The following is an exclusive excerpt from “Valentino. A Grand Italian Epic,” out June 10, 2025 and available for purchase here. Reprinted by permission of Taschen. © 2024 TASCHEN GmbH.

In their frothy, sensual, sweet-toothed glamour, Valentino’s clothes seem quintessentially Italian – the half-century œuvre of a maestro whose fashion soul is as Roman as his profile.

The designer’s mantra is: “I always wanted to make women beautiful,” and his inspiration was that of a provincial boy in the drab post-war period going to the movies with his sister and catching the glory days of Hollywood stars in their silver-screen years.

Like the rest of the Romans, he was fascinated by the shiny, Dolce Vita glamour and he gave it classical class. By the time he was touched with the stardust of his own era, dressing the famous who were also his friends, Valentino had become part of the motion picture. Images of the young designer with deep, dark eyes, his models dressed in pristine white, accompanied photographs of his celebrated international clients: Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren and his dear Jackie — Jacqueline Kennedy — who turned to him for her state wardrobe and later for her girlish wedding dress for her marriage to Aristotle Onassis.

But Valentino did not rise, fully formed, like Botticelli’s Venus from some mysterious fashion ocean. His famous “White” collection in Florence in 1968 might have appeared to mark an effortless ascent. But the truth is different: a long and hard-working journey over nearly 20 years to fame and fortune. And a significant mix of French style with his Italian heritage.

Valentino’s early years have something in common with the Old Masters of Italian art. For the designer’s secret is that he became, at age 17, a humble apprentice – not to an artist, but to the art of haute couture.

Hearing Valentino talk now about the fruitful decade in Paris in the 1950s, when he drew designs on scraps of paper, interviewed with Balenciaga and got a position with Jean Dessès, it seems a world away from today’s fashion colleges, runway dramatics and fast, factory-made fashion. The fledgling designer witnessed the high noon of haute couture, as the ideas he had expressed as pencil strokes were transformed via canvas toiles, fine fabrics and fittings into beautiful clothes.

Those French years were also the seedbed of Valentino’s fashion style, which grew into that particular Franco-Italian blend of light-handed ‘barocco’ that is known as Rococo. If you define the essence of Valentino’s work, it is also the definition of Rococo: exquisite flourishes developed from a sculpted base. It is evident in the designer’s tailoring, when a jacket has a lacy collar or a skirt breaks out into ruffles at the hem. The dresses are pure Rococo with their millefeuille layers and decorative details.

Such finesse does not come easily. Valentino recalls the giddy workload of those formative French years after his parents allowed him to come to Paris and lodged him with friends. He also talks about the gratitude he feels to his parents: his father’s support when, to finance the new House of Valentino in Rome in the 1960s, the Garavanis’ modest country home was sold. The couturier says he owes to his elegant mother the advice to keep things classy and simple.

Those early years as a studio hand — and his father’s example — must have instilled a work ethic that is the essence of Valentino’s life. Apart from his beloved couture, for which every silhouette, fabric and embellishment is a personal decision, Giancarlo Giammetti, his partner and friend since they met in 1960, says that 75 percent of the company’s output goes through the maestro’s nimble hands.

And what an output! Whereas the great couturiers of the past showed two collections a year to their private clients, Giammetti lists the litany of collections: ready-to-wear, sport, shoes, bags, belts, cruise and pre-season collections. They make up the Valentino empire — further enlarged since the company was bought by Marzotto S.p.A., the Italian conglomerate, in 2002.

Then there is that other modern runway: the red carpet, where Valentino’s teenage dream turns into reality with each Oscar or Golden Globe season and with the stars he has dressed from Gwyneth Paltrow to Julia Roberts.

There are also sweet moments, when Valentino and Giancarlo escape on their yacht, ski in Gstaad or enjoy the fruits of success. Far from being a tortured creator seeking to chill out in a wilderness, Valentino shares his success with his friends and opens his homes to them. Each summer, in the Paris couture season, he invites guests to dinner at his French Château de Wideville whose restoration inspired the French government to bestow on Valentino the latest in a long line of honors: the Légion d’Honneur.

The social soirées are emblematic of Valentino’s character: an un-pompous Italian ease in the buffet of seasonal delicacies; an eclectic mix of international guests; and the bella figura of the designer himself in his impeccable Caraceni tailoring.

Who are the couture clients? Glamorous and globally minded Americans from a country that Valentino conquered so long ago and from which he has lost so many friends, including Jackie Onassis and Nan Kempner. Then there is European high society — and none so dear to the designer as the new generation of Crown Princesses from Marie-Chantal of Greece to Mette-Marit of Norway.

If fashion designers mostly divide into the romantic and the classic, Valentino fits into both categories. His work, like his life, is a fusion of rigor and grandeur.

The symbol of Valentino — the one that captures the opulence and light-hearted grace of Rococo — is the bow. Always pristine and perfectly proportioned, it edges a cardigan in soft satin, flutters down the backbone as an organza butterfly or drapes at the bosom in slithering silk. A bow is also identified in the mind with a gift, as if women were wrapped and decorated to celebrate their beauty and fragility. That succulent sweetness — the weightless fabrics, whipped-cream frills and pretty make-up — has not always been in fashion. Such arrant femininity was a defiant challenge in the minimalist era and to the years when androgyny was on the agenda. The harmony and classic beauty that Valentino strives for went right out of fashion during the modernist period, just as it was expelled from con­temporary art. (Although in both, there is currently a restitution of earlier values.) The words “edgy” and “cool” are anathema to a creator who has never hidden his personal distaste for destroyed and disheveled looks.

But it is the mark of a great designer not to be blown by the winds of cultural change, but to take forward a personal vision and aesthetic. And Valentino is now dressing daughters as he might still dress their glamorous grandmothers.

What did Valentino invent in fashion? The answer is a modern glamour that has traveled from the jet set to the private plane era. And at its beating heart is an atelier in Rome, where exquisite dresses are made to traditional standards and presented like a sumptuous cake, as the seamstress unveils her creation for the maestro’s approval.

Valentino is now the last link in a chain of high-fashion history – the only couturier who has been apprenticed to the past and is still in absolute creative control of a house that he himself founded.

The young Italian stripling has become – by default, but also by desire – the keeper of couture’s purest flame. And he does it with joy – con brio!

“Valentino. A Grand Italian Epic” by Matt Tyrnauer, Suzy Menkes and Armando Chitolina, $125, available here.

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