Photo Credits: Valentino at Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, Mr. Satterly, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
The designer who turned a shade of red into a global language leaves behind a 60-year legacy of glamour, discipline and beauty
ROME — Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani, the Italian couturier universally known simply as Valentino, died on Monday at his home in Rome, his foundation announced. He was 93. The cause of death was not immediately disclosed.
With his passing, fashion loses the last of the post-war triumvirate — alongside Giorgio Armani and the late Karl Lagerfeld — who turned Italian style from a regional craft into an international industry.
The red that changed everything
It was, by his own telling, a flash of colour in the dark of Barcelona’s opera house: an elderly woman in a velvet gown, a mix of carmine and scarlet with a hint of orange. Years later, in 1959, the young Valentino translated that memory into a strapless tulle cocktail dress. The press called the hue simply “Valentino red” — and it never left his collections again.
“I think a woman dressed in red is always wonderful, she is the perfect image of a heroine,” he wrote in his 2022 book Rosso. He kept the promise, putting at least one red dress in every show for almost five decades.
From Voghera to the world
Born an only child in Voghera on 11 May 1932, Valentino studied in Milan and Paris, apprenticing under Jean Dessès before opening his Roman atelier on Via Condotti in 1960. That same year he met architecture student Giancarlo Giammetti in a café on Via Veneto. Giammetti would become his life partner and the business brain who left Valentino free to draw.
The breakthrough came in 1962 at Palazzo Pitti, where an all-white collection stunned buyers. Elizabeth Taylor wore Valentino for the Spartacus premiere in 1960; Jackie Kennedy chose a white lace Valentino for her 1968 wedding to Aristotle Onassis. From there the client list became a roll-call of 20th-century icons: Audrey Hepburn, Princess Margaret, Sharon Stone, Penélope Cruz.
He was, crucially, the first Italian invited to show on the official Paris haute couture calendar, cracking a French monopoly that had stood since Worth.
An emperor, not a CEO
Colleagues called him “l’Imperatore” not for temperament — he was famously shy, superstitious, devoted to his pugs and to chocolate — but for standards. His atelier perfected the budellini technique, rolling strips of wool into silk-covered tubes by hand, and he insisted on four fittings even for ready-to-wear.
“To be with Valentino as a friend, as a lover and as an employee is a bit the same: you need a lot of patience,” Giammetti once said in the documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor.
Valentino sold his company in 1998 for around $300 million but remained creative director until his farewell in January 2008 — a three-day Roman celebration that ended with a final Paris show. “I would like to leave the party when it is still full,” he said at the time.
The business after the man
The house that bears his name passed to Qatari fund Mayhoola in 2012 and later saw Kering take a 30% stake. Yet Valentino himself never fully retired from beauty. With Giammetti he opened the PM23 gallery in Rome in 2025; its inaugural show, “Horizons/Red,” was, fittingly, a meditation on his signature colour.
Why he mattered
In an age now dominated by drops, collaborations and algorithms, Valentino represented a different contract: that clothes should be made slowly, worn for decades, and remembered. His designs looked simple — a shift, a cape, a column — but hid hours of handwork.
He also understood that Italian fashion needed narrative as much as needlework. He staged shows in the Temple of Venus, dressed opera divas and Hollywood stars with equal care, and proved that “Made in Italy” could mean fantasy, not just factory.
Tributes on Monday came quickly. Sophia Loren called him “the man who taught us to walk into a room as if it were a stage.” Alessandro Michele, current creative director of Valentino, posted a single square of red fabric. Giammetti, 86, released a brief statement: “Red isn’t just a colour. It’s a symbolic and aesthetic force of extraordinary power” — echoing his words at last year’s gallery opening.
Valentino is survived by Giammetti and by an aesthetic that will outlive both: the idea that elegance is not excess, but precision; that a woman in red is, as he insisted, always a heroine.
Funeral arrangements will be private, the foundation said. The public mourning, in boutiques from Madison Avenue to Via Montenapoleone, has already begun — in the quietest, most Valentino way possible: with a dress, perfectly cut, hanging in a window, waiting to be worn.
