Although he can’t say he’s thrilled at being 75, Valentino doesn’t seem overly
burdened by morbid introspection. True there are the ghosts – Jackie O, whom
he dressed continuously for 30 years after she visited him in the months
following the assassination of JFK; Audrey Hepburn, who came to him whenever
she wasn’t at Givenchy; the artist Jean Michel Basquiat, who used to loiter
outside Valentino’s fashion house in Rome in the 1980s “because he was
having a flirt with one of the English girls who worked for me”.
There are also next weekend’s celebrations of his 45th year in fashion – three
days of lavish parties and dinners set (thanks to Rome’s Mayor and Italy’s
Arts & Culture Minister) in some of Rome’s most historic sites. A
thousand guests are expected, many of them famous and/or rich, many wearing
much-loved outfits from their own Valentino archives – for Val (as his
ladies call him) is nothing if not a purveyor of enduring loveliness. On
Saturday the extravaganza will culminate in Valentino showing his couture
collection in Rome for the first time in 17 years.
Flattering though the attentions of the world’s press will no doubt be, these
are just the proceedings to encourage the kind of retrospective navel-gazing
that frequently ends in tears. But on the day we meet at his white-stuccoed
mansion in Holland Park, West London, (the one with the three Picassos,
three Basquiats, two Warhols, one Damien Hirst and the Cy Twombly – and
those are just the paintings I glimpse downstairs) Valentino is feeling
nostalgic only for the previous evening’s concert with Prince, which he
attended with a few well-dressed friends and which was so invigorating that
the designer found himself actually moving. “Not dancing, no, I couldn’t
claim that, but definitely moving. And, you know, I looked around the room
and the ladies were really beautifully dressed.” Those vast hooded lids
hover over his blue eyes momentarily in valediction: “I have to tell you
now, England has some really well-dressed girls.”
This must be profoundly reassuring for the man who has spent his life
beautifying women. What he observes with disapproval, however, is some
English girls “putting together dresses from pieces that come from
Portobello and who knows where else. Young girls, they think it’s
fashionable, but if those dresses are worn by a lady of 50 or so, then,
sorry, she looks like a grandmother.”
His dresses have always made a woman look like a class act.Jacqueline de
Ribes, the socialite, was such a fan that she would climb the six flights of
stairs to the chambre de bonne (a maid’s room) where he lived when he
first arrived inParis, aged 18, from Italy. The visits were for purely
sartorial reasons, you understand, and it was an exceptionally pleasing chambre
de bonne, decorated by Valentino with Directoire furniture.
His ideal woman is dressed, he says (closing his eyes completely this time and
caressing the air with his hands to make a narrow torso), “with high, small
breasts, a bare back maybe, something a bit veily at the front and never
too much cleavage”. It’s the timeless classiness that Jackie Kennedy
instinctively grasped when she saw a friend wearing a Valentino dress in
1965 (“she was in mourning, but she was so happy with my white collection
that she ordered six outfits, and that put me on the map”).
It is what Elizabeth Taylor sometimes railed against in their long, fruitful
but somewhat combustible relationship. “She said to me once, ‘Valentino, why
do you keep trying to make me look like a lady when it’s such a lost cause?’
” And it’s what Jennifer Lopez intuited almost four decades later when she
asked him to dress her, her then fiancé and the bridesmaids for her second
marriage. “She rang me – I was on the boat – and she said, ‘Listen,
Valentino, I would love to look like a princess. Will you dress me?’ ” Of
course he would. He has also dressed Julia Roberts (the night she won an
Oscar), Cate Blanchett (the night she won hers); Jessica Lange (she won,
too); Mercedes Ruehl (ditto), as well as adding elegance to Reese
Witherspoon, Salma Hayek, Elle Macpherson and Julianne Moore. He has
phenomenal staying power: his creations are classic without being fusty,
exquisitely made (some of his couture fabrics cost £1,000 a metre; he has
had some of the same seamstresses for 30 years), and always fashionable
without being fashion statements. But more than the clothes, one senses that
Val himself, with his surprisingly sardonic sense of humour and deadpan delivery, is part of the draw.
Many of his clients – such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Elizabeth Hurley – have
become friends, and as friends, they inevitably receive an education in
grand opulence, old style. He is very hospitable, but then there is plenty
to be hospitable with. In addition to the London mansion, there is the New
York apartment, the 16th-century château outside Paris, the Roman palazzo,
the chalet in Gstaad and the 132ft yacht, all of them fully staffed with
butlers, maids, major-domos, chefs and bodyguards. And the hospitality –
food, linen, flowers and wine – is of an otherwordly quality. “I do like to
entertain,” he says with laudable understatement, as he shows me the room in
his London house lined with blue and white Meissen porcelain, “but sometimes
I drive the people around me crazy.” The sheets on his bed must be ironed
every other day. Even the TV suppers, taken at six o’clock (with his five
pugs), are eaten from gleaming silver. “It’s because I detest messy.” The
magnificent Roman nostrils flare with feeling.
