Valentino Garavani Dies: Fashion World Mourns ‘Last Emperor’

ROME — The world of fashion is mourning the loss of Valentino Garavani, the iconic designer whose glamorous creations and signature shade of red became synonymous with Italian elegance. A public viewing began Wednesday in Rome, offering fans a chance to pay their respects to the legendary figure.

Garavani, who passed away Monday at the age of 93 at his Rome residence, is lying in state at the foundation bearing his name in Piazza Mignanelli, just steps from the famed Spanish Steps. The fashion world, and beyond, is reflecting on a career that defined decades of style.

A funeral Mass will be held Friday at the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri in central Rome, where family and friends will gather to celebrate his life and legacy.

Known simply as Valentino, the designer dressed generations of royalty, First Ladies, and Hollywood stars – from Jackie Kennedy Onassis to Julia Roberts and Queen Rania of Jordan – all of whom credited him with making them look and feel their best. His influence extended beyond the runway, shaping a global vision of glamour.

Hundreds of fashion luminaries, dignitaries, and Roman citizens lined up to honor the “last emperor” of Italian fashion during the two-day public viewing. Valentino maintained his atelier in Rome, even as he frequently presented his collections in Paris, cementing his international presence.

Mourners waited in line to enter the foundation headquarters and pause before his casket, adorned with a single red rose and surrounded by white flowers. Family and close friends sat on either side of the casket, including his two beloved fawn-colored pugs.

“I worked for him for 14 years… they were the most beautiful years of my life, the ones I spent with him,” said hairstylist Alba Armillei. “Everything he touched became beautiful.”

Rome’s mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, praised Valentino as one of “Italy’s most luminous and beloved figures,” emphasizing the designer’s strong ties to the Italian capital. The outpouring of grief underscores Valentino’s enduring impact on Italian culture.

Alba Verga, sporting a red Valentino coat, remembered Valentino as “the greatest, the most immense forever.”

“He made us dream. His dresses for me were sculptures, works of art, but above all dreams and through his dresses, I always dreamed,” she said.

Alessandro Michele, the current creative director of the Valentino house, said the Maestro would be irreplaceable, but left a solid legacy.

“He was a great example of life,” Michele told reporters before entering the foundation for a final farewell. “He came from afar and built something immense.”

Ballerina Eleonora Abbagnato recalled “the first dress created by Valentino for the Vienna Opera when I danced on New Year’s Eve with ostrich feathers, true elegance, the red, the emotions and the effect it created.”

The windows of Valentino’s flagship store were draped in black, displaying his famous quote: “I love beauty. It’s not my fault.”

Valentino’s nearly half-century career, spanning from his early days in Rome in the 1960s to his retirement in 2008, never succumbed to fleeting trends. He founded the House of Valentino on Rome’s Via Condotti in 1959.

His impeccable designs made him the king of the red carpet, the go-to for A-list celebrities’ ceremony and awards needs. His sumptuous gowns have graced countless Academy Awards, most notably in 2001 when Roberts wore a vintage black and white column dress to accept her Best Actress statuette. Cate Blanchett also donned Valentino — a one-shoulder butter yellow silk gown — when she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2005.

Paris Mourns Valentino, the Last Titan of the Golden Age of Haute Couture

PARIS (AP) — The death of Valentino Garavani cast a shadow over the opening of Paris Men’s Fashion Week on Tuesday.

Front-row guests and industry figures lamented the loss of one of the last towering names of 20th-century haute couture: an Italian designer whose working life was closely intertwined with the Paris runways.

Valentino, 93, died at his Rome residence, according to a statement from the Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti Foundation announcing his death. While he built his house in Rome, he spent decades showing collections in France.

FILE – Fashion designer Valentino Garavani during a photo session to present the documentary “Valentino: The Last Emperor” in Rome, Monday, Nov. 16, 2009.

(Alessandra Tarantino/AP)

“He was one of the last great couturiers who really embodied what fashion was in the 20th century,” said Pierre Groppo, head of fashion at Vanity Fair France.

On a day meant to sell the future, many guests said they were thinking about what fashion has lost: a designer as a living institution.

Groppo pointed to the codes that made Valentino instantly recognizable: “the polka dots, the ruffles, the bows” — and to a generation of designers who, he said, “somehow invented what celebrity culture is.”

Valentino’s vision was built on a simple idea: to make women look radiant and then make the moment unforgettable.

He dressed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor, cemented his signature “Valentino Red” in the public imagination, and through his decades-long partnership with Giancarlo Giammetti, helped make the designer himself part of the spectacle, as recognizable as the clients in the front row.

The End of a Fashion Era

Leading fashion writer Luke Leitch framed the loss in equally grand terms, calling Valentino “the last of the ‘leviathans of fashion of that generation,’” and saying it was “absolutely” the end of a certain kind of designer: figures whose names could sustain a global house, and whose authority didn’t come from viral speed but from permanence.

Trained in Paris before founding his maison in Rome, Valentino became a unique figure: Italian in origin, but fluent in the rituals that made Parisian haute couture an institution. His career moved between those two capitals of elegance, bringing Roman grandeur to a system that still treats fashion not just as commerce, but as ceremony.

Even as he aged, the founder of the house continued to appear at his haute couture and ready-to-wear shows, as an Associated Press reporter observed, until he finally retired from public life, always radiating a quiet grandeur from his front-row seat.

For some in Paris on Tuesday, the loss felt personal precisely because Valentino’s world was never just Italian.

Groppo remembered the designer as “much more than a fashion brand,” adding: “It was a lifestyle.”

That lifestyle — the polish of haute couture, the social glamour, and the conviction that elegance could be a form of power — remains a benchmark, even as fashion speeds toward louder branding and faster cycles.

“It’s quite sad because he is so important to the fashion industry, and he contributed so much and I can’t forget the impressive red he created,” said Lolo Zhang, a Chinese fashion influencer attending the Louis Vuitton show in Paris.

“He always celebrated pure beauty, and the architecture for the silhouette, and how he used color. The old era is just passing.”

Other guests described a belated realization, the kind that only comes when a figure who seemed permanent suddenly departs.

YSL, Chanel and Valentino“There are some people who want to be Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel… There are also people who are spontaneously Valentino,” said Guy-Claude Agboton, deputy editor of Ideat magazine. “It’s a question of identity.”

For Parisian fashion observer Benedict Epinay, the mourning was tied to memory. And to the emotional weight of Valentino’s last bow.

“It was such a grand moment. I was lucky enough to attend the last show he gave,” Epinay said. “It was so moving because we knew at that moment it was the last show.”

Fashion observer Arfan Ghani pointed to what Valentino represented for younger designers: an “elegant” standard of restraint in an era that often rewards noise.

“Because they were very classic materials,” Ghani said. “It wasn’t as noisy as many other of these brands with the branding.”

Paris-based sculptor Ranti Bam described Valentino in the language of form: less trend than structure, less look than line.

“As a sculptor, I saw Valentino as an artist,” Bam said. “He transcended fashion into sculpture.”

“He didn’t follow trends, he pursued form,” he added. “That’s why his work doesn’t become dated, it endures.”

The Valentino fashion house has continued for years under a new generation of leadership and design, still showcased in Paris.