La Dolce Vita, the Valentino Way

Observer

17-06-2025

'Fashion is not always seen as an art, and designers were not yet artists,' said Giancarlo Giammetti, the founder, with Valentino Garavani, of the Valentino brand. He was speaking on video from Rome about the fashion house they created in 1960.
This month a large book about the house came out. 'Valentino: A Grand Italian Epic' is a 576-page tome devoted to all things Valentino: drawings of gowns, archival photographs, advertisements, fashion features and many anecdotes from celebrity fans.
Elizabeth Taylor discovered the label when she was filming 'Cleopatra' in Rome. Clients like Audrey Hepburn and Nan Kempner liked how classic the classics were. Garavani never embraced fads and stuck to what critic Suzy Menkes described in the introduction as a penchant for 'frothy, sensual, sweet-toothed glamour.'
Matt Tyrnauer, who directed the 2009 documentary 'Valentino: The Last Emperor,' said in an interview that the book shows the house's role in the invention of fashion PR and modern advertising.
'Fashion was the most rarefied world for a certain set of women of a certain class who patronized these houses, who were not interested in publicity or marketing because they didn't need it, but the world was changing,' said Tyrnauer, who is credited as the author of the book (Menkes wrote the introduction). 'Giancarlo Giammetti was at the vanguard of that.'
Indeed, the house was savvy about dressing celebrities and maintaining friendships with people in the public eye.
'I was drawn to the craftsmanship and elegance of Valentino's clothes long before we became friends,' Gwyneth Paltrow wrote in an email. 'I had grown up seeing women like Mrs. [Marella] Agnelli and Jacqueline Onassis in his creations, and Valentino became a brand I aspired to wear. I cherish the vintage Valentino I have in my archive, especially a couture cape with feathers he gave me as a gift in the early 2000s.'
The book, an updated edition of a 2007 version that has been redesigned, including a new layout and cover, has elements of oral history. Gloria Schiff, a onetime Vogue editor, recalled that Jacqueline Kennedy had been a client of Valentino since the 1960s. 'I was playing tennis with Jackie Kennedy at the River Club one morning, and she seemed a bit down,' Schiff said. 'This was some time after the assassination, when she was really in mourning. She said, 'Honestly, even if I wanted to go out, I have nothing to wear.'' Schiff arranged a meeting between the first lady and the designer.
Garavani went on to design Kennedy's wedding dress for her marriage to Aristotle Onassis in 1968. Sort of, Giammetti said. 'We knew about the romance and gossip, but she never said, 'Valentino, can you make a dress for me?'' She bought a dress from that season's collection, which she wore to her ceremony.
'The morning of the wedding, that dress was on the cover of WWD,' Giammetti said. 'They made the scoop. We didn't do anything.'
Valentino did design a wedding dress for Anne Hathaway. 'He somehow intuitively knew the exact dress I wanted, which was for the skirt to ombré into soft pink, but which I was too shy to ask for,' Hathaway wrote in an email. 'When he showed me the sketch, I couldn't believe it. It was like he had read my mind and my heart.'
The book works as a history of fashion photography, with images from Lord Snowdon, Bruce Weber, Deborah Turbeville, Steven Meisel, Jean-Paul Goude. One page has Claudia Schiffer surrounded by white-coated women in the Valentino atelier, photographed by Arthur Elgort in 1995.
There is a lot of Valentino's brightly pigmented signature shade of red, which is recognized as its own Pantone color, a mix of 100% magenta, 100% yellow and 10% black. It is shown on masses of models playing blindman's buff with Garavani on a stretch of grass and on a top worn by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland in her Upper East Side apartment, in a room decorated in the same red.
Vreeland said that Valentino 'likes women who believe in overdressing, creating a role, giving a feeling that they will not disappear into the background.'
'His woman must startle,' she said. 'She must be riveting.'
Over-the-top luxury and extravagance were hallmarks of the house as well. There are photos of Garavani wearing sunglasses and denim outside his 17th-century Château de Wideville in France. Others show his many pugs hanging out in Gstaad, Switzerland, or on the Valentino yacht.
'Yachts, houses, paintings, entertaining, castles — none of the other designers is living that way,' publisher John Fairchild is quoted as saying. 'Valentino outlives everybody. He's the biggest high-liver I know.'
Former French Vogue editor Joan Juliet Buck talks about being impressed that someone ironed her bedsheets daily when she stayed with Garavani and Giammetti in Capri.
'We were young when we started, super-young and curious,' Giammetti said. 'Our lifestyle was taught to us from important clients. So, yes, someone ironed the bedsheets, I feel embarrassed to say. It has nothing to do with style, and it's not a very expensive luxury. Unless you do naughty things, then you change them.'
Tyrnauer said that for all the opulence of the brand, Giammetti 'got the best out of everyone at hand.'
'I would be around while they were doing collections,' he said. 'If he needed help doing show notes for the collection, he'd say, 'You're a writer, sit here and help me figure out what to say about these looks.' I thought that was kind of amazing.' —NYT