“An Affair Called Valentino,” by Joan Juliet Buck, was originally published in the March 1985 issue of Vogue.
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"Everything is made to attract, seduce, entrance": there are, in fact, no woebegone fashion chapters in the success—or style—that s Valentino. At the top of his form, at a time when good form easily encompasses softly flirtatious, wholly feminine dressing, this Rome-based designer shows among the gilded ranks of couture makers in Paris, dresses a fiercely loyal following of internationals, brings to the world—with men s, children s, ready-to-wear, accessory, and Valentino Night collection—sure style, an all-of-a-piece look, a seemingly pervasive taste for the letter "V." Valentino, orchestrator—and charmingly!
The music that accompanies every Valentino show and has become the designer s signature tune is a short piece named, with absolute accuracy, "Soul Coaxing." The first time I heard it, years ago in Rome during the rehearsal for the couture showing, it summoned up an arbitrary but pleasant illusion that I was drifting in a canoe down a small river over which hung boughs of jasmine and gardenia. The buoyant and seductive tune was soothing, a little narcotic. The couches in the main showroom of the Via Gregoriana couture house (no little gold chairs for Valentino) were then beige and white, deep and soft. At the third or fourth hour of rehearsal, the privileged professionals who were there to watch and pay attention no longer sat, they basked, passive and beatific like lizards in the sun. Valentino Garavani himself is not unlike his little tune.
At that point, ten years ago, Valentino was only the foremost Italian couturier, with an atmosphere of expensive and racy style about him, past triumphs that included a famous all-white collection and the dress Jacqueline Kennedy wore to marry Aristotle Onassis. His client list was made up of the rich, the famous, the crowned heads of Europe and the Middle East. The vast hypnotic showroom seemed to me then to be full of the dangerous enchantments of vanity and greed, both of which were in temporary disrepute. I could not approve of what Valentino stood for (how one chooses to approve when one is very young!), but I could not help being touched by the man s shyness, his authentic warmth. We spoke in French, and his Italian accent curled the words into cautious calligraphy, roped in flourishes. I spent one weekend in his Capri house, surrounded by handsome international people of all sexes who wore jeans and gold bracelets. They said such things as: "You should wear smaller bikinis." The sheets on my bed were ironed every night by the maids. We young guests pooled together to tip the staff, and on the boat back to Naples realized with horror that we had tipped the wrong set of maids and butlers; the untipped contingent sat facing us tight-lipped.
Today, one can say that Valentino has an empire, or—a designer s identification with his product being complete—that he is an empire. Eight years ago, he began showing his ready-to-wear in Paris where he is now a respected member of the Chambre Syndicate de la Couture. His total business comes to $150 million a year. To the houses in Rome and Capri he has added a chalet in Gstaad, a yacht, and a New York City apartment. At a dinner party Valentino gave in New York this winter, I asked the richest man in Venezuela how he and Valentino had become friends. "We are fellow tycoons," said the richest man in Venezuela.
One sees designers edit their surroundings, alter their lives (to paraphrase Lillian Hellman on a very different subject) to suit this year s clothes. Ten years after I first knew him, Valentino is essentially the same, down to the Cartier love bracelet on his wrist. Where others reshape and discard, he adds. Last summer, at his open-air couture showing in the Piazza Mignanelli, he celebrated the twenty-five years of his couture house and received a prize from Italy s Minister of Industry. The collection was comprised of all of Valentino s favorite looks; this year s novelty was the presence of three New York graffiti artists spraying a huge revolving sculpture with a "V" and a "25." "He has changed the image of Italy throughout the world," said the announcer as Valentino received the prize.
Taste, image, money: in the careers of designers, the first creates the second, which brings in the third. Valentino s clothes do not carry messages. They are knowingly crafted to make women pretty and sexy. Women of all ages wiggle their hips in Valentino clothes and look like girls.
As a boy in Voghera, a small town south of Milan in the Lombardy plain, Valentino drew dresses in his school books. At the age of six, with a raging fever, he persuaded his mother to wrap him in a blanket and carry him to see a cousin dressed up for a ball. The dress, he recalls, was pink tulle. He also remembers a black charmeuse one-shoulder dress worn by his cousin Lucia and cousin Rina s mauve dress that she wore to the races: "She wore navy-blue suede shoes with it and a mauve felt hat with a navy taffeta bow." Valentino s pale-green eyes light up with the memory.
