Fashion 88 : Italy’s Valentino: Once Again, He Does Just About Everything Right
When you see John Travolta, Quincy Jones, Walter and Carol Matthau, Linda Evans, Morgan Fairchild, Swifty and Mary Lazar all in a row, all tapping feet and clapping hands for pretty clothes, you know the designer has done something right.
Valentino Garavani, Italy’s national fashion hero, usually does do things right. He is the kind of perfectionist who once confessed that he cannot sleep unless his robe is properly folded beside his bed. And so he left nothing to chance when he traveled from Rome to Los Angeles to show his spring collection to 800 famous-name guests on Stage 14 at 20th Century Fox on Wednesday night.
He arrived with a 55-person entourage and spent almost a full week overseeing even the most minute details, including the placement on stage of a huge replica of a Roman head by sculptor Igor Mitoraj, whose work he collects.
The event, hosted by Neiman Marcus and the Colleagues to benefit the Children’s Institute International, was a tribute to the upbeat opulence that is somehow characteristic of upper-crust life both in Rome and Los Angeles.
The sensual, hourglass evening-dress shapes, the opulent laces and chiffons, the exotic embroideries heaped on transparent fabrics that swirl and sway as women walk, all bestow a glamour for which the designer has long been known.
But even for Valentino, whose cheerful colors are worn by such disparate types as Nancy Reagan, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Joan Collins and the queens of Jordan and Spain, the evening was “an extraordinary event.”
“I just don’t do this kind of thing any more,” he said before the festivities, admitting that he has not appeared at a public showing of his clothes since 1982, when his was the first fashion show ever held in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Appears With Clients
Where Valentino does appear these days is in all the chic spots frequented by the international set who wear his clothes. They are not only his clients but his neighbors and friends.
Ask him where he has homes and he shrugs, his lids lowered to half mast while he thinks. “Rome, of course. The chalet in Gstaad. A pied-a-terre in New York . . . and the place in Capri. Oh, there’s a maisonette in London I forgot.”
The 56-year-old designer, son of a Lombardy electrical-supply-store owner, has worked for 39 years to reach the point where he can forget how much real estate he owns.
Paris at Age 17
After heading for Paris at 17, he won a fashion school scholarship from the prestigious French Chambre Syndicale. He then apprenticed for five years with designer Jean Desses and for two more at Guy Laroche, both in Paris.
With funds from his father, he opened his own Rome salon in 1960 and launched what has now become a $500-million empire that includes men’s and women’s clothing, fragrance and licenses for everything from sunglasses to blue jeans.
Valentino shows couture collections in Rome each year, but always presents his ready-to-wear in Paris because that is where he trained and where his career began. Instead of being offended, his countrymen are thrilled by his twice-annual defection to France.
In fact, Valentino’s name is a household word in Italy, where he is revered above all other designers, even Giorgio Armani, who is headquartered in Milan.
Valentino, the Roman, is the one who first put Italy on the world fashion map. And he has helped to keep it there for 28 years.
A TV crew from Italy’s Channel 1 followed the designer everywhere in Los Angeles, preparing an hourlong, prime-time documentary about his trip.
Stefanie Casini, the show’s director, explained that “to Italians, Valentino epitomizes the greatest designer of all. He went to Paris and proved that he, an Italian, could compete with Chanel, Saint Laurent and the other French greats.
“He raised the image of Italian creativity in the eyes of the world. He helped make Italian fashion even more important than Italian industrial design. Armani has been popular for only 10 years, but Valentino has been ranked among the world’s Top 10 designers for 20 years--right up there with the French. His success has never ceased,” she said.
Pretty Clothes
Something else differentiates Valentino from the Milan design group with whom he does not consort: his clothes.
Valentino’s clothes are pretty. Fashion intellectuals tend to put him down for that, claiming that pretty is not enough. He breaks no new design ground, they complain, doing the same beautifully put-together outfits year after year.
Suzy Menkes, author of “The Windsor Style” and fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune, agrees, saying: “Valentino’s clothes are pretty clothes for women who consider themselves pretty. There is nothing wrong with that.”
And Valentino himself is proud that pretty is what his designs are all about. “I know what a women needs. She dresses to please her husband, to please herself. She doesn’t spend these extraordinary amounts of money just to be ‘in fashion,’ I mean in step with some trend. She wants to buy things that can stay in her wardrobe. Actually, buying things that can be worn many, many times is the secret of elegant women.”
And the secret of his own continuing longevity, Valentino feels, is to keep on doing just exactly what he has always done. Even he cannot ignore the ill winds blowing throughout the world fashion industry these days, he admits.
“There is big confusion now. There are too many fashion labels and too many designers all over the world. Women are getting tired of it all,” and a shake-up is in the air. He smiles, as if the shake-up might not be such a bad thing. “When it happens,” he says with confidence, “you’ll see that only the best designers will survive.”
