On the 19th of January, we lost a legend, one whose pure passion evolved into one of the largest and most iconic maisons in fashion history. On behalf of BS4F, this article honours the life and legacy of the Italian fashion designer Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani, known mononymously as Valentino.
Valentino was born on May 11, 1932, in Voghera, a small town in the Lombardy region of Italy. He was named after Rudolph Valentino, the silent film star of the 1920s, by his mother — a prophetic choice. Like his namesake, Valentino would go on to become an architect of fantasy, though his medium of choice was fabric. Born into a family of relative affluence, his father, Mauro, was the director of an electrical supply company. Young Valentino had no strong ties to the fashion industry, per se, yet his fascination with fashion emerged early and decisively.
His aunt Rosa was a designer, and Valentino apprenticed under her, sketching obsessively from a young age. These early, almost theatrical memories planted the seed of what would become a flourishing luxury powerhouse. Fashion, as he understood from a young age, wasn’t about dressing bodies, but rather about creating moments.
“Even as a young boy, my passion was to design, and I have been very lucky to be able to do what I have loved all my life. There can be few greater gifts than that,” Valentino later reflected.
His childhood love of cinema also propelled him into the world of fashion, “I was crazy for the silver screen. I was crazy for beauty, to see all those movie stars being sensational, well dressed, always perfect.”
Valentino often described himself as a spoiled child, acquiring a taste for luxury from a tender age: custom-made shoes, blazer buttons designed to his own specifications. There are even recollections of him crying because his mother made him wear a bow tie with a blazer. His parents recognised his passion and drive and supported it financially — a support system that would later prove instrumental to his success.
At the age of 18, with their backing, Valentino moved to Paris to study. He initially joined Jacques Fath, before working with Balenciaga and Dior, and eventually secured an apprenticeship with Jean Dessès. During his five years with Dessès, he learned the intricacies of haute couture construction and refined his aesthetic sensibility. His Parisian chapter was invaluable. It allowed him to absorb the rigour of French couture while steadily developing his own vision, one that would later marry architectural precision with the sensual romanticism of Italian craftsmanship.
In 1959, Valentino returned to Rome and, with financial backing from his father, presented his first collection in his own salon, marking the birth of an empire. There was no turning back. Everything was already grand. Models flew in from Paris for the debut show at a time when Italian fashion remained marginal on the global stage.
It was in the same year that the iconic strapless cocktail dress in a red hue — a mix of carmine and scarlet with a hint of orange — was reportedly inspired by a woman he had seen at the Barcelona opera. He called it the “Fiesta” dress. That single moment changed everything; it marked the birth of Valentino Red. Red, he later explained, wasn’t sentiment; it was strategy, “After black and white, there was no finer colour.” To him, red wasn’t just a colour; it was the only one that could compete with a woman’s personality without overpowering it.
Valentino’s story was not without its downfalls. Within two years of opening his house, he was nearly bankrupt. His excessive spending on fabric, detail, and the fantasy he was engineering drove away his father’s business associate. The house stood on the edge of collapse. Valentino continued to spend relentlessly on haute couture. The clothes were extremely expensive, and profit was never the priority. He refused to create anything that did not look like a dream.
Then came Elizabeth Taylor.
In 1961, while in Rome filming Cleopatra, Taylor discovered Valentino’s work and commissioned a white column dress for the Spartacus premiere. Elizabeth Taylor in Valentino White proved what the designer already knew: the right dress on the right woman at the right moment could rewrite a career.
This became a defining trait of Valentino, who was renowned for his relationships with celebrities – from Elizabeth Taylor to Jacqueline Kennedy to Julia Roberts and Anne Hathaway. Valentino did not chase trends. His promise was simple: make women feel beautiful, and he engineered the dress to deliver that feeling.
But this wasn’t the entire rescue story. The other half arrived as fate, dressed in practicality. Valentino is also known to believe deeply in fate. One hot July night in 1960, Valentino met Giancarlo Giammetti at the Café de Paris on Via Veneto, where celebrities and paparazzi orbited the same cafés until dawn. Giammetti was an architecture student, but he possessed the mind Valentino lacked. He asked for the books, identified the leaks, and imposed structure on the dream.
“That was the day I met Valentino and my life changed,” Giammetti would later say.
They became business partners and partners in life. Valentino created; Giammetti managed. Their partnership resembled that of an artist and a prime minister: creative obsession protected by commercial discipline. This balance became the formula behind the brand’s strategic success for nearly five decades.
In 1978, the duo invited hundreds of guests to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. They staged a performance and distributed bottles of their first fragrance, Valentino di Valentino. Fragrance became a vital revenue stream—an entry point into the Valentino world for those who might never own a $20,000 gown. Over the decades, fragrance licensing passed through several hands from Procter & Gamble, Puig and L’Oréal. Each partnership was a strategic expansion of accessible luxury.
Retail followed a similar trajectory. In 2008, Valentino opened its first Chinese boutique at Beijing’s Peninsula Palace Hotel, entering a market that would come to define 21st-century luxury growth. Boutiques soon followed across Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East. From a single salon, Valentino became a global empire, yet the core proposition remained unchanged: women as leading ladies.
In 2012, Mayhoola for Investments LLC acquired Valentino for €700 million. Under its ownership, the house modernised while safeguarding its heritage. By 2024, Valentino reported revenues of €1.311 billion—a commercial testament to a single red dress created in 1959. On January 19, 2026, the world lost the legend himself. With an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion, Valentino’s journey — from a small Roman salon to a billion-euro conglomerate — ended as theatrically as it began.
His farewell unfolded in the Eternal City, attended by fashion and film royalty: Tom Ford, Donatella Versace, Anna Wintour, and Anne Hathaway. Outside, admirers wore and carried red in tribute.
Valentino proved that precision and romance, discipline and fantasy, business and beauty could coexist and not only that, they could thrive.
By Ridhi Collin
Sources:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/valentino-garavani-dies-age-93-designer
https://www.italiandesignschool.it/valentino-the-story-of-valentino-garavani
