Valentino Garavani, Fashion's "Last Emperor" Dies at 93

Legendary Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani has passed away at the age of 93 in Rome. The news was confirmed in a statement by the Valentino Garavani Foundation and Giancarlo Giammetti, his partner in both life and business. Valentino will lie in state in Rome’s Piazza Mignanelli next week before a funeral at the Basilica Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri on Friday. According to the statement, Valentino “peacefully passed away today at his residence in Rome surrounded by the love of his family.”

Valentino will be remembered for his elegant style and the dresses he created for some of history’s most important women, including Jackie O, Elizabeth Taylor, and Princess Diana. “I know what women want,” the designer said in the documentary, Valentino: The Last Emperor. “They want to be beautiful.” He was the couturier of multiple generations, the go-to designer for those who wanted a beautiful, well-constructed gown. With the help of Giammetti, Valentino turned his eponymous luxury label into an international success and one of the biggest brands in the world to this day.

Born Valantino Garavani in Voghera, a town in northern Italy, in 1932, the designer immediately took an interest in fashion, enthralled by the glamorous gowns he saw in the cinema when accompanying his older sister. “My dreams were from those films,” Valentino told the New York Times in 2006. “I saw so many on the silver screen, and they were so beautifully dressed.” He took to sketching dresses in his school notebooks, and eventually went to work for his aunt, Rosa, as well as a local designer.

When he was 17, Valentino moved to Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne before going on to work under the couturier Jean Dessès and then Guy Larroche. In 1958, he returned to Italy—this time, Rome—and founded his own brand a year later with the help of his father, who sold his country home to fund the endeavor. Valentino set up on the Via Condotti and was just about a year into his new venture when he met Giammetti, then in architecture school and living at home with his parents. The two immediately formed a tight bond, with Giammetti dropping out of school to become Valentino’s business partner, saving the brand from bankruptcy in its first year. They also began a romantic relationship, which ended in 1972, though their business partnership outlived that by decades.

Valentino’s aesthetic was established with his first collection, an array of clean, modern dresses with an added feminine flourish in the form of lace, ruffles, and embroidery. His use of red was also immediately noted, and would go on to become the signature color of the house, dubbed “Valentino Red.” The clothes quickly caught the eye of the day’s most glamorous, including Marella Agnelli, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor, whom he dressed for the premiere of Spartacus in Rome in 1961. Word of his work spread across the world and to New York, where socialite swan Babe Paley became a fan. When the newly-widowed Jacqueline Kennedy spotted a Valentino design for the first time around 1964, she immediately inquired about the designer, bought six couture Valentino dresses, and went on to wear them throughout her mourning period following President Kennedy’s death, solidifying what would become a longtime relationship with Valentino. A few years later, she donned a long-sleeved, lace Valentino dress to her wedding to Aristotle Onassis in 1968, a piece she selected from the designer’s famous all-white spring collection that same year. “I owe a big percentage of my fame to her,” Valentino said of the former first lady in W Magazine in 1984.

While his contemporaries, like André Courrèges and even Yves Saint Laurent, were embracing the styles of the time, showing skirts with shrinking hems and clothes that responded to the political landscape, Valentino kept his designs timeless throughout the years. “I think I have succeeded through all these decades because I was always concerned with making beautiful clothes,” he told Vanity Fair in 2004. “Forget about fashion—the grunge look, the messy look. I cannot see women destroyed, uncombed, or strange. I want to make a girl who arrives some place and makes people turn and say, ‘You look sensational!’” That’s not to say Valentino never pushed the envelope. The designer can take at least partial credit for birthing the logomania movement that still affects fashion culture to this day. In the late ‘60s, Valentino took to printing the brand’s “V” logo on many of his pieces, to the point where Gloria Emerson wrote in a story about the designer for the New York Times in 1969, “If Valentino, the celebrity designer of the Italian couture, doesn't stop putting the initial ‘V’ on his stockings, belts, buttons, pockets and shoes, his collections are going to look like one man's obsession with a Volkswagen.”

