The Man With The Touch Of Elegance

His body was laid in state not far from the Spanish Steps — thousands queued over the two days to bid their farewells to the designer, the first, and in many ways the only, Italian to break into French haute couture back in Fifties, a postwar epoch when things like that were thought impossible. On the bright crisp Roman morning of January 23, Valentino was moved to the at the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri (the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels and Martyrs) on the Piazza della Repubblica, where the service celebrating his long life was held.

Pictured top, two imposing caribinieri, replete in their formal uniforms of traditional bicorns, shining sabers and capes, stationed as an honor guard to flank the church doors, dwarf the mourners and pallbearers. Aptly, the regulation scarlet lining of the carabinieri’s capes, buttoned back on the right side to ease the handling of weaponry, provides an unwitting echo of the world-famous “Fiesta red” that Valentino debuted on a dress in a couture show in 1959, a color whose popularity rooted it so deeply in the fashion lexicon for the following half-century of his career that it became “his.”

Chief among the mourners was Valentino’s business partner and former life partner Giancarlo Giammetti, pictured above arriving for the service with Valentino’s current life partner Bruce Hoeksema. It was the keen, ultra-discreet Giammetti who navigated the designer, and the company, across the perilous shoals of the fashion business for decades, until its sale and Valentino’s retirement in 2008.

Pictured below, the current Valentino creative director Alessandro Michele, left, with actress Anne Hathaway, center, make their way through the crush to the service. In 2006, two years before he retired, Valentino famously had a cameo in the coming-of-age fashion-world comedy The Devil Wears Prada, starring Hathaway alongside Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci, during which filming the actress became and long remained friends with the designer, who dressed her for many subsequent red carpets and who described her as “like a daughter.” Here, Hathaway wears a well-trimmed Valentino topcoat. For his part, and most fittingly, Valentino creative director Michele will be planting the exuberantly luxe Valentino standard yet again in Paris, January 26-29, at Valentino’s beloved Paris Haute Couture fashion week.

It was Valentino’s partner Giammetti who early on encouraged Valentino to branch out into fragrance, accessories, and the like, establishing the more accessible facets of the larger brand. After four decades in business, in 1998, together the men sold the company for a reported $300 million to the Italian conglomerate HdP, which entity then flipped it in 2002 to the Marzotto group, who also sold it on for an eye-watering $3.5 billion in 2007. After a final, fifth decade with his eponymous company, Valentino retired in January 2008, after a final, much-lauded show. The company is currently jointly owned by Qatari investors and the Kering company, with Kering having the option to purchase the entire brand by 2028.

Pictured below, Kering CEO François Henri Pinault makes his way to the church.

It was Valentino’s unapologetic love of luxe fabrics, his rapier-fine cut, and and his microscopically critical eye for detail that gained him his huge list of celebrated clients over the decades. Over his half-century in the mix, he never relinquished a millimeter of any bit of it. For its part, the client list is long and laden with old-school European, American, global-corporate and entertainment-industry wattage alike — Jacqueline Kennedy, Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor and Julia Roberts, to name but four fashion Thoroughbreds in that stable.

Valentino once quipped that he only needed a few things to make it all happen, but chief among them was a good Italian seamstress. In fact he had a close coterie in his atelier — many of his seamstresses stayed with him for their entire working lives. Pictured above, model and actress Natalia Vodianova, wife of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy board member and Christian Dior chair Antoine Arnault, pensively arrives at the service.

Pictured below, Conde Nast executive Anna Wintour makes her way into the church.

Valentino, the man, was known for his public and his professional reserve, and in fact that was a motor of his designs’ broad appeal. He could be quite acerbic about it, as in the 2025 illustrated biography, published by Taschen, in which he takes the gloves off, saying: “The grunge look, the messy look. I don’t care; I really don’t care. I cannot see women destroyed, not well combed or looking strange and stupid make-up and dresses that make the body look ridiculous. I am not this kind of gentleman; I am not this kind of creator.”

Pictured above, no less a showy dresser dresser than Donatella Versace exhibits an uncanny amount of reserve in a simple, elegant Valentino dress. As the designer would possibly have been amused, even his most extravagant fashion competitors kept it toned down for his valedictory.