Hamish Bowles Reflects on the Beautiful Life of Valentino

Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani—known, simply and powerfully, as Valentino—was born on May 11th, 1932, in Voghera, a rather quiet place lost somewhere between Milan and Genoa. But by the time he died, aged 93, on January 19, he had conquered the worlds of fashion and style, bringing a certain idea of beauty—luxurious, impactful, glamorous, immaculate, feminine—to whatever he touched. “I love beauty—it’s not my fault,” Valentino famously said with a shrug, and in fashion, he saw a way to captivate and ensnare women (his only clients when starting out, before he widened the purview of his well-dressed net). He trained at the Accademia dell’Arte in Milan, studying both French and fashion, and then, aged 17, moved to Paris, to the École des Beaux-Arts and the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, before securing an apprenticeship in 1951 with the Athenian couturier Jean Dessès, who dressed royalty and high society ladies in his immaculately draped and vividly colored evening gowns. Jacqueline, the Comtesse de Ribes, dressed with Dessès, and when she was asked by Oleg Cassini to design some dresses for him in Paris, she mentioned it to Dessès, telling the designer that “I don’t know how to draw in a chic way.” Dessès was amused. “I have an Italian illustrator,” he told her, “who would be very happy to earn a little more money after working-hours doing the drawings for you”—and a friendship between Valentino and Jacqueline was born. When he was chez Dessès, Valentino also created—sketches only—a series of lavishly draped and embroidered dresses as a fantasy project, including a day dress of blue chiffon (miles and miles of it) and an evening dress embroidered close to the body with cameos containing flowers and pink and yellow and brown chiffon draped across the bust and falling from the back to the floor: clothes for a Cinecitta star. (When he held his 30th anniversary party and exhibition in 1992, le tout monde descended on Rome to celebrate with him. His phenomenal workrooms had secretly recreated the designs in these early sketches—the abiti del sogno (dream dresses)—which proved to be every bit as ravishing when spirited to life as they had been when Valentino first dreamt of them.) When Guy Laroche, Dessès’s assistant, departed to start his own couture house, Valentino joined him for a few years before leaving to work briefly with the Russian-Georgian Princess Irene Galitzine (Galitzine had made palazzo pajamas a thing, amidst opulent evening clothes). Then, in 1959, Valentino started his own house with backing from his father and a family friend. In the meantime, someone had come into his life. Giancarlo Giammetti recently recalled their first meeting, with Giammetti seated alone in a Roman cafe. “A kind person came and said, ‘Are you alone?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you mind if me and my friend can sit here?’ Of course,” Giammetti remembered. “And Valentino sat next to me—I remember very deeply.” A whoosh of dark hair framed Valentino’s tanned face, with its sultry features and his arresting blue eyes. “Then Valentino started to speak to me in French. I said, ‘Sorry?’ ‘Oh, sorry—I just arrived from Paris after seven years, my mind goes French, and I was hoping that you speak French…’” Giammetti, it turns out, had studied French for most of his life. “He said, ‘From now on, if I see you again, we speak French.’ And we still do. Incredibly.” The two would speak French to each other—as lovers, and then as intimate friends and business partners—for the rest of Valentino’s life. Valentino soon found a lavish, frescoed apartment in the fashionable Via Condotti, but less than a year later he was facing bankruptcy. (Though Valentino threw the blame at his “champagne tastes,” someone had not been paying the rent.) He and Giammetti simply moved the salon to a 16th century palazzo on the Via Gregoriana. (Incidentally, Giammetti acquired the Via Condotti apartment recently and has had it transformed into his offices by Studio Peregalli’s Laura Sartori Rimini. It’s a sumptuous series of rooms, the walls now hung with silver tissue or silk velvet—though some still have their original frescoes—and filled with Hervé van der Straten furniture and antiques. What may have been “Champagne tastes” in 1959 are now sublime and defining.) Valentino gradually began to make his mark on fashion. His flashing good looks easily summoned the press, to be sure, but it was his clothes that had an allure for the stars who would pass through Rome. And when Elizabeth Taylor, there to shoot Cleopatra, chose his pleated, sleeveless white column dress, with two bands of ostrich plumes at the hem, to wear to the premiere of Spartacus, everyone took notice. Suddenly, his work was appearing in Vogue. Gloria Schiff, an editor there at the time, not only helped bring Valentino into the magazine’s world—she introduced him to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who quickly became a well-known proselytizer for the house, spending vacations in Capri with Valentino and Giammetti. In 1964, Valentino debuted his animalier motifs with a jetted, boxy zebra-motif jacket over a crisp white satin skirt featured in the magazine, and then, in the fall of 1967, Veruschka was photographed walking the backstreets of Rome by