Throughout the decades, the Valentino brand expanded beyond couture to ready-to-wear and menswear, starting with Valentino Uomo in 1969. With the help of Giammetti, he became one of the first brands to embrace licensing to increase revenue, and by the late ‘80s, the company had 50 licenses for various products. In the ‘90s, though, they reorganized, maintaining licenses for just perfumes, sunglasses, and jeans. Meanwhile, as Valentino grew, Valentino’s own profile increased as well, and the designer became a celebrity in his own right, known for his tanned skin, caramel-colored coiffed hair, and sleek suits. His involvement in the larger cultural landscape increased the popularity of his own persona, as well as his brand. In 1984, when he designed the uniforms worn by the Italian national team members at the Los Angeles Olympic Games. In 2006, he pushed even farther into the mainstream with a cameo alongside Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada.

And Valentino’s grandiose nature bled off the runway into his life as well. The designer enjoyed many homes throughout the years, including a villa in Rome, a 19th-century townhouse in London, a chalet in Gstaad, a Russian-inspired apartment in Manhattan, and a 17th-century castle near Paris. Of course, there was also the 152-foot yacht, T.M. Blue One (named after his parents, Teresa and Mauro), which employed nearly 50 staff members. “Valentino and Giancarlo are the kings of high living,” said John Fairchild, former publisher and editor-in-chief of Women’s Wear Daily, to Vanity Fair in 2004. His houses were meticulously decorated and filled with art by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Damien Hirst, the perfect venues to host everyone from Princess Diana to Sharon Stone. “I was born like that, wanting to dress nicely and see beauty all around me,” he told W Magazine in 1984. “I love beautiful houses filled with beautiful furniture and beautiful objects.”

Throughout the years, Valentino continuously attracted the attention of the ever-changing Hollywood elite. Rarely did an event go by without at least one major name donning a Valentino design. When Jessica Lange accepted the Oscar in 1983 for her role in Tootsie, she did so in a sparkling, mint green Valentino dress, and in 1991, Sophia Loren accepted her honorary Oscar in the brand as well. In 2001, when Julia Roberts took home her Oscar for Erin Brockovich in a 1992 vintage Valentino dress, it once again proved the continued staying power of Valentino’s designs. That same year, he also dressed Jennifer Lopez for her marriage to Cris Judd, after she reached out to him with the desire to look like a princess. To mention every time a famous name wore one of Valentino’s dresses over the years would take hours, but it does feel necessary to include Cate Blanchett’s yellow Oscar gown, which she wore in 2005 to pick up the Best Supporting Actress award for The Aviator, as well as the red Valentino gown Anne Hathaway wore when she hosted the Oscars in 2011. “Look around. All the others Valentino started out with—maybe with the exception of Karl Lagerfeld—are gone,” the designer’s longtime friend, Isabel Rattazzi, said in 2004. “Only Valentino remains, and today he is dressing Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston and J.Lo. To be able to stay relevant like that for decades is quite a trick.”

The brand Valentino changed hands multiple times over the designer’s 45+ years with the brand. In 1998, Valentino and Giammetti initially sold the company for $300 million to conglomerate Holding di Partecipazioni Industriali (HdP) as it attempted to build out its fashion division to rival Gucci and LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. Just four years later, however, the company was sold to Milan-based textile company, Marzotto Apparel, for $210 million. In 2005, Marzotto combined its fashion assets into the Valentino Fashion Group, which they eventually sold to London-based private equity firm Permira for $3.5 billion in 2007. It was that same year that Valentino and Giammetti announced their joint retirement from Valentino after over 45 years together. Valentino held his final ready-to-wear show, for spring/summer 2008, in October 2007, a collection filled with bright dresses, hand-painted florals, large hats, and matching gloves. “It is not a collection with tears in between,” he told W. “I leave with great joy in a certain way, because I leave after 45 years on top of my career.”

In January 2008, the designer returned to the runway one final time to present his last couture collection, held at the Musée Rodin in Paris. The role of creative director was then handed to Alessandra Facchinetti, who was replaced by Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli after just two seasons. Piccioli remained at the helm until March 2024, with former Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele stepping in upon Piccioli’s departure.

Over the years, Valentino received much recognition for his work and impact on the world of fashion. In 1986, the designer was honored with Cavaliere di Gran Croce, the most senior order of merit in Italy, and in 1996, the Cavaliere di Gran Croce. The CFDA honored Valentino with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, while in 2008, he was presented with the Medal of the City of Paris. Many retrospectives have been put on in his honor, including those put on at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. Valentino will be remembered for his great appreciation for beauty, his elegant designs, and the grasp he held on the intersection of fashion and culture for half a century.