What’s in a name? When it comes to Valentino, quite a lot. As the great
Italian fashion designer surveys his gilded life with his swanky homes and
his supersized yacht, he must surely give thanks to the woman who made it
all possible. Not only did Teresa Garavani bring a strapping boy into the
world in May 1932, she also named him after the first international screen
idol, Rudolph Valentino. What a career move. As he lay in his cradle, long
before he would ever pick up a pencil to design dresses for the world’s most
celebrated women, his name was already synonymous with romance and glamour.
After this auspicious start, all life ever did for Valentino, the only son
of adoring parents and the enfant prodigieux of his generation, was get
better and better. “I am so proud and so grateful,” he says. “I love my job,
I love my work.”
The sunkissed life of the 75-year-old Italian designer, who celebrates the
45th anniversary of the founding of his multi-million-pound fashion empire
next month, serves as a latter-day Aesop’s fable. His story of reaping
riches in the rag trade is a salutary tale, an object lesson in how to do
everything just so. Far from being a here-today-gone-tomorrow sensation like
so many designers, Valentino is the tortoise that outstrips the hare. “I’m
proud of having done everything step by step,” he says. “I never rushed.”
The approach that brought him success, he explains, was a softly, softly
one, always piano, piano. No wonder his elegant and opulent style, honed in
the cutting rooms of Paris where he grafted for many years, has found him
dressing royalty, first ladies and movie stars for nearly five decades.
His clothes are present when history is made. When the empress of Iran Farah
Diba fled her country in 1979 in the wake of the Islamic revolution, she did
it in Valentino. Madame Bernadette Chirac chose it for the day that her
husband became president of France. It was the world’s most famous widow who
made his name. After the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, Jackie
turned to Valentino the following year to make her entire wardrobe in black
and white as she came out of mourning. Four years later she married
Aristotle Onassis wearing an ivory georgette minidress of his design.
“Jackie Kennedy made me famous around the world,” he says. As a result, his
career went from mere superstardom into orbit, where it remains. As one
Vanity Fair writer puts it, “Valentino has dressed more princesses than
there are in the Almanach de Gotha [the European register of royalty], more
socialites than there are in the Social Register, and more Hollywood
beauties than there are, well, at the faded MGM of today.” His evening
dresses are drop-dead gorgeous creations of lace and chiffon, show-stoppers
with heart-stopping price tags of £20,000 and more.
There will be nothing piano, piano about next month’s celebrations in Rome.
Much of the city’s ancient heart, near the Forum, will be cordoned off for a
three-day extravaganza rumoured to cost over £5m. As Walter Veltroni, the
mayor of Rome, has said, “There is the Pope and there is Valentino. In
this city, I don’t know who else is as famous.” Guests will fly in
from all over the world to attend a preview of a Valentino retrospective at
the Ara Pacis museum, where 300 dresses from his archive will be shown. More
than 800 people will feast on delicacies such as quails’ eggs and the finest
mozzarella di bufala, which is flown to him wherever he is in the world.
Fountains will splash, orchestras will strike up and fireworks will
whiz-bang overhead. Valentino demands nothing less than perfection. He says:
“We are trying to put together something so that people will say, ‘This is
the Valentino we know and we love… He loves homes, good food; he loves
everything beautiful.’”
Veltroni is just one of the people who pay tribute to the man in a new book
devoted to his life and legacy. Valentino, a collection of essays,
photographs and reminiscences, is published next month. Though it borders on
the gushing, this festschrift reminds us just how long he’s been at the top.
When the fashion industry talk about him they reach for the superlatives.
Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, has called him “the Sheikh of
Chic”, while one fashion writer, Reinaldo Herrera, prefers “the king of
Italy”. Other sobriquets are “King of the Red Carpet” and “King of Couture”.
As befits such regal status, Valentino occupies an 18th-century palazzo in the
centre of Rome, next to the Spanish Steps. A former nobleman’s house,
Palazzo Mignanelli serves as his global headquarters and couture studio, the
lifeblood of his empire. Other Italian giants such as Armani, Prada, Dolce &
Gabbana, Moschino and Versace may jostle for a share of the billion-dollar
global market, but it is Valentino who dominates the world of couture, where
every piece is bespoke. Here, more than 60 seamstresses, known as petites
mains for their dexterity, labour all day for regulars such as Princess
Firyal of Jordan, Lady Bamford, Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece and Kate
Winslet – the named dummies on which their clothes are fitted lie around in
various states of undress. One clumsy move and you can send a Jordanian
queen or a Kuwaiti princess flying. There are clouds of tissue paper
everywhere as finished garments wait to be dispatched.
