he legendary Italian fashion designer Valentino , who died Monday at 93, was known for outfitting the most glamorous and famous women of the 20th century and his unabashedly feminine designs.
His hallmarks included bows, lace and his signature shade, Valentino Red. “I want to make a girl who arrives someplace and makes people turn and say: ‘You look sensational!’” he told Vanity Fair in 2004.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis wore Valentino often, including at her wedding to Aristotle Onassis in 1968. Movie stars spanning generations— Audrey Hepburn , Elizabeth Taylor , Sophia Loren , Anne Hathaway , Sharon Stone and Halle Berry , to name a few—chose to wear Valentino for major events such as the Oscars and Cannes Film Festival.
Along with Giancarlo Giammetti , his partner in work and life, Valentino transformed the couture house he started in 1959 into a booming business that the pair sold to an Italian holding company for $300 million in 1998. Valentino staged his first runway show in Florence in 1962 and presented his famous all-white spring 1968 collection at the St. Regis hotel in New York. He and Giammetti expanded into ready-to-wear in the 1970s and became one of the first fashion houses to embrace licensing. For his final spring 2008 couture collection, Valentino ended the show with a parade of top models wearing the same low-backed red gown. He took his bow at the end wearing a suit and tie, blowing kisses to the crowd.
Valentino always pursued beauty and eschewed trends. “For you, beauty was never a luxury nor an ornament: it was a form of defense, a place of safety,” Pierpaolo Piccioli , the fashion designer who took over Valentino with Maria Grazia Chiuri in 2008, wrote in an Instagram caption on Monday. Piccioli also served as the sole creative director of Valentino from 2016 to 2024. “You taught me that fashion is joy, though a profoundly serious kind of joy.”
Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli, left, and Jennifer Lopez attend The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute benefit gala celebrating the opening of the Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between exhibition on Monday, May 1, 2017, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
American actor Anthony Perkins, second from left, and Italian actress and model Marisa Berenson (beside him wearing hat) watch fashion presentation of Italian designer Valentino’s spring-summer collection, in Rome, Jan. 24, 1975. (AP Photo/Claudio Luffoli)
Actress Anne Hathaway arrives at the New York City Ballet Fall Gala honoring fashion designer Valentino Garavani at Lincoln Center on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2012 in New York. For this one night only Valentino will create costumes for three ballets.(Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP Images)
Actress Julia Roberts presents the Oscar for best cinematography at the 73rd annual Academy Awards Sunday March 25, 2001 in Los Angeles. Julia Roberts is wearing a vintage Valentino gown. (AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian)
Teenage star Brooke Shields greets the star filled audience at the end of the Valentino spring-summer 1981 High Fashion collection in Rome Jan. 1981. (AP Photo)
FILE – Princess Diana, left, wearing a gown designed by Valentino Garavani, stands next to British singer and former Beatle Paul McCartney and his wife, Linda, as they arrive at the Music Palace in Lille, France, Nov. 15, 1992. (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau, File)
Italian fashion designer Valentino waves to the public and holds by the hand American actress Sharon Stone wearing the wedding gown at the end of the presentation of Valentino’s 1994 Spring/Summer ready-to-wear collection presented in Paris October 13, 1993. (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau)