Franco Rubartelli wearing a chocolate brown mid-calf sweater, gold belted, over narrow pants in tiger stripes and a dramatic floor-length coat. There was an evening coat (again, to the floor) in ostrich-feathered and beaded red tulle—and when it was slinked off, one saw a strapless red columnar dress underneath, with a racy bodice that seemed insouciantly tucked round the body: jet-set chic! And then there was the wildly successful White collection for Spring 1968, from which Marella Agnelli ordered a dandified white-beaded waistcoat and embroidered jacket over a gently A-line floor-length skirt; Henry Clarke, meanwhile, photographed Marisa Berenson (granddaughter of Schiaparelli, lest one forget), and Benedetta Barzini wearing the collection in Cy Twombly’s astonishing Rome apartment for Vogue. In 1959, Valentino designed a clear red dress, called Fiesta, and from then on they were a regular part of his offerings, while his particular red—soon to become his trademark—was both bold and unapologetic. As Valentino became a name to watch, with ladies—Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, any number of princesses, Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis, Nan Kempner, Lynn Wyatt, and Susan Gutfreund, among so many more, flocking to dress with him—so his residences became exponentially more impressive. His Roman base—a penthouse apartment with Persian miniatures on the fabric-covered walls and banquettes fit for a Turkish salon, had been transformed into a house on the Appian Way, decorated by Renzo Mongiardino, the ne plus ultra of decorators. I went to visit Valentino in the late 1980s, and it was breathtaking. Its effects had amplified since a few years earlier, when Mongiardino had originally done it: Then, it was an elaborately columned environment, with pale green batiks and white upholstered Empire sleigh beds, but when I saw it, chintzes and 1880s velvets vied with large Chinese pots groaning with arum lilies. Everywhere, there were elaborately arranged flowers, and when one made out the objects behind them, one spotted a Fernando Botero painting or two. When I first went to Rome for the couture in the mid-’80s, long before my Appian Way adventure, I plucked up all my courage and walked into Valentino’s intimidating couture salon just off the top of the Spanish steps—two small-ish rooms that positively oozed with recherché glamour. There, hanging up, were his immaculate suits, sumptuous ballgowns, and elegant evening dresses, everything that one might need if one led that life—that is, if one had a chauffeur and lived… well, if one lived like Valentino himself did. Of course, this pair of elegantly finished rooms opened onto a positive hive of industry occupying five floors of a vast palazzo. Here were the couture ateliers: room after room of industrious ladies and a smattering of men—hundreds of them—applied to the task at hand in light-flooded rooms. (Some years after my first adventure with the couture salon, the place was subtly transformed by the English architects and designers Peter Moore and Peter Kent—there were silvered banisters, acres of pale gray marble in the hallways, and paintings by Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring, and Francesco Clemente, and it was all very, very chic.) Valentino’s show then always finished with music just before the maestro came out with a curious clapping of his fingers against his palms, arms in the air. It was triumphant; it was showbiz. In 1991, I had an appointment with Valentino to discuss his entire career, and met with him in an elegant room looking over the Piazza Mignanelli filled with antiques and lush draperies that lent it a Cécile Sorel sort of look. It was not easy getting him to speak. Next door in a vast room—and I mean vast—sat Giancarlo Giammetti, surrounded by arte povere and 1940s antiques, who was very easy to get to speak. Of course, Valentino had a number of other properties: in Capri, in New York, in London. But in 1995, I was invited to the 17th century chateau of brick and stone he had acquired—a house that was revealed to me only after I had followed a drive and dramatically turned a corner: There, plunging downhill, and glimmering below, was the Chateau de Wideville, once home to Madame de la Valliere, mistress of Louis XIV (Versailles is conveniently near). In the evening’s light, I explored the breathtaking Jacques Wirtz gardens, where brilliant violet rosemary stretched across the field and cut through the forests, while roses and scented high-summer flowers filled the walled garden. And then: the breathtaking house itself. Valentino worked with Henri Samuel on the interiors, which—with their emerald silk-velvet armchairs and a sort of Chinoiserie motif, which gave the house a sort of fanciful Palm Beach air—brought a level of comfort to the splendidly austere exterior. I was amused to see that the enormous Francis Bacon in Valentino’s sitting room depicted an abstracted man sitting on a carpet of bunches of roses, quite unlike anything I had seen before in his work—as Valentino-ish as it was possible for a Bacon to be. As I headed in for dinner, rather moved by the exquisite gardens and the ravishing interiors—by everything that Giancarlo and Valentino had done in life—I said to Valentino, “What you’ve done is to create beauty.” He clasped my hand and, weeping, said “It is beauty.”