The palazzo also houses part of his vast dress archive. Hundreds are kept here
in polythene bags; others are in a giant store in Valdagno, northern Italy.
As meticulous about the past as he is about the present, he makes sure the
history of every item lent is logged on a computer and that each creation is
tagged. A sequined dress bears the label “Sharon Stone, 1993”. A
coffee-coloured polka-dot silk gown is tagged “Melanie Griffith, Cannes,
2001”. A sunray-pleated cream frock with crystal droplets was destined for
“Wife of Tom Hanks”. Avery Agnelli, Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Taylor and
Jennifer Aniston, to name a few, are all here in spirit.
Gwyneth Paltrow, one of Valentino’s most loyal customers, loves the fact that
he is very “old-school in his approach. He thinks a woman should look
beautiful in a dress and that’s the end of the story; that fashion isn’t a
place for concept and art. He gets crazy with me if I wear a jacket with an
unfinished seam or the sleeve isn’t the right proportion. I mean, he goes
nuts – it’s hysterical”.
It’s hard to pierce the surface of Valentino because his world is all about
surface. Whatever question is posed, the answer always comes back to
“beauty, beauty, beauty”, recited like a mantra. In short, fashion is
fashion for Valentino, not a concept that has to be explained or understood.
The aesthetic is everything. “A dress must give beauty to a lady and you
must respect the human body,” he says. “A woman to my eyes must look
sinuous, glamorous, feminine and distingué…”
What, all at once? Still, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have time, like
Jennifer Aniston or Susan Sarandon, to drop in for a fitting. His petites
mains will come to you. They took an emergency call one Saturday from a
hostess in the south of France who claimed that her frothy Valentino
confection, just delivered, did not fit and her guests were arriving that
day. Could they fix it? Two seamstresses boarded a plane and arrived a few
hours later only to discover that she had been trying to put the frock on
backwards.
A slight man, Valentino seems swamped as he sits behind a huge desk covered
with silver-framed photographs. “Here is Queen Rania,” he waves, a reference
to King Abdullah of Jordan’s wife, consistently named one of the
best-dressed women in the world and one of a handful rich enough to buy his
couture. “And here is Mrs Kennedy as she was then.” He and Jackie were
lifelong friends and he adored her uniform of trousers, trench and big
sunglasses for the day, and strapless gowns for the evening. “I made the
whole of her wardrobe when she went on a visit to Cambodia with Bobby
Kennedy in 1964.”
You soon appreciate that the list of glamorous women who send their
kissy-kissy signed photos, which has included Princess Diana and Elizabeth
Taylor, represents his family. His sexuality is no longer a secret.
Valentino, who enjoyed a 12-year romance with his business partner,
Giancarlo Giammetti, is now linked to the American designer Bruce Hoeksema,
an eternally youthful former model. Also in his family line-up is a snap of
his six pugs (Margot, Maude, Monty, Molly, Milton and Maggie), who often
travel with him in his private jet.
At the end of a working day, which starts about 11am and continues late into
the evening, Valentino leaps into one of his many cars, usually a Mercedes,
and is driven home to his villa on the Appian Way, half an hour outside
Rome. Failing that, he can always order the jet to whisk him to another of
his homes. He has a house in Holland Park, a 140ft yacht, an apartment in
Manhattan overlooking Central Park, a chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, and a
17th-century chateau outside Paris, Wideville, which once belonged to Louise
de la Vallière, the mistress of Louis XIV. There, Valentino has planted the
world’s largest rose garden, more than a million blooms, and keeps 12
gardeners busy all year. In recognition of his restoration of one of
France’s important historic houses, the French government has awarded him
the Légion d’Honneur.
Valentino will never play down his taste for the high life. He is far too
shrewd for that. He understands how his clients live. And as a collector of
houses and art, including works by Picasso, Chagall, Miro, Basquiat, de
Kooning and Warhol, he knows he lives better than most of those he dresses.
“He’s been a revolutionary in this way,” adds Reinaldo Herrera, “in the
sense that he has kept the thermometer of luxury. People always try to
pretend that they’re not interested, that they want a simple life. He does
not want a simple life, he wants the grand life.”
This grand life sees him granting audiences as sparingly as a pope, while
entertaining like a Jay Gatsby. As he once told a journalist from The New
Yorker, “I have all these things – yachts and houses. And they say I am
insane, this is not the world any more, nobody lives this way. Maybe I did
[make] a mistake, but I want these things in my life. My eyes want to see
perfection. Some people have said to me, ‘You have too many houses and
rooms.’ But too much for whom?”
