Gilded Stars™ is the project that celebrates the origins of Hollywood The first exclusive collection signed by Angelo Trofa has arrived

There was a time when movie stars were mythological figures: unattainable faces, crafted to embody collective dreams, desires, and fantasies. Before social media, before the global entertainment industry, Hollywood had already invented the modern concept of celebrity. But many of those names, once venerated as deities, slowly faded away amid scandals, cultural shifts, and the transition from silent film to sound. It is from this lost memory that Gilded Stars™ was born, the new project by London-based designer Angelo Trofa, dedicated to the ghosts, the glamour, and the forgotten stories of early Hollywood.

The project grew out of the meeting between Trofa's passion for cinema and his background in sportswear design, a career that led him to create uniforms for some of the world's most prominent football clubs, transforming these forgotten stories into collectible objects. The first Gilded Stars™ collection takes shape through a premium limited-edition T-shirt line and a collectible newspaper devoted to the project's historical in-depth features, written by film historian Pamela Hutchinson. The first chapter is dedicated to Rudolph Valentino, whose centenary of death falls in 2026. Regarded as the first true global idol in Hollywood history, Valentino perfectly embodies the rise and fragility of the cinematic myth.

His death in 1926, at just 31 years of age, triggered an unprecedented collective outpouring, with thousands of people flooding the streets to pay their respects, while his funeral became one of the most spectacular and chaotic events in the history of popular culture. Even before he was a star, Valentino was a symbol. Through roles such as the seductive lead in The Sheik and the gaucho in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, he transformed the concept of masculine allure on the silver screen, becoming the definitive "Latin Lover." His personal style, his relationship with his wife Natacha Rambova, and his collaborations with visionary figures such as Alla Nazimova all helped to build an image that transcended cinema itself.

Through its first collection, Gilded Stars™ does not merely celebrate a legend, it tells the story of an entire era. A moment when Hollywood was beginning to create its own myths, and when fame could transform a person into a symbol, only to erase them just as swiftly. Nearly a hundred years on, those dynamics still feel familiar. The cult of celebrity, the obsession with success, and the fascination with the fall of idols continue to define contemporary culture. Gilded Stars looks to the past to speak about the present, bringing back to light the stories of those who built cinema's earliest dreams.