The next day I watch him choose fabrics in his studio. "Pale pink and watermelon," he says to the man from Taroni, as assistants peer helpfully over the table, "and coral, peau d ange, mandarin, and mauve—and navy blue." Fabric samples fall on the table with the slitting sounds of torn silk. His hands touch the fabrics before he glances down. Occasionally an assistant s fingertips reach for a shining half-yard, but he has already muttered "no" and the swatch is bunched with other rejects by the window. He knows what he wants.
Valentino s clothes are not cerebral; and their creation, it seems, is based on unconscious memory, strong technique, an appetite for sensual gratification. The next appointment after the Taroni man is the embroidery man from Paris. There ensues a confrontation between the free-floating fantasy of the Italian and the logical approach of the Frenchman. "I have ideas to give you," says Valentino. "And I bring you techniques," says M. Lesage. "First," says Valentino, bringing a young woman forward, "this is Marina, who is getting married. I want a flower to put on her dress." Marina, who works in the studio, blushes a little. A calla lily is discussed, a rose is decided upon.
On to couture business: embroidered mosaics richer than Ravenna s fall on the table. "Too heavy," says Valentino. "You can only make a cardigan, and then the woman has to take it off. No good for summer. A linen guipure would be good. "But not stiff," says Valentino. "Gold," he continues, "coral, diamonds, on white linen . . . sublime."
On to flora: anthurium, philodendron, dahlia, pink camellias with lily of the valley, arum lilies, white gardenias, mauve orchids . . .a moment s doubt. M. Lesage advances that the orchid is a sick-looking flower. "Fine, get rid of it," says Valentino. M. Lesage looks at his list. "What size flowers, where are they to go, on what kind of dresses?" he asks. "You make them, I ll decide where to put them," Valentino says.
The elegant Suzy Gandini is next, unfurling her fabrics on the white table. Then, two men from a lesser firm, who look for flowers to print in the big botany book that is every designer s staple. "I wish I had someone really good to draw the flowers I want," says Valentino. He tends to conjure everything himself.
At seventeen, he left Voghera and went to Paris, where he got a job sketching at Jean Desses. (One night ten years ago I wore a 1951 Desses dress of my mother s. Valentino recognized it with some emotion. "I worked on that dress," he said.) He went on to Guy Laroche and in 1958 returned to Italy. In 1959, with some money from his father, he started his couture house in Rome. Giancarlo Giammetti, then twenty-two and studying architecture, met him and joined him in 1960.
"We took an apartment at 54 Via Gregoriana and turned it into a showroom. We were young and new and took risks," explained Giammetti. "We went to show in Florence, where we were given the last time slot on the last day. Luckily the buyers had heard of Valentino, and they waited. Our first Roman customer was Contessa Acquarone, who ordered an entire wardrobe for the Olympic games. She was later indicted for murdering her husband. Elizabeth Taylor was filming Cleopatra; Valentino s first magazine cover was of Taylor in a white pleated dress. She came at four in the afternoon for a 9:00 a.m. appointment and stopped the show we had that day. There is a great deal of chaos in Giammetti s stories of the early years. "We did it in a very Italian way, improvising from nothing. There are no fashion archives in Rome to pillage for accessory ideas: a gentleman comes to you empty-handed and you have to explain what you want. Everything was easy before we were successful. We always spent a lot of money, everyone wanted to work with us—fun new girls and boys, friends daughters." Those whom Giammetti calls the "papillons" floated off to husbands or new lands, while the base of the house—cutters and atelier heads, premieres and drapers, have remained essentially the same for over twenty years. Daniela Giardina, who heads up publicity and advertising, has been with them for thirteen years. Instead of leaving, she had a baby, Andrea, about whom both Valentino and Giancarlo grow misty.
The house on the Appia has changed very little. The white linen runner is laid fresh on the stairs every morning, the screening room still has blinds with orange trees on them. The collection of Chinese cloisonne birds is still massed by the jade and coral trees in cloisonne cachepots, the Boteros are still in the study, which has however become Napoleon III where it once was Moorish. Mongiardino s velvet chairs with central strips of tapestry echo the Botero women s curves. The chimney in the living room is still a pyramid, with alert palm trees on either side. Objects and paintings have been added, in generous profusion, but no new passion eliminates an old one. Valentino is oddly faithful for a designer: old whims are treasured along with new discoveries. Rather than discard, he embraces more and more, and extends the reach of his affections. The pink flamingoes are no longer in the garden. They were the particular concern of Valentino s late mother, who personally performed an autopsy on a defunct flamingo when she suspected foul play.
He is solid, slow-moving, often abstracted; instinct says he is reliable. The contrast between the partners is sharp. Where Valentino hesitates, thinks, answers slowly, warms to an anecdote from the far past, Giammetti declares, retracts, his dark eyes confidential and suspicious at once, clinging to the moment with a torrent of words in three languages. "Giancarlo is the oddest mixture of intelligence and naivete," says a friend of theirs.
Valentino works in an all-white studio, where every piece of paper and cloth is in motion, from table to atelier. In between this room and Giammetti s office is a large room full of noble clutter. "Don t look," says Giammetti. "It s all being changed. His own office is dark, bristling with patterns and recorders, cassettes, bibelots, businesslike things sheathed in leather or brass.
The designer recollects and invents, somewhat out of time; the businessman is surrounded by dailies, weeklies, monthlies.
"Valentino gets better and more sure of him- self all the time," says Giammetti. "He is serene, I get more anxious. Every day in Italy, there are six thousand people working on Valentino products. I worry about the organization, the running of everything."
Earlier, in the white studio, Valentino had confided: "Big success makes me anxious. I never want to disappoint. I work so hard in Rome that I couldn t get through, psychologically, unless I took weekends off. I have to be happy with my way of life. I m lucky not to be tormented, to be able to enjoy weekends, skiing holidays, the boat, flowers."
"He is not the artist who wants to live with genius and madness," says Giammetti. "He s wise; he knows that at fifty you can t do what you did at thirty. It s not a problem of getting sick, collapsing, and dying; it s the problem of perpetuating the business without its being a weight." It is Giammetti s determination that turned Valentino into an empire. He is forty-six, Valentino is fifty-two. There is hardly an end in sight.
The turning point for Valentino came when Mendes, a Paris firm, began making his ready- to-wear collection in 1974. By 1977, he was showing among the French designers, and something happened to the Valentino look. What had previously been soft and feminine, excessive and delightful but free-form, became sharpened by the competition into the identifiable style that is Valentino today. The shoulders of both couture and ready-to-wear garments bear pads so delineated that they resemble falsies, rising from the shoulder and curving back into the arm. Instantly recognizable, they set the confident and pretty Valentino look. The clothes themselves are now made by the Torinese firm GFT (which also manufactures Armani s ready-to-wear), and the workmanship standard is high. Along with the two yearly couture collections, the two ready-to-wear ones, two men s collections, two knitwear collections, and two each of a cheaper "Miss V" line, a children s line, children s knits, bathing suits, leather, jewelry, shoes, and bags are tennis clothes, skiwear, and two collections called "Night." These are solely evening clothes with the provocative thrust and slink of shoulders and drapery. The linings of accompanying evening bags are always red. The shoes, which are designed by Valentino directly on wooden foot forms, have high, sexy heels. Everything is made to attract, seduce, entrance; the word "flirt" comes to mind.
Giammetti, having launched himself on a discussion of other designers, says he thinks it is brilliant that Chanel has chosen Ines de la Fressange to be its permanent model, and that Saint Laurent repeats the same hat. "With Valentino, it s more the spirit that doesn t change—long legs, small hips, small breasts, long neck, small wrists and ankles." He is describing the kind of girl drawn in the margins of school books. But over this adolescent ideal are Valentino s dreams of glamour and memories of the glamorous nights of adult cousins and something else: "Valentino has superstitions that became status symbols," says Giammetti. "He did red once, and now you have red in every collection. Do you think Valentino believes the color has to be in every collection because he loves red or because it s lucky? We imposed initials on clothes, but I can t tell you if a little " V " on a polo shirt is for good luck or a statement. People react to things in a way different from the way you created them. Most of our statements came to be because we are romantic; we don t like to throw away things we like or that bring good luck."
If superstition is finding comfort in instinctive choices, it s not that far from taste; it may even be taste itself. Every fortune-teller Valentino ever went to told him that he would be a great designer. And when Giammetti joined Valentino, an astrologer told him that they would make a fortune together.
Things come true. The world has changed in ten years. Women want to be wanted again. Lucky financial coincidences mean that people spend more than they did before on looking good. New millionaires have come out of the woods. Valentino no longer needs to improvise either accessories or a gilded court in Rome. He must travel to Paris and can travel to New York: the gilded world exists again. There are Valentino boutiques in the capitals, almost as opulent as the couture house, and princesses to wear his clothes in every town. The world is safe for luxury; he no longer has to defend it. Archduchess Sophie of Austria has grown into a beautiful woman, Lynn Wyatt has emerged from Texas, Paloma Picasso has come into her own. He no longer has to pretend: the world he dreamed of is his. It was only a matter of time.
I complimented him on the clothes in his boutique. "Ah!" he said, smiling a little ironically. Finally, you noticed."