Italian haute couture ’emperor’ painted fashion red

By Giulia Segreti

It was 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 on Monday 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,” Valentino said. “It is not my fault. And I know what women want: they want to be beautiful.”

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.

That year, Elizabeth Taylor chose a white Valentino gown for the premiere of blockbuster Spartacus.

Also in 1960, he met Giancarlo Giammetti in a Roman cafe. Giammetti would go on to be his partner in business and in life.

“To share life with a person for your whole existence – every moment, joy, pain, enthusiasm, disappointment – is something that cannot be defined,” Valentino said of him.

Giammetti took on the managerial part of the business, leaving creative matters to the designer.

“To be with Valentino as a friend, as a lover and as an employee is a bit the same: you need a lot of patience,” Giammetti said in Valentino: The Last Emperor, a documentary that followed the designer in the last two years of his career.

Valentino’s georgette fabrics, chiffon ruffles and ornate embellishments, including the exclusive budellini technique – where long strips of sheep’s wool are hand rolled into tubes, wrapped in silk and stitched together – won him a multitude of awards, including France’s highest civilian distinction in 2006.

“Fame and fortune didn’t change him,” Giammetti said at the time. “He is still the little guy I met 45 years ago.”

Superstitious and introverted, Valentino loved chocolate, skiing and his pugs. He told Corriere in 2017 that he was afraid of death.

In 2007 he wowed Rome with lavish celebrations to celebrate his decades in fashion – a three-day event that included dinners, parties and exhibitions with thousands of guests flying in from around the world.

Months later he announced that he would stop designing for his company, which he no longer controlled after selling the firm almost a decade earlier for some $300 million.

“I have decided that this is the perfect moment to say adieu to the world of fashion,” he said. “As the English say, I would like to leave the party when it is still full.”

His last catwalk show was held in January 2008 in Paris, a city he called his second home and which he said had taught him to love fashion and life.

The business that bears his name was bought by Qatari fund Mayhoola for €700 million in 2012. French luxury group Kering bought a 30 per cent stake in 2023, with a commitment to fully acquire the business from 2026, but then deferred the move to 2028 at the earliest.

Valentino and Giammetti remained active in supporting the arts. Their foundation opened the PM23 gallery in the centre of Rome in 2025, next to the Valentino headquarters.

Fittingly, the opening exhibition – Horizons/Red – focused on the colour most closely associated with Valentino.

“Red isn’t just a colour,” Giammetti said at the time. “It’s a symbolic and aesthetic force of extraordinary power.”