It's 8:30 A.M. on Good Friday, and Valentino Garavani is still asleep. Chateau de Wideville, his eight-bedroom Louis XIII castle about 30 minutes outside Paris, is completely silent save for its giant underbelly, where a staff of 10 is buzzing like bees making expensive honey. The French chef, who has been employed for nine years and travels with the designer wherever he goes ("I would cry if he ever left me," Valentino says later), is unloading crates of fresh vegetables and fruits from a tiny truck. "No one ever sees this part of the house," says Michael Kelly, Valentino's faithful chief butler of 10 years, the man in charge of every one of the designer's five homes. The rows of brown riding boots and green wellies lined up by the door like soldiers are "for guests." Meanwhile, a maid is ironing in a room larger than most of his boutiques. All is in perfect order.
Valentino bought Wideville 12 years ago, and he has spent five years restoring the castle and its gardens at considerable cost. "Let's not speak about it," he later whispers of the amount. Its front "yard" looks like an eight-lane green-grass highway, while the rear is populated by giant mounds of topiaries. Outside, long ropes of moss hang from trees. Inside, gold trim, rich velvets, and Chinese porcelain sweep across every surface. It is an incredibly intimate and romantic place, and of all of Valentino's magnificent properties, this is his favorite.
As is his daily custom, Valentino wakes up around 10:30. While he is blow-drying his hair (he achieves the perfect blow-out himself in "just one minute!"), Monty, Milton, Maude, Molly, and Margot, his five pugs who go everywhere with him, receive their own beauty treatment by Carmelo, a de facto dog butler who every morning brushes their teeth, cleans their paws, wipes their eyes, noses, and ears, and tends to their coats so that they are fit for their master's perfectionist hands.
When the master emerges, he is indeed perfect. At 75, Valentino has a well-preserved handsomeness that comes as a bit of a shock. His corduroy riding pants and cropped tweed jacket show off a very svelte figure and a firm backside. His golden hair and tinted aviator sunglasses sparkle in the French sun, while his caramel riding boots perfectly match the color of his skin.
It's hard to believe, after all this time on top, that Valentino was once fired for suntanning. The not-often-discussed incident occurred in Paris in 1957, when he was working as an assistant to the famous couturier Jean Desses. He took an extended vacation to Saint-Tropez and, well, got a little carried away in the sun. "I arrive [back in Paris] a little late," the designer recalls with a flippant wave as he sits on a velvet chair in the drawing room of the chateau. "They say to me, 'Valentino, we love you very much, but ...'"
Not that his day in the sun ended that afternoon. The talented young Italian was immediately snapped up by another hot couturier of the day, Guy Laroche, and he had a new job in 12 hours. It is perhaps a more telling account of the man who today emerges in the mind's eye: Valentino, reigning king of the good life.
But let's clarify one thing: Valentino has worked his taut legs off since he started his own label in 1959 in Rome, masterminding an empire of couture, ready-to-wear, and accessories whose higher--if not only--purpose is to make women beautiful.
Over the years, he has amassed not just the chicest clients in the world--from early champion Jackie O. to the empress of Iran to his current gal pal Gwyneth Paltrow--but also a collection of homes and art that threatens to outsparkle the princesses who so fiercely adore him. In addition to Wideville, there's his enormous Holland Park mansion in London, the apartment in New York, a ski chalet in Gstaad, the villa in Rome, and the jet he rents to zoom around to each one, pristine pugs in tow.
Few fashion designers, and frankly not many regular human beings, live as well as Valentino. Though now on the brink of retirement (he is expected to announce his final farewell this July at a blowout anniversary celebration in Rome), he has no intention of downgrading the luxury quotient.
Part of his lifestyle is practical--practical if you're Valentino. "He doesn't like to travel because he doesn't like hotels," says his lifelong business partner and close confidant Giancarlo Giammetti. "Instead of staying in a hotel, he stays in a house.
"Even when we weren't superrich, we spent money," continues the equally chic Giammetti, who has been by Valentino's side since 1960. "We would always arrive somewhere with the cars, the Vuitton luggage, the valet, the publicist. We had fun; we loved that."
"Sometimes it's not good being a perfectionist," the designer adds. "I travel, and I'm always complaining. The food is never good. Asian food is not good. I am against garlic. I am against so many things. I bore my friends."
Valentino's vision is just as singular. He cannot imagine ever having a career other than fashion design. "I'm a workaholic when I'm in my fashion house all day long. I go like this"--he sketches furiously in the air--"without stopping." Since his spoiled youth in Voghera, Italy, where his mother shook her head in exasperation over his demands for custom-made sweaters, Valentino has honed his inimitable talent for wrapping women up like the greatest gifts in the world. "His attention span is terribly limited about anything other than his clothes or his houses or his flowers or his friends," admits Giammetti.
Get him talking couture and he brightens like a schoolboy. Whether it was with his first red dress in 1959, his famed white collection in 1968, or Kate Winslet's mint gown at this year's Oscars, Valentino has had the same goal: Make the woman pop! To this end, he has no patience for simply dressed women. "When they arrive [to a party], no one notices them," he says, eyes widening and nostrils flaring. "It is like they are not there.
"I love dresses that embellish the lady," he clarifies. It comes as no surprise that Valentino "hated, hated!" the minimalism of the 1990s, labeling all the dark colors "the year of the divorce." Grunge was another fashion low point: "Bag ladies!" he chides. And there's no chance in hell he'd be caught designing a collection for Top-shop or H&M, like so many of his colleagues. "No, no, no," he says tersely at the mere mention.
