ROME, ITALY – JANUARY 23: Pallbearers officers carry the coffin of Valentino Garavani during the funeral ceremony at Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, on January 23, 2026 in Rome, Italy. Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani died at the age of 93 in Rome on January 19. (Photo by Antonio Masiello/Getty Images)

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His body was laid in state in his Rome headquarters, the Palazzo Mignanelli, 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 shoulder to ease the officers’ 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 “Valentino red.”

Italian businessman Giancarlo Giammetti (L) and Vernon Bruce Hoeksema arrive at the funeral ceremony for the late Italian fashion designer Valentino Gavarani at the Basilic of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, in Rome on January 23, 2026. (Photo by Stefano RELLANDINI / AFP via Getty Images)

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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 opposite 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.”

At the funeral, Hathaway wore a luxuriously-trimmed Valentino topcoat, a trademark Valentino masterclass in the execution of a statement tempered by restraint. For his part, and most fittingly, Valentino creative director Michele will plant the exuberantly luxe Valentino standard yet again in Paris, January 26-29, at Valentino’s beloved Haute Couture fashion week, the glass ceiling that the maestro broke six decades ago.

ROME, ITALY – JANUARY 23: Anne Hathaway and Alessandro Michele attend the funeral of Valentino Garavani at Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri on January 23, 2026 in Rome, Italy. Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani died at the age of 93 in Rome on January 19. (Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images)

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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. Valentino and Giammetti stayed with the company under their new owners until 2008. After that final, slightly bumptious 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 retaining the option to purchase the entire brand by 2028.

Giammatti explained his and Valentino’s 2008 decision to retire from the firm, ten years after he and Valentino sold it, to the Financial Times with these words: “We left because the industry changed and meetings were all about money, not design. Sales forecasts decided what got created. The conglomerates made each label work to the same model.”

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

ROME, ITALY – JANUARY 23: François Henri Pinault is arrived at Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri on January 23, 2026 in Rome, Italy. Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani died at the age of 93 in Rome on January 23. (Photo by Deepixel/Getty Images)

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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 stitch of that. For its part, the client list, spanning generations of well-known women from all sectors, is long and laden with old-school European, American, global-corporate and entertainment-industry wattage — Jacqueline Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor and Julia Roberts, to name but five champion fashion Thoroughbreds in that stable.

By way of illuminating just a small bit of the history: To wear during her year of mourning after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy commissioned six black-and-white dresses from Valentino. She was in them for the year 1964 — the year she was supposed to have been back in the White House. For her 1968 wedding to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, she commissioned Valentino to construct a short ivory dress — considered controversial at the time, now thought to be one of the most innovative, heartfelt iterations in wedding attire. That marriage would traverse an unfortunate path, but at the kickoff, the dress was Valentino’s note of hope for Jackie.

Russian model Natalia Vodianova arrives at the funeral ceremony for the late Italian fashion designer Valentino Gavarani at the Basilic of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, in Rome on January 23, 2026. (Photo by Stefano RELLANDINI / AFP via Getty Images)

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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 Palazzo Mignanelli atelier — many of his seamstresses stayed with him for the duration of their working lives. The same is true of his clients. 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, careful and reserved as the man she is there to honor, Conde Nast executive Anna Wintour makes her way into the church.

British-US fashion editor Anna Wintour leaves the funeral ceremony for the late Italian fashion designer Valentino Gavarani at the Basilic of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, in Rome on January 23, 2026. (Photo by Stefano RELLANDINI / AFP via Getty Images)

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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 he was just last year in the 2025 illustrated Taschen biography, Valentino: A Grand Italian Epic, 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 (in) 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.”

Italian fashion designer Donatella Versace arrives at the funeral ceremony for the late Italian fashion designer Valentino Gavarani at the Basilic of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, in Rome on January 23, 2026. (Photo by Stefano RELLANDINI / AFP via Getty Images)

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Pictured above, no less a showy dresser than Donatella Versace exhibits an uncanny amount of reserve in a simple, elegant, all-black Valentino dress on her way into the church. The designer would not have missed the irony: Even his diametrically opposed, far more “modern” and extravagant fashion competitors kept it elegantly pared back and firmly in the Valentino profile for the occasion of the Roman valediction.