Never trust a fashion “insider” who tells you The Devil Wears Prada is OTT. It’s positively banal compared with the real shenanigans and grandeur of the grands fromages who preside over the Kingdom of Fashion. For decades, none was grander than Valentino Garavani, a man so confident in his destiny that – like Madonna, Jesus and Gandhi – he decided early on he wouldn’t be needing two names.
Unlike Gandhi, however, he didn’t believe in slumming it. Over the years, I visited him in his château outside Paris, his Warhol and Basquiat-spattered apartment overlooking the Seine, his Holland Park mansion in London and at his studio in Paris where we would sit in state as models paraded before him in a mini rehearsal of his show, while a puddle (I use the word advisedly) of his pugs waddled amongst the taffeta trains. I also attended – along with about 1,000 other guests – a party in Rome to celebrate his 30th year in fashion. Glory be, the guest of honour was Elizabeth Taylor. I seem to recall she had travelled with a zillion pieces of luggage, as you’d want her to, and that all of them had got lost in transit.
Don’t for one minute think I’m bragging. If Valentino ever had the faintest idea who I was, he hid it behind an impressive veneer. For years I wondered whether he was extremely short-sighted and too vain to wear glasses. Or perhaps he used his nostrils to see – he always seemed to be looking down that Roman nose, while his eyelids fluttered at half mast. Then again, the man had the vision of a sighthound when it came to celebrities, many of whom he would entertain on his yacht each summer. The world’s media, who were supplied with an endless stream of pictures of glamorous Hollywood actresses and European aristos clinging to extinct titles, were thrilled.
I adored interviewing him. He was so funny, so self-knowing, so generous with his time. He knew his cinnamon tan was implausible but was unrepentant. Another designer, decades younger and who went skiing with him, recounted how once when Valentino fell face down on the snow, he left a luminous orange imprint behind him.
And my goodness – his dresses. True, he was never groundbreaking like Saint Laurent. Nor did he invent a new sporty-chic way of dressing like Chanel. In the Eighties, his designs became a bit fussy and overwrought. But that was the era. At his best, the pared-back Roman elegance, mastery of proportion and colour (especially his signature Valentino Red) and his ability to make any woman look like a class act meant his clothes are absolutely timeless – as an exhibition of his many red outfits (alongside red paintings by the likes of Helen Frankenthaler, Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko) in Rome last summer testified.
The spectacularly chic Jacqueline de Ribes, a socialite, was such a fan, Valentino once told me with typical lack of faux modesty, that she would climb the six flights of stairs to the chambre de bonne (a maid’s room) where he lived when he first arrived in Paris, aged 18. It was an exceptionally pleasing chambre de bonne, not the usual down at heel kind, he clarified. He’d decorated it himself with antique furniture. And the visits were for purely sartorial reasons, he was at pains to point out, as if anyone could be in doubt. He was famously, openly, in long-term relationships with other men, including his business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, with whom he maintained a harmonious friendship long after their romance ended.
His ideal woman was dressed, he told me, for once completely closing his eyes and caressing the air with his hands to make a narrow torso, “with high, small breasts, a bare back maybe, something a bit veil-y at the front and never too much cleavage”.
It’s the purity of line that Jackie Kennedy instinctively grasped when she saw a friend wearing a Valentino dress in 1965 (“she was in mourning, but she was so happy with my white collection that she ordered six outfits, and that put me on the map”).
He went on to dress her for the rest of her life. J-Lo, he told me, rang him before her second marriage asking him to dress her, her then fiancé and her bridesmaids. “She rang me,” he told me, “I was on the boat.” Of course he was. “And she said, ‘Listen, Valentino, I want you to make me look like a princess.’”
It was the princessy-ness that sometimes got on Taylor’s nerves during their long, fruitful but somewhat combustible relationship. “She said to me once, ‘Valentino, why do you keep trying to make me look like a lady when it’s such a lost cause?’”
Elegance, however, was what he did. It blew in and out of fashion but he stuck with it. He knew no other way.