Jacqueline de Ribes, the impeccably dressed French countess who moonlighted as a fashion designer in 1950s Paris, hired the young Italian to do sketches for her and could not break his decorative streak. "Valentino thought my things were too severe," she recalls now. "He would say, 'Oh, but, Countess, can't we add a flower here or a bow there or a frill there?' And I said no. Recently I saw him at a dinner party and he said, 'Jacqueline, let's face it, my frills and my bows took me quite far!'"
Indeed, his blending of the classy with the glamorous has made for a very potent fashion cocktail. In his six decades working, Valentino has dressed every major woman he has wished for. All except the queen of England. "Ah, and Angelina Jolie!" he adds, marveling that she remains unconquered. "I love her. She is sexy, but elegant sexy."
The designer refrains from naming his favorite client. "There are so many, I don't want to make anyone jealous," he says. But, he admits, the three with the best style were Marella Agnelli, Babe Paley, and Gloria Guinness. "They were the top, top, top."
Certainly he is bewitched by the rich, the royal, the thin, and the beautiful, but fame or money alone does not a client make. Today there are a lot of high-profile yet badly behaved, barely clothed celebrities that Valentino is not interested in servicing. He tactfully refrains from naming them. Georgina Brandolini, who worked with him for 19 years, says, "He does not like cheap, vulgar women."
"What is very important to me is the way [a woman] moves and makes the clothes alive," Valentino explains. "If you don't know what to do, you don't know how to act, you don't know how to move, you walk badly, you do ridiculous movement, then that's a disaster. When I have friends who have little girls, I say, When they are eight years old, please look at their movement, because now you can correct everything."
Princesses (and Valentino has dressed nearly all of them, from Gloria von Thurn und Taxis to Marie-Chantal of Greece to Rosario of Bulgaria) have been the easiest to dress. "They give you the [social] programs, so I know exactly what to do." Actresses are another story. "They are so spoiled," the designer says. "I remember a movie star once asked me for a wedding gown, and she wanted a very big decollete, and I said, Well ..." He pauses for dramatic effect. "I think you should do this in California."
The only part of his own design repertoire that Valentino finds particularly embarrassing is from the 1980s, when even he indulged in a Dynasty moment. Just talking about it makes him shudder. "You think, Oh, my God, what have I done?" he croaks. "It was soooo out of proportion. Those huge shoulders, too short! It was a disaster of all disasters."
The worst review--or, let's say the only one Valentino actually remembers--was delivered in the late 1960s by Eugenia Sheppard, the sharp-tongued critic of the International Herald Tribune. "One season she proclaimed him the new Rolls-Royce of fashion, and the season after, she said the Rolls-Royce has a flat tire," recalls Giammetti with a smile.
Valentino has a much better memory for the good times. "He is a master of giving parties," says Carlos Souza, Valentino's longtime PR chief. When he got his first big contract in America and received a substantial licensing check, Valentino threw a lavish party at the Pierre hotel, and the famous fashion editor Diana Vreeland sent Barbra Streisand dressed up as a maharani as his gift. A few years later, the designer dressed up as a ringmaster and threw a circus-themed birthday party at Studio 54.
"He is a wonderful host," adds master of class Jacqueline de Ribes. "If you go to his house, he always makes an effort to know that you're happy." Adds Souza, "Watch out if you don't serve yourself twice, or he'll say, What's wrong with the food? He's very Jewish mother in that sense."
And pity the woman who turns up in jeans. "If I give a dinner, I don't like to see a lady coming in [like she's been] jogging. I'm sorry. No." Valentino is firm. "You should have the education to know where you are going."
Gwyneth Paltrow, who has spent many a weekend at Wideville, says the designer can actually tolerate her in jeans at an appropriate moment only "if the jeans are cut to his liking and the top is more couture than cotton. Also, I better have just had my hair perfectly highlighted and blown stick straight."
Regardless of retirement, Valentino himself plans to stay in the same Caraceni blazers he has long favored. "The day I stop, I'd love to do costumes for [the Verdi opera] La Traviata," he says giddily. In the meantime, he warms to dishing on who should replace him. "It must be someone who automatically loves me," he says in an adorably childish way. "They have to forget a tiny, tiny bit their pretentious life"--that is, their own name--"and they have to be clever enough to watch what I did." Valentino has never heard of many of the names rumored to take his place. Giammetti, shaking his head, says, "Names come up and he's like, Who's this? If you say Giambattista Valli, he doesn't know he exists. Badgley Mischka, never heard of them. If you talk about Phoebe Philo, you have to really explain who she is. He knows superbig names: Karl, Miuccia, Donatella."
Not surprisingly, Valentino wants "someone important" for the job, and his top pick is the man with the big name, Tom Ford. "I know he likes what I do, and he's a clever guy."
But for now, it's hard to give up a job that's treated him so gloriously. Valentino is a sucker for a fan or, even better, an adoring crowd. "My popularity on the street when I go out, it's unbelievable; after two minutes, people are all around me. This is joy to me." He pauses, considering this. "It's maybe the only thing I'm going to miss when I'm not doing this anymore."
My popularity on the street is a joy to me. It's maybe the only thing I'm going to miss when I'm not doing this anymore."
