The Great Fashion Designers (26 page)

From this start Italian fashion was to develop fast in the post-war years, brilliantly promoted as an industry from 1951 by Giovanni Battista Giorgini, an agent and entrepreneur, who invited the all-powerful American press to a series of shows and fashion exhibitions in and around the Pitti Palace in Florence ‘immediately after the great Paris shows'. John Fairchild of
Women's Wear Daily
, who received the first invitation, remembered in 1992, ‘The French at that point were struggling to get into the ready-to-wear business as they saw the demand for haute couture fashion melting away before their eyes. What Giorgini did was boldly leapfrog ahead of the French to bring the Italians into ready-to-wear before the French, always slow to move into new ways.'

When Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani, a 27-year-old Paris-trained couturier, returned to Italy in 1959 to set up his own studio, he instinctively located himself in Rome among the couturiers. He wanted the clientele that could afford his exacting perfectionism, the handmade craftsmanship, the clothes for a confident life lived publicly. He did of course develop many product lines, including ready-to-wear collections, but he remained at heart a dressmaker to the rich and famous. Their roll-call is interminable and includes Rita Hayworth,
Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy (who married Aristotle Onassis in Valentino), Princess Grace, Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale, Ornella Muti, Gina Lollobrigida, Marisa Berenson, Elsa Peretti, Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone and Julia Roberts—who accepted her 2001 Oscar in Valentino. Long before the phrase ‘red-carpet dress' was coined, Valentino was the master of the genre, producing flattering, impact-making gowns that looked good from every angle and were guaranteed not to be difficult to wear. His favourite colour, a lush Mediterranean summer poppy red, more orange than scarlet, became known among fashion cognoscenti as ‘Valentino red,' and nothing was better qualified to make a grand entrance on the grandest of occasions. He discovered it when, as a student, he took a holiday in Barcelona and went to the opera. ‘All the costumes on the stage were red,' he said later. ‘All the women in the boxes were mostly dressed in red, and they leant forward like geraniums on balconies, and the seats and drapes were red too … I realised that after black and white, there was no finer colour.'

It is a colour that sizzles, that draws every eye in the room. ‘I know [that],' Valentino told Susannah Frankel for
Dazed & Confused
in 2000, ‘women often say, “Ah, if you want an evening gown, go to Valentino.” What is the point of going out if nobody notices you? Stay home! Stay home and invite some friends and you can wear what you like. But if you want to go out and be, for one evening, beautiful, with lots of seduction, sexy and everything, you must do the big number, no?'

Valentino Garavani was born into an affluent family—his father owned electrical supplies stores—in 1932 in Voghera, a small town halfway between Turin and Milan in northern Italy, his country's industrial heartland. As a child he loved drawing and at school displayed an interest in fashion, going on to study at the Santa Marta Institute of Fashion Drawing in Milan while learning French at the Berlitz School. In 1950 his parents subsidised a move to Paris, where he enrolled at the school of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. He won the International Wool Secretariat's design competition, earning a job at the couture house of Jean Dessès. He stayed for five years acquiring Dessès's taste for sweeping drapery and exoticism—clothes inspired by classical Roman and Greek draperies and Egyptian decoration. For Valentino's 1991 retrospective, ten sketches from this period were made up to open the exhibition. They were, wrote Bernadine Morris of the
New York Times
, ‘revealed to be the precursors of themes which he would elaborate on later in his career.'

They showed, she noted:

the basic Valentino shape for day and evening as slender, except for a few bouffant dresses of calf or ankle length, as was the style of the early 1950s, before the mini. The surfaces of the slim, long evening dresses are encrusted with jewel embroidery and the narrow shapes are softened by back-flowing chiffon panels or capes. The day dresses are decorated with velvet bands or with a leopard-printed belt matched to an accompanying stole. They are accessorised with stiletto heels and small, forward-thrusting hats. We can see in this mini-collection the first appearance of Valentino's red, the prominence of graphic black-and-white embroidery suggesting Meissen china and the black-and-white dress in a shape suggesting a Greek vase … Far more important, however, than any of these details is the unmistakeable sense of elegance and authority.

