The cause of death was not immediately known.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Scaling the heights of high fashion, he was the first Italian to feature on the exclusive \u200cParis haute couture catwalks.<\/p>\n
Passionate about film, he dreamed as a young man of dressing the \u201cbeautiful ladies of the silver screen\u201d, as he called them, among them 1950s Hollywood stars Lana Turner and Judy Garland.<\/p>\n
Valentino would eventually design Elizabeth Taylor\u2019s wedding gown, and was the first choice \u2060for numerous Oscar winners, including Sharon Stone and Pen\u00e9lope Cruz.<\/p>\n
His romantic designs, simple at first glance, were full of intricate detail. \u201cI love beauty,\u201d Valentino said. \u201cIt is not my fault. And \u200cI \u200bknow \u200dwhat women want: they want to be beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n
The designer, who also dressed Jackie Kennedy, created a business empire under his own name before selling it off before his retirement, in 2008.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2060for designer Jean Dess\u00e8s. He returned home in 1960, opening his own fashion house in the heart of Rome.<\/p>\n
That year, Elizabeth Taylor chose a white Valentino gown for the premiere of blockbuster Spartacus.<\/p>\n
![\"Valentino](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/7FL7NCI3M75NTXQPDNMCD2NGWI.jpg\")
Valentino Garavani at his exhibition Valentino: Master of Couture at Somerset House in London in 2012. Photograph: Warrick Page\/The New York Times<\/p>\n
Also in 1960, he met \u2060Giancarlo Giammetti in a Roman cafe. Giammetti would go on to be \u2060his partner in business and in life.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo share life with a person for your whole existence \u2013 every moment, joy, pain, enthusiasm, disappointment \u2013 is something that cannot be defined,\u201d Valentino said of him.<\/p>\n
Mr Giammetti took on the managerial part of the business, leaving creative matters to the designer.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo be with Valentino as a friend, as a lover \u200dand as an employee is a bit the same: you need a lot of patience,\u201d Mr Giammetti said in Valentino: The Last Emperor, a documentary that followed the designer in the last two years of his career.<\/p>\n
Valentino\u2019s georgette fabrics, chiffon ruffles and ornate embellishments, including the exclusive budellini technique \u2013 where long strips of sheep\u2019s wool are hand rolled into tubes, wrapped in silk and stitched together \u2013 won him a multitude of awards, including France\u2019s highest civilian distinction in 2006.<\/p>\n
\u201cFame and fortune didn\u2019t change him,\u201d Mr Giammetti said at the time. \u201cHe is still the little guy I met 45 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
Superstitious and introverted, Valentino loved chocolate, skiing and his pugs. He told Corriere in 2017 that he was afraid of death.<\/p>\n
In 2007, he wowed Rome with lavish celebrations to celebrate his decades in fashion \u2013 a three-day event that included dinners, parties and exhibitions with thousands of guests flying in from around the world.<\/p>\n
Months later he \u200cannounced that he would stop designing for his company, \u200cwhich he no longer controlled after selling the firm almost a decade earlier for some $300 million.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have decided that this is the perfect moment to say adieu to the world of fashion,\u201d he said. \u201cAs the English say, I would like to leave the party when it is still full.\u201d<\/p>\n
His last catwalk show was held in January \u200c2008 in Paris, a city he called his second home and which he said had taught him to love fashion and life.<\/p>\n
The business that bears his name was bought by Qatari fund Mayhoola for \u20ac700 million in 2012. French luxury group Kering \u2060bought 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.<\/p>\n
Valentino and Mr 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.<\/p>\n
Fittingly, the opening exhibition \u2013 Horizons\/Red \u2013 focused on the colour most closely associated with Valentino.<\/p>\n
\u201cRed isn\u2019t just a colour,\u201d Mr Giammetti said at the time. \u201cIt\u2019s a symbolic and aesthetic force of extraordinary power.\u201d \u2013 Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A mix of carmine and scarlet, with a hint of orange \u2013 a new hue, inspired by an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292804,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,13,14,6,371,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-292803","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-featured-news","11":"tag-featurednews","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-italy","14":"tag-latest-news","15":"tag-latestnews","16":"tag-main-news","17":"tag-mainnews","18":"tag-news","19":"tag-top-stories","20":"tag-topstories","21":"tag-world","22":"tag-world-news","23":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115923792957584642","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}