. So did Jackie’s wedding dress, and the wedding dress Valentino designed for Princess Marie Chantal of Greece, which took 25 people four months to make. The many extraordinary, arduous techniques that helped create such pieces were scrupulously documented in accompanying text and visuals. They helped reanimate the question about whether Valentino’s work was emblematic, as had so often been mooted with him and his peers, of a dying art. Was he indeed the Last Emperor?

That was one reason why, in his later years, the question of legacy would inevitably arise in conversations with Valentino. What happens next? “My dear, this is a big thing,” he demurred to one interrogator. “One day I’m going to think about it. Now I don’t want to. I say I’m much too young, it’s impossible.” In May 2022, to celebrate his 90 years young, a celebratory exhibition was mounted in the Teatro Sociale in Voghera. Fifty dresses — red, of course — from the archives were displayed on the Teatro’s stage, along with sketches, photographs, clippings and other ephemera that captured the spirit of the different eras from which the looks were chosen. It was a special homecoming for Valentino, but it had the inescapable sense of a circle gracefully closing.

In 2023, the Fondazione Valentino Garavani e Giancarlo Giammetti acquired the palazzo at 23 Piazza Mignanelli, renovating and renaming it PM23 as a hub for the foundation’s cultural and educational activities. It was officially inaugurated in May 2025 with a stunning exhibition of Valentino’s red dresses matched to masterpieces of contemporary art by Picasso, Warhol, Basquiat and many more. Years earlier, the designer had thoughtfully provided a characteristically droll epitaph to accompany such a defining moment: “I love beauty. It’s not my fault.”