In 1957 Guy Laroche, the chief illustrator at Dessès, left to set up his own couture house, and Valentino went with him. Two years later, with financial backing from his father, Valentino presented his first collection in his own salon in the Via Condotti in Rome. Elizabeth Taylor, in Rome filming
Cleopatra
, ordered a white dress to wear for the world premiere of
Spartacus
—and the beautiful women of the world began to beat a path to his door. In 1960, Giancarlo Giammetti, a student of architecture, joined the young company, becoming Valentino's partner and managing director; he was to run the business side until Valentino stepped down in 2007. In the same year, Valentino launched his ready-to-wear collection. He first showed with Giovanni Batista Giorgini's stars at the Pitti Palace in Florence in 1962. At just thirty, he was allocated the last slot on the calendar, one that meant the buyers would have to stay another night, delaying their flights home. But they had heard rumours and they stayed. They raced backstage afterwards, elbows
out and chequebooks at the ready. International recognition was within his grasp.

In the mid-1960s Valentino abandoned Florence and the Pitti group and, as the closing couturier of the Rome shows, crowned the presentations of the Fontana sisters, Princess Irene Galitzine, Maria Antonelli, Roberto Capucci and Emilio Schuberth. Valentino's evening presentations became glittering social events in their own right, the audience composed of actresses and the wives of politicians, magnates and millionaires, all in evening wear and their best jewels. Perma-tanned and attended by a family of pugs, the couturier had become a member of the class he dressed, entertaining his clients socially in his many homes and on his yacht. His signature style was now established. Consistently elegant, it rarely changed direction suddenly but adhered to classic tenets of good taste while indulging in expensive detail and opulent decoration. These were clothes that looked rich but old-money rich, never vulgar, always glamorous, always grown-up. In 1968 he told
Women's Wear Daily
, ‘I believe only in high fashion. I think a couturier must establish his style and stick to it. The mistake of many couturiers is that they try to change their line every collection. I change a little each time, but never too much, so as not to lose my identity.' His dominant themes—the floral and animal prints, the heavy encrustations of beading, the stark contrast of black and white, the fine pleating—were eagerly looked for in every collection.

In her 2008 monograph on the designer, Pamela Golbin wrote:

As Valentino himself so rightly puts it, he is no innovator in the realm of fashion. Viewed within the broader history of haute couture, he is, however, the recognised champion of a unique silhouette, with a stylistic sensibility uniting supreme grace and timeless allure … Fluid silhouettes, subtle femininity, and refined sensuality are the hallmarks of Valentino's style … This sensibility—distinguished by a lean, graphic contour—is an integral part of his vocabulary, resulting in styles that are the epitome of understated luxury.

In January 1970, Valentino was the first couturier to put his name to the mini's death warrant when he dropped hems to mid-calf. He was making his influence felt commercially, too, opening ready-to-wear stores in New York, Geneva, Lausanne, London and Paris. In 1975 he began to show his ready-to-wear in Paris. Although no French couturier was likely to concede that Italian workmanship could rival that of the
petites mains
, on ready-to-wear Italian manufacturing was already superior to French, a phenomenon that was to lead eventually to Italy's pre-eminent position in high-quality fashion manufacturing. The 1980s was to be Valentino's decade. It was the decade of Reagan and Thatcher; Diana, Princess of Wales; and flaunt-it fashion, dress-for-success, wide-shouldered suits with tight skirts and gold buttons accessorised by aggressive quantities of gold jewellery and stiletto heels. In the late 1970s fashion had begun to turn Valentino's way as a new formality and grandeur made itself felt. He took inspiration for his big-skirted ball gowns from the romantic portraits of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, revelling in a fairy-tale prettiness not seen since Dior. As the 1980s progressed, the clothes acquired a harder edge, a more imposing, vampy feeling. He developed the body-sculpting complex pleating, the oriental-inspired embroideries and art deco appliqué work, his beloved animal prints (a tribute to his beloved animals) and his sophisticated colour combinations.