When terrorism gripped Rome in the late 1970s in the wake of the Red Brigades,
he took to riding around in a red bulletproof Mercedes. John Fairchild,
editor-at-large of Women’s Wear Daily (WWD), was aghast. “My God, I
thought, you must want to get blown up.”
In fact, the flamboyance of Valentino’s life has brought only rewards. He has
more than 1,250 outlets across the world, with an estimated profit of over
£162m. He was one of the first to understand the importance of licensing his
name to leather companies and manufacturers of perfume. Every year he
designs prêt-à-porter and sport collections, menswear, shoes, bags, belts
and cruisewear. In 1998, he and Giammetti sold their company to a large
industrial firm, HdP, publishers of the newspaper Corriere della Sera, for
over £152m. It was sold again to Marzotto, the Italian conglomerate, in
2002. Last month, Permira, a private equity firm that owns stakes in Tetley
and Homebase, bought nearly 30% of the Valentino Fashion Group for £530m.
On the surface, this kind of money doesn’t make sense. With the rise of
ready-to-wear, the demise of couture has been predicted since the 1960s. But
each generation provides new blood: young princesses such as Marie-Chantal
of Greece or Mette-Marit of Norway, and the newly rich who crave luxury.
This is the reason Dior, Armani and Lacroix, to name a few, continue to
create couture as well as ready-to-wear. Neither Valentino nor Giammetti
will comment on the recent deal that has put yet more millions in their
wallets. Nor will they speak of retirement, rumours of which have been
circulating for years. Many industry insiders are talking up the Rome
celebrations as a finale, not a fanfare. Valentino has founded an Aids
charity, Life, and is considering setting up a museum, possibly in London,
so that students can study his work. This is the only suggestion, as he
approaches his late seventies, that his thoughts are turning to his own
mortality.
Perhaps the wisest move of his career was to dominate Hollywood’s red carpet.
Once a year, his team decamp to Hollywood just before the Oscars to wait
upon the stars. Sophia Loren, Jane Fonda, Jessica Lange, Cate Blanchett and
Hilary Swank have all accepted Oscars in Valentino dresses. “The real reason
is that we like these kind of people,” says Giammetti of their Hollywood
sojourn. “Maybe we are still under the spell of movie stars – especially
Valentino. When he was 10 years old he would go to the movie theatre… To
meet and be able to work with an actress is something seducing for him.”
When the Academy Awards are screened, hundreds of millions see his designs,
giving him publicity that is both unquantifiable and invaluable. And while
almost nobody among the audience can shell out £20,000 for a frock, many
will go out and buy his perfume at £30 a bottle – cheap at the price for a
whiff of glamour.
Valentino’s own story begins with Hollywood. Growing up in Voghera, a
provincial town near Milan, he spent much of his adolescent years in the
local cinema. He and his older sister were transfixed by the elegance of
Lana Turner, Vivien Leigh, Katharine Hepburn and Rita Hayworth. “I was crazy
about film stars,” he says. “All my life I was fascinated to see a beautiful
woman coming down the staircase in a long gown. This was my dream since I
was a child and it is for this reason that I am a designer.”
He was a sognatore, a dreamer, who never wanted to study but only to sketch.
At 17, he persuaded his parents to let him study in Paris and enrolled at
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, followed by fashion school, the Chambre Syndicale
de la Couture Parisienne. He joined the atelier of Guy Laroche and then Jean
Dessès, two of the biggest names in 1950s couture, to serve his
apprenticeship. After eight years he returned to Italy to set up his own
couture house. His father, an electrical wholesaler, sold his country house
to fund him. “I had fantastic parents who let me go when I was so young,” he
says. His mother, he says, “was always elegant. She was a bourgeois lady who
had beautiful crepe-de-Chine dresses and well-cut coats”.
Her son’s timing was impeccable. He started out just as the world’s eyes were
focused on Italy in the era immortalised in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. After
the grey privations of wartime, Rome, with its vibrant film industry at
Cinecitta, seemed a Technicolor place of paparazzi on Vespas and Anita
Ekberg frolicking in its fountains. With Antonioni and Visconti making
films, it was dubbed Hollywood-on-Tiber. Everyone wanted a piece of it and
Valentino, young and handsome, fitted the part. It was here that he met
Consuelo Crespi, the American wife of an Italian aristocrat, who went on to
be fashion editor of American Vogue. Through Crespi he met Jackie Kennedy.
