Valentino is celebrating 45 years of dressing the world s most beautiful women. Although he can t say he s thrilled at being 75, Valentino doesn t seem overly burdened by morbid introspection. True there are the ghosts Jackie O, whom he dressed continuously for 30 years after she visited him in the months following the assassination of JFK; Audrey Hepburn, who came to him whenever she wasn t at Givenchy; the artist Jean Michel Basquiat, who used to loiter outside Valentino s fashion house in Rome in the 1980s because he was having a flirt with one of the English girls who worked for me .
There are also next weekend s celebrations of his 45th year in fashion three days of lavish parties and dinners set (thanks to Rome s Mayor and Italy s Arts Culture Minister) in some of Rome s most historic sites. A thousand guests are expected, many of them famous and/or rich, many wearing much-loved outfits from their own Valentino archives for Val (as his ladies call him) is nothing if not a purveyor of enduring loveliness. On Saturday the extravaganza will culminate in Valentino showing his couture collection in Rome for the first time in 17 years.
Flattering though the attentions of the world s press will no doubt be, these are just the proceedings to encourage the kind of retrospective navel-gazing that frequently ends in tears. But on the day we meet at his white-stuccoed mansion in Holland Park, West London, (the one with the three Picassos, three Basquiats, two Warhols, one Damien Hirst and the Cy Twombly and those are just the paintings I glimpse downstairs) Valentino is feeling nostalgic only for the previous evening s concert with Prince, which he attended with a few well-dressed friends and which was so invigorating that the designer found himself actually moving. Not dancing, no, I couldn t claim that, but definitely moving.
And, you know, I looked around the room and the ladies were really beautifully dressed. Those vast hooded lids hover over his blue eyes momentarily in valediction: I have to tell you now, England has some really well-dressed girls. This must be profoundly reassuring for the man who has spent his life beautifying women.
What he observes with disapproval, however, is some English girls putting together dresses from pieces that come from Portobello and who knows where else. Young girls, they think it s fashionable, but if those dresses are worn by a lady of 50 or so, then, sorry, she looks like a grandmother. His dresses have always made a woman look like a class act.
Jacqueline de Ribes, the socialite, was such a fan that she would climb the six flights of stairs to the chambre de bonne (a maid s room) where he lived when he first arrived inParis, aged 18, from Italy. The visits were for purely sartorial reasons, you understand, and it was an exceptionally pleasing chambre de bonne, decorated by Valentino with Directoire furniture. His ideal woman is dressed, he says (closing his eyes completely this time and caressing the air with his hands to make a narrow torso), with high, small breasts, a bare back maