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The narrative of Valentino, A Grand Italian Epic (ed. Armando Chitolina, and Matt Tyrnaeur, Taschen, $125) begins in 1932, the year of designer Valentino Garavani’s birth. Yet the starting point for this fascinating and old-school fabulous tome is actually 2007, when Taschen published a gargantuan numbered run of a book (now highly collectible) which celebrated Mr. Garavani, bound and boxed in —what else?—Valentino red. “This is a reprint of a very, very important book, which was a very limited edition,” says Giancarlo Giammetti, Valentino Garavani’s life and work partner of this new version. “It takes as its basis that book, especially interviews with people who are not with us any more, and has been updated in this incredible way. I just asked my office to buy 200 copies—200 copies!—because I want to be sure it becomes a bible of our work.”
Two hundred copies sold or not, its biblical status is already assured. In an era when we don’t lack for hagiographical fashion monographs, coffee tables the world over are groaning with those paeans to designers’ brilliance and magical talents, often told by advertising campaigns, red carpet turns, and just enough carefully chosen private images to make everything feel ‘personal.’ This tome delivers all this aplenty, but then turns it on its head.
Valentino, A Grand Italian Epic certainly has plenty of gorgeous ad campaign imagery (though sadly for me not my own particular favorite, the Steven Meisel-photographed spring 1993 Very Valentino campaign with model Patricia Hartmann) and just as many celebrity moments (Jackie Kennedy Onassis features a lot, and rightly so; her love of the Valentino label was borne out of friendship; ditto Audrey Hepburn; ditto Elizabeth Taylor). Also included are some terrific images of Mr. Garavani and Mr. Giammetti from their earliest days. Yet there’s something else: a kind of soul, a sense of life, and an unexpected earthy honesty that gets us beyond the shellac of glamour. “Listen, in every book, and in every interview, I try to distance myself from glorification because I can’t talk about that,” Giammetti says. “I know what it took us to get here. I am going to do what I like, especially at this time of my life. If you want to do something honest, you have to be honest. All the people in this book who speak about us are honest too.”
They are indeed. In the hilarious, affectionate tease of a poem Meryl Streep wrote for an award she gave the designer, she lovingly chides Mr. Garavani for claiming he won’t dress girls from ‘streep malls.’ “But my feelings weren’t hurt in the least,” she says. And in an essay recalling an advertising campaign he shot for the designer in 1985, the eternal waspish wit Rupert Everett, writes, “Valentino’s eyes were pale and profound, and surveyed us from inside his physical form like a lady in purdah regards the world through a crack in the palace wall.” (The actor recalls he behaved like a diva on set, and was subsequently barred from a glam, A-List gathering in Gstaad, but was eventually warmly welcomed back into the Valentino fold.) And then there are the oral histories from friends—other designers, aristocrats of both European and Hollywood lineage, models, muses, and cultural types—like these bon mots from author Amy Fine Collins, who wryly observes: “It is nearly as hard to envision fashion without the house of Valentino as it is difficult to picture the Vatican without the Pope.”
The book is in part structured via decades of the designer’s life and work, so there is plenty of amazing fashion in here: The all-white collection of 1968, which every designer at the house of Valentino since the founder’s departure has riffed on; red dress after red dress, one more spectacular than the other; and decades worth of haute couture, rephotographed in forensic detail, the better to see the craftsmanship. (As Hamish Bowles points out, what set Valentino’s couture apart was that as much work went into the clothes actually worn by the house’s clients as were on its runways.)
What makes the book sing is the running of contemporary interviews and reviews which contextualize the fashion: the verbatim transcript of a lunch conversation with Valentino at Warhol’s Factory in the 1970s: “Why do you talk to him? He’s not the star,” Valentino says at one point when attention turns away from him. Or from that same decade, a price-by-price breakdown comparing the cost of Valentino couture and the ready-to-wear, courtesy of The Miami Herald.
In this regard, the book reminds of me of another truly great fashion tome, Helmut Newton’s Pages from the Glossies, where Newton’s images aren’t shown in glorious isolation, but in the context of how they looked when they were finally published, with headlines and cropping and art direction. In other words: They were still Newton’s images, but they’d also been surrendered to others to do what they wanted with them. Valentino, A Grand Italian Epic, is similar in spirit. For all the opulence and extravagance of the world of Garavani and Giammetti, they are totally happy to have others weigh in on it and pull back the curtain on the artifice and self-invention.
Giammetti offers his own breakdown of the Valentino decades. “Each had its own importance,” he says. “The ’60s were the beginning, the discovery of Valentino all over the world, and the white collection which made him. The ’70s we discovered the world, we discovered fun, and our life was mostly in America; we had a lot of influence from the people around us, friends like Giorgio di Sant’ Angelo, and of course we started to understand that the world was not just about the clothes, but who wore them. In the ’80s we started to make money; that decade for fashion, especially for us, was really when licensing started, and fashion was very strong and statuesque, the big shoulders, very suited—it was very interesting, very, very interesting.” And the ’90s,” he went on to say, “were the least inspiring for Valentino. It wasn’t just the idea of grunge, but there was something that Valentino wasn’t feeling, and the great luxury that he had is to feel that he could do what he wanted and not be obliged to do something else. That was my job: To make him feel there were no worries, even if there were. The ’90s were more complicated, I have to say that.”
As for the 2000s, Giammetti recalls, “the fashion companies, not just Valentino, became conglomerates, became groups. More heads telling you what to do; more people that we never knew who they were, but they were able to have importance. What was taken was the freedom of Valentino, his courage, and when you don’t have courage, you don’t produce the same thing in a nice way. You try to make everybody happy—and you make no one happy. So Valentino started to decide, ‘I don’t want to live like this.’ And this happened a few years later, in 2006. We were thoughtful, because you don’t just leave a company with your name after 40 years. But for us it was much more important to have the dignity of staying who we are, be who we are, believe in what we do, and not be one of those designers in the hands of business people.”
Garavani and Giammetti’s relationship—they famously met as teenagers in a cafe in Rome; the rest is literally history—is discussed by them in the book. “This is not a story about money or fashion,” Giammetti says in their conversation. “It is a story of love.” When I ask Mr. Giammetti for his favorite image in the book, he promptly chooses a candid Jonathan Becker image of him and Valentino on a private jet, both men caught in, shall we say, candid discussion. “Our life has not always been, ‘Oh, we agree’,” Giammetti says, laughing. “And because there is a certain moment where there is no need to share everything; when you trust somebody and you know what he does is the best for all of us, it’s stupid to complain. But of course if you remember there was a movie, The Last Emperor,” Giammetti went on to say, “in which Mr. Tyrnauer, who was the director, loved to emphasize our disputes, which was fun for the film, but not really the essence of us together.”
Quite the contrary, in fact. The images in the book that Giammetti returns to again and again are where, he says, “I see Valentino working; I see him with the seamstress, or the model, really in the moment, changing a little thing. Not posing next to the model, but perhaps explaining to her the way she has to walk. Those are the pictures, the behind-the-scenes pictures…those are my favorites. Everything that makes him alive, and makes him in control; that’s how I always think of him.”