Italy acknowledged Valentino's contribution to its identity as a fashion force with many honours, including its highest decoration, the Cavaliere de Gran Croce (the equivalent of a British knighthood) in 1986. In 1982 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, then directed by Diana Vreeland, invited him to show his collection there. In June 1991 the city of Rome celebrated his thirtieth anniversary with a fashion show of 300 outfits and a black-tie dinner for 500. Valentino retired in 2007, having already sold his company some years previously. Alessandra Facchinetti took over as head designer until she was abruptly fired after her spring 2009 collection. Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli were named as the new creative directors. The duo had previously designed accessories for the label and, in the reports on the autumn/winter 2009 couture collection, were well received.

Further reading:
Pamela Golbin's (2008)
Valentino: Themes and Variations
is an excellent book and touches on many aspects.

No designer has remained as influential for as long as Karl Lagerfeld, with the exception of Coco Chanel, whose mantle he inherited. Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, long after most of his contemporaries (including his long-time rival Yves Saint Laurent) had retired from the fray, Lagerfeld was still acknowledged as a vibrant, inspirational force and integral to the continuing allure of the house of Chanel.

That said, Lagerfeld the designer remains something of an enigma. His skill in updating other fashion houses' signature styles has tended to overshadow his own personal style. Lagerfeld, a line launched in the 1980s that bore his own name, never drew the plaudits of his work for Chanel, Chloé or Fendi. He is, perhaps, the ultimate, flexible, modern, mercenary designer, able to adapt, transform, modernise and amaze—a chameleon without equal who created the template for so much in contemporary fashion, inspired and prompted by a series of muses and alliances, such as his friendship with the Italian fashion editor Anna Piaggi. He has tended to eschew fashion theorising, making what he describes as ‘just great clothes, no great theories behind it.' But behind the oft flippant and frivolous exterior is a designer who works fanatically hard and treats fashion with deep seriousness. In the twilight of his career, Lagerfeld has retained the capacity to surprise and delight, his designs for Chanel full of the
joie d'esprit
of a much younger man. His capacity for hard work is legendary, although even his most fervent supporters recognised that he had overreached himself in 1993, when he was simultaneously designing for Chanel, Fendi, Chloé and his own Karl Lagerfeld lines. His own signature lines have had a chequered history; the core line, Karl Lagerfeld, folded in 1997, although it was subsequently bought by Tommy Hilfiger Corporation in 2006.

In 2007, Lagerfeld came charging back with a new signature collection, K Karl Lagerfeld, for young men and women. His determination to remain ever-relevant to a new young generation was palpable, reinforced by his dramatic weight loss three years earlier (forty-two kilograms in thirteen months), which made a statement to the world that he was an ageless designer with plenty yet to deliver. Likewise, when he auctioned off his collection of eighteenth-century art and furniture at Christies in 2000, he made it clear that he was resolutely looking to the future. Even a questionable decision to produce a signature capsule collection for mass-market fashion retailer Hennes & Mauritz in 2004 was a defiant statement of youthfulness. Despite his deep understanding of history, Karl Lagerfeld has shown little respect for it. His mantra is ‘modern', a word repeated in countless interviews over six decades. Since his appointment as head of design at Chanel in 1982, he has simultaneously trashed and cherished the Chanel heritage. The appointment initially shocked the Paris fashion milieu—Lagerfeld was considered a
styliste
rather than a couturier, and he was a German outsider. But his skills, usually (although not always) applied with a lightness of touch and wit, have made him synonymous with the modern house of Chanel. ‘Only the minute and the future are interesting in fashion—it exists to be destroyed,' he has said. ‘If everybody did everything with respect, you'd go nowhere.' The
Wertheimer family, who control the label, have made it clear that he has a job for life.