A mix of carmine and scarlet, with a hint of orange – a new hue, inspired by an elderly woman at Barcelona’s opera house, whose elegance struck a young Valentino Garavani.
The colour, introduced to the fashion world several years later, in 1959, with a strapless cocktail dress of draped tulle, has carried his name – ‘Valentino red’ – ever since, doubling as the eponymous Italian fashion group’s signature.
“I think a woman dressed in red is always wonderful, she is the perfect image of a heroine,” Valentino wrote in the book Rosso (Red), released in 2022. He would include at least one red dress in every one of his collections.
Valentino, the Italian fashion designer who built one of the country’s most celebrated luxury houses and was known in the industry as ‘the emperor’, died yesterday at his home in Rome, his foundation said. He was 93.
The cause of death was not immediately known.
Valentino ranked alongside Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld as the last of a leading generation of designers, from an era before fashion became a highly commercial industry run as much by financiers and marketing executives as by couturiers.
Scaling the heights of high fashion, he was the first Italian to feature on the exclusive Paris haute couture catwalks.
Passionate about film, he dreamed as a young man of dressing the ‘beautiful ladies of the silverscreen’, as he called them, among them 1950s Hollywood stars Lana Turner and Judy Garland.
Valentino would eventually design Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding gown, and was the first choice for numerous Oscar winners, including Sharon Stone and Penelope Cruz.
His romantic designs, simple at first glance, were full of intricate detail. “I LOVE BEAUTY. It is not my fault. And I know what women want: they want to be beautiful,” Valentino said.
The designer, who also dressed Jackie Kennedy, created a business empire under his own name before selling it off ahead of his retirement, in 2008.
Valentino was an only child, born into a well-to-do family in Voghera, south of Milan, where his father ran an electrical supplies company.
Having started drawing and appreciating high-end clothes from a young age, he studied couture in Milan and Paris, where he then worked as an apprentice for designer Jean Dessès. He returned home in 1960, opening his own fashion house in the heart of Rome.
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