“Fortunately, my staff understand me now. For instance, I was at my French
château a few weeks ago, and you should see the gardens. Incredible. Really
everyone who goes there is flabbergasted. Tulips, tulips, tulips, and the
head gardener knows I hate to see mud so he had the soil covered with a
carpet of forget-me-nots.”
Valentino does indeed engender extraordinary loyalty. His head of
international PR, the beauteous Brazilian Carlos Souza, something of a
legend himself within the smart latitudes of Capri and New York, has been
part of the fold since the late 1970s – Souza’s wife and sons becoming part
of the extended Valentino family. Meanwhile, Valentino’s business partner
(and one-time lover), the savvy and equally well-preserved Giancarlo
Giammetti, has been the other half of the Valentino brand since the two met
in Paris in 1960.
It is an exceptionally good-looking crowd. For a man of his years, Valentino,
with his spectacular cinnamon-coloured tan and matching, immaculately
coiffed head of hair, is in splendid shape, thanks partly to the regular
strolls (never runs) on his jogging machine. But then, as a young man he was
movie-star material – a detail not lost on the film industry, which cast him
as an extra when he was a fashion apprentice in Paris and gave him a cameo
as a doomed aristocrat in a film about Marie Antoinette.
What with the lavishly furnished maid’s room he once lived in, and the (much
later) visits from Gwyneth and Elle, one might assume that this is a man who
has blotted out life’s unpleasantnesses from his personal landscape. The
lids hover at half-mast again. “It is true I am probably a little obsessed
with beauty. When I was a teenager my mother asked, ‘Why do you want to be
surrounded only with lovely things and people?’” If Valentino has been a
one-man bulwark against declining social standards in manners and glamour
for 40 years, Giammetti, whom everyone credits as the alchemist in the
Valentino powerhouse, has afforded him the wherewithal to do it. It’s an
interpretation that Valentino is the first to endorse. “Me, I am a disaster
with money. I know only how to spend it, make dresses and do houses.”
Not that this ever seemed to hold him back. Brought up outside Rome in a
comfortable, middle-class family, Valentino Garavani moved to Paris in the
late 1950s, where he was apprenticed to Jean Desses and Jacques Fath. He
dropped his surname and, backed by his father, opened his first shop, a maison
de couture, on Rome’s Via Condotti in 1959. He met Giametti in 1960, an
encounter that both credit with changing their lives. From the outset, the
pair thought big, often living beyond their means. By 1973, Valentino had
bought the first of his Picassos.
One of the first fashion entrepreneurs to spot the potential wealth offered
by licensing deals, Giammetti even put the Valentino name on cigarette
lighters and bathroom tiles, though the items were later confined to just
three: perfume, sunglasses and jeans. In 1998 the two partners sold the
company for about £150 million to HdP, an Italian conglomerate. In 2002,
with revenues of more than £90 million a year, HdP sold it again, for £210
million. Giammetti and Valentino are multimillionaires.
Valentino has dressed every woman he ever dreamt of dressing – and some he
didn’t – and become the only Roman designer to move his shows successfully
to Paris, and has even, after one memorable trip to Madrid, where he noticed
the women at the opera wearing a particularly vibrant shade of red, had a
colour named after him. A Valentino red Mercedes was auctioned at a New York
charity gala a few years ago. Honour-bound to bid for it, Valentino shipped
it back to Rome, where he says it was sprayed a much less eye-catching
black. As a lover of deeply tanned skin and sweeping chinchilla coats, he is
not normally given to such studied coyness. Perhaps he doesn’t wish to be
recognised in the streets of Rome, where there is already a man who goes
around impersonating him.
Since 1982 Valentino has lived with Bruce Hoeksema, a handsome American who
used to be the company’s vice-president and now designs jewellery, much of
it festooning Valentino’s slender wrists. Indeed, Valentino has the air of a
man thoroughly at ease. Unusually for someone still at the centre of the
highly neurotic fashion world, he isn’t in thrall to anyone else. When the
producers of The Devil Wears Prada approached him to appear in a cameo
role as himself, it didn’t occur to him that by agreeing he could be
courting eternal condemnation from the mighty Anna Wintour. “Hmm,” the lids
flutter. “Anna is my very dear friend. And you know, I think now, after that
film, she is even more famous.” As is he.
Although he was close to Andy Warhol (one can imagine the latter falling for
Valentino’s flamboyant, Latin good looks) and went to Studio 54 once or
twice, his dalliance with decadence was, by his account, a bit of a washout.
“I didn’t drink, I didn’t do drugs.” The biggest excitement was when Warhol
chose the name of Valentino’s new pug: Josephine. “And when he painted me
several times. Of course, Giancarlo wouldn’t let me buy them. I don’t think
he thought much of them, to tell the truth.” The nostrils flare
sardonically. “But I got them a few years later.” Now, like the two flower
paintings that Valentino acquired for £5,000 each in the late 1960s, they’re
worth millions.
I think we can safely say that he’s not that much of a disaster with money.
