Farewell to Valentino Garavani, the last great couturier of Italian fashion A legend from beginning to end

Valentino Garavani left us today. The scale of this loss is gigantic: although he retired from the scene back in 2008, leaving his own brand, which has now become a global empire, in the steady hands of Alessandro Michele, the imprint left by the designer on the world of Italian fashion as we know it is still felt today. Who knows where Italian fashion and its enormous reputation would be today if Valentino had not, back in 1962, closed that year's edition of Pitti Immagine with a Haute Couture show that put Rome and Italy on the fashion map forever. Of course, there was Italian fashion prior to Valentino, that of Emilio Schubert, Vincenzo Ferdinandi, Jole Veneziani, and the Sorelle Fontana, not to mention that of Rome's various princely ateliers such as Giovannelli-Sciarra and that of Simonetta Colonna, but after Valentino the dike that separated French fashion from Italian and European fashion broke projecting into the future. Garavani is in fact the last exponent of a great tradition of Italian couturiers that from the 1970s onward was gradually replaced by the masters of prêt-à-porter and found new life only decades later with the haute couture of Gianni Versace, which debuted in 1989, and that of Armani, which instead became a label in its own right in 2005. Valentino was the hero of two worlds: couture on the one hand and ready-to-wear on the other. A role that made him both a hieratic and hyper-popular figure in the collective consciousness of Italians.

It is clear that being the last exponent of a tradition of Italian couturiers goes hand in hand with a certain lifestyle that, in Valentino Garavani's case, became iconic: photos with Jacqueline Onassis in Capri, castles in France and palaces in Rome, three hundred custom-made suits from Caraceni, Mercedes rides through the streets of the capital in the darkest moments of the Years of Lead, waltzes with Liz Taylor, the yacht T. M. Blue One where André Leon Talley used to visit him, the famous pugs, the happy birthday song sung in New York by Aretha Franklin, Placido Domingo and Bette Midler. Because of his natural discretion Valentino Garavani was never a public man, yet he was never afraid to speak his mind and fight for his causes - his long Peace Dress created in the same year as the Gulf War and, even earlier, his commitment to the fight against AIDS and the establishment in Rome of an academy bearing his name dedicated to artistic performances and cultural activities remain famous. Valentino said he knew how to do only three things in life: make clothes, decorate houses, and entertain people. The latter endowment not only served him well during the 1970s, which he spent hanging out with the elites of New York society, but also forever entered the hearts of the public with Donna Sotto le Stelle, a dazzling summer kermesse that saw the couturier, along with other big names in Italian fashion, parade on the steps of Trinità de' Monti in Rome. An image that is still silkscreened in the memories of at least two generations of Italians. 

In the aftermath of his passing, after a long life studded with successes and triumphs, what remains of Valentino's fashion? Rereading old newspaper articles devoted to him in the 1980s and 1990s, one seems to be reading about a parallel universe: while, as the years progressed, fashion was pursuing the myth of haute bourgeoisie, hyper-minimalism, and subcultures, the narrative surrounding the designer remained that of old-fashioned luxury, grand aristocracy, and the total jet-set. The only difference is that the jet-set of legends that Valentino frequented was made up of aristocrats, movie divas, legendary journalists and editors, and singers. It was a world that still survives in the brand's large family, but it was light years away from the influencers, tiktokers, independent bloggers and eternal debutantes that fashion surrounds itself with today. It was a more traditionalist and certainly more explicitly elitist world than the one we know today, but at the same time it consolidated the brand's aristocratic aura alongside the collections and campaigns that accompanied its great commercial success.

It was precisely that narrative that kept intact the aura of romanticism that surrounded him, the dream he went about nurturing as a nobleman of yesteryear. Yet that narrative did not prohibit his brand from maintaining the dynamism of its various rivals: the presentation of the youthful Oliver line made in 1989 at Brera, alongside hundreds of sketches by academy students, remains famous - a kind of hyper-modern attitude that, years later, delivered into the hands of Pierpaolo Piccioli, repeatedly proclaimed as the only true heir to Valentino's spirit, who ferried the historic brand into a new millennium of fashion. The man behind Valentino may be gone today, but his work will continue to outlive him.