Paris mourns Valentino, the last titan of couture’s golden age

Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani looks on during a press conference at Rome's Capitoline museums, Wednesday, June 13, 2007, on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of Valentino Maison foundation. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, File)

PARIS — Valentino Garavani’s death cast a long shadow over the opening day of Paris Fashion Week menswear Tuesday, with front-row guests and industry figures mourning the passing of one of the last towering names of 20th-century couture — an Italian designer whose working life was closely entwined with the Paris runways.

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

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

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

Groppo pointed to the codes that made Valentino instantly legible — “the dots, the ruffles, the knots” — and to a generation of designers who, he said, “in a way, invented what is celebrity culture.”

Valentino’s vision was built on a simple idea: make women look luminous, then make the moment unforgettable.

He dressed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor, among others, fixed his signature “Valentino red” in the public imagination, and — through his decades-long partnership with Giancarlo Giammetti — helped turn the designer himself into part of the spectacle, as recognizable as the clients in his front row.

The end of a fashion era

Prominent fashion writer Luke Leitch framed the loss in similarly outsized terms, calling Valentino “the last of the fashion ‘leviathans of that generation’,” and saying it was “absolutely” the end of a certain class of designer: figures whose names could carry a global house, and whose authority came not from viral speed but from permanence.

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

Even as he aged, the house’s founder kept turning up at its couture and ready-to-wear shows, as observed by one Associated Press journalist — until he eventually retreated from public life, all the while radiating quiet grandeur from his front-row seat.

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

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

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

“It’s quite sad as he’s so important to the fashion industry, and he contributed a lot and I cannot forget the stunning red he created,” said Lolo Zhang, a Chinese fashion influencer attending Louis Vuitton ’s show in Paris.

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

Other guests described a delayed realization — the kind that arrives only when a figure who seemed permanent is suddenly gone.

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 Paris fashion observer Benedict Epinay, the grief was bound up with memory. And with the emotional charge of Valentino’s final bow.

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

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

“Because it was very classical materials,” Ghani said. ”It wasn’t as loud as a lot of other of these brands are with 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,” she added. “That’s why his work doesn’t date, it endures.”

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

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Associated Press writer Amy Seraphin in Paris contributed to this report.

Thomas Adamson, The Associated Press