Valentino Garavani

Valentino Garavani (1932–2026) was an Italian couturier and the founding designer of Valentino. After a decade in Paris with Jean Dessès and Guy Laroche, he returned to Italy in 1959 to open an atelier at 11 Via Condotti in Rome. Its costly commitment to Parisian couture standards pushed the young business close to collapse; after meeting Giancarlo Giammetti in July 1960, Garavani placed finance and administration in his hands while retaining complete authority over design.

The partnership converted a precarious salon into an international house. Garavani’s July 1962 presentation at the Sala Bianca in Florence secured foreign buyers, and Palazzo Mignanelli became the atelier’s permanent Roman centre in 1967. Together, Garavani and Giammetti extended Valentino from haute couture into ready-to-wear and licensed product, presenting prêt-à-porter in Paris from 1975 and joining the official Paris couture calendar in 1989. In May 1981, Garavani also designed a guest fur runway for Revillon, a collection-level engagement separate from his authority at Valentino.

Garavani remained creative director after the 1998 sale to HdP and through the house’s later Marzotto and Permira ownership. His final ready-to-wear show was presented in October 2007 and his final haute couture collection at the Musée Rodin on 23 January 2008. He died in Rome on 19 January 2026, leaving a body of work that established Valentino as a Roman couture institution with an identity extending far beyond its eponymous origin.

Garavani joined French couture discipline to a Roman conception of public elegance. He worked from flat drawings, with the premières of the flou atelier resolving line, drape, volume and movement in three dimensions. Controlled silhouettes and elongated evening proportions supplied a stable frame for lace, bows, flowers and embroidery, allowing concentrated ornament without surrendering precision.

Colour functioned as structure. Rosso Valentino gave the house a recognisable ceremonial signature, yet the 1968 White Collection used white, ivory and beige to make cut, surface and the new V hardware carry the image. The 1970 Midi collection showed another side of his method: by lowering the hemline against the prevailing miniskirt, Garavani used proportion to advance a competing idea of modernity.

Across the 1980s and 1990s, padded, authoritative forms coexisted with a return to archival romanticism and increasingly diaphanous, heavily embroidered eveningwear. The continuity lay in the atelier system. Ornament was engineered through construction and specialised handwork, making Garavani’s authorship inseparable from the Roman makers who translated his drawings into garments.