5 days ago
The Highly Collectible Book Valentino, A Grand Italian Epic Has Been Reissued—Giancarlo Giammetti Takes Us Through Its Pages
Couture. Spring-Summer 1969. Ample white organdy tunic embellished with five volants. Audrey Hepburn. Photo Vogue Italia, 1969. © Gian Paolo Barbieri
They are indeed. In the hilarious, affectionate tease of a poem Meryl Streep wrote for an award she gave the designer, she lovingly chides Mr. Garavani for claiming he won't dress girls from 'streep malls.' 'But my feelings weren't hurt in the least,' she says. And in an essay recalling an advertising campaign he shot for the designer in 1985, the eternal waspish wit Rupert Everett, writes, 'Valentino's eyes were pale and profound, and surveyed us from inside his physical form like a lady in purdah regards the world through a crack in the palace wall.' (The actor recalls he behaved like a diva on set, and was subsequently barred from a glam, A-List gathering in Gstaad, but was eventually warmly welcomed back into the Valentino fold.) And then there are the oral histories from friends—other designers, aristocrats of both European and Hollywood lineage, models, muses, and cultural types—like these bon mots from author Amy Fine Collins, who wryly observes: 'It is nearly as hard to envision fashion without the house of Valentino as it is difficult to picture the Vatican without the Pope.'
The book is in part structured via decades of the designer's life and work, so there is plenty of amazing fashion in here: The all-white collection of 1968, which every designer at the house of Valentino since the founder's departure has riffed on; red dress after red dress, one more spectacular than the other; and decades worth of haute couture, rephotographed in forensic detail, the better to see the craftsmanship. (As Hamish Bowles points out, what set Valentino's couture apart was that as much work went into the clothes actually worn by the house's clients as were on its runways.)
What makes the book sing is the running of contemporary interviews and reviews which contextualize the fashion: the verbatim transcript of a lunch conversation with Valentino at Warhol's Factory in the 1970s: 'Why do you talk to him? He's not the star,' Valentino says at one point when attention turns away from him. Or from that same decade, a price-by-price breakdown comparing the cost of Valentino couture and the ready-to-wear, courtesy of The Miami Herald.