Valentino would never need his father’s help again. Soon he was dressing
Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor – who
just happened to be wearing Valentino when she met Richard Burton.
His next piece of good fortune came in 1960 when he met Giancarlo Giammetti,
then an architectural student, at a cafe in Rome’s Via Veneto. They soon
became an established couple, not an easy feat in the climate of 1960s
Italy. Their collaboration has been long and happy and is often compared
with that of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. Together, Valentino and
Giammetti sound like a contented old married couple. “Meeting him was my
greatest chance,” coos Valentino. “Valentino is as solid as a rock,” gushes
Giammetti.
That rock knows he can be difficult. “I am much too precise, too concerned
about details,” he says. “It’s difficult because all those things I
learnt as a young man, I translated into my personal life. My houses, my
objects, my paintings, my surroundings. So is the way I entertain, what kind
of food I give my friends. This is all a contest. This is me. I try to be
perfect, but I cannot. One cannot do everything.”
It is Giammetti who shoulders the burden of the business, leaving the maestro
free to fret about collections and customers. “It’s a difficult job to
satisfy the buyers and the press,” says Valentino. “And then you have to
know the ladies, the crowd, what’s going on, who they are, what people like
and what they never like.”
Valentino never liked the “excesses” of the 1980s but adored the 1960s and
70s. When he launched his famous all-white collection in 1968, the fashion
press saluted his genius. “Americans are going wild about this Italian, who
in next to no time has become the king of fashion,” wrote WWD of the show
that saw white minidresses teamed with lace tights and flat shoes. That year
may have seen student uprisings in Paris and Soviet tanks rolling into
Prague, but 1968 remains, in the annals of fashion at least, the year of
Valentino. The 1970s saw him partying at Studio 54 and spending time with
Andy Warhol, who painted him, at the Factory in New York. “I used to see all
these art works drying on the floor,” he says. “I could have been a
billionaire if I had bought them then.”
In the 1980s he dressed Jane Fonda, Anjelica Huston, Jessica Lange and Brooke
Shields. But padded shoulders seemed to cause him actual pain. “Ugh,” he
winces, “the 1980s were too much for me. Ladies were overdressed,
over-combed and over-made-up. The big shoulders and short skirts were out of
proportion.” If we dwell any more on the ugly decade, we are going to need
smelling salts. But the 1990s were better, when he graduated to designing
for Nicole Kidman, Susan Sarandon and Halle Berry. His roll call now
includes Keira Knightley, Naomi Watts, Scarlett Johansson, Reese
Witherspoon, Cameron Diaz and Renée Zellweger.
As for minimalism and grunge, they were unpleasantnesses that simply didn’t
happen to Valentino. Many fashion commentators have noted that to him “edgy”
and “cool” are four-letter words. As Donatella Versace, who presides over
the fashion empire her late brother founded, acknowledges, “Like all true
fashion designers, he has stuck to his style over the years, regardless of
the changes in trends.”
All of which makes him not anti-fashion but supra-fashion, always keeping true
to his vision and never chasing after fads. “I think fashion and style are
two different things,” he explains. One is temporary; the other eternal. And
Valentino red, his signature colour, is certainly ever present.
A recent New York Times shoot, a homage to his 45 years, was a paean to his
scarlet dresses.
If he could choose a decade to have lived in, it would be the golden age of
Hollywood, with its screen sirens of the late 1920s and early 1930s. This
was a time of high glamour that masked the terrible reality of the Wall
Street crash and the Depression. It was a fiction produced by the
all-powerful studios but an alluring one nonetheless. He is misty-eyed
talking about his favourites, such as Fred Astaire and Cary Grant. The
allure was “the brilliant life, the top of the top. The stars were under
contract to the studios and they were always so beautifully dressed. Then
there were ladies who would wear five diamond bracelets and slinky dresses.
There were cigarette boxes by Cartier and crocodile suitcases. Such
raffinement.”
No wonder that he has often taken a turn on the catwalk at the end of his
shows to that Sinatra showbiz anthem, New York, New York. The lights, the
camera and the action are pure Hollywood. He even played himself in that
film about the fashion world, The Devil Wears Prada. He was thrilled. Even
though he is easily as famous as the actresses he dresses, Valentino is
still the star-struck sognatore, the dreamy child who once sat wide-eyed in
his local cinema.
Valentino, edited by Armando Chitolina, is published by Taschen in August,
price £600, as a signed limited edition of 2,000 copies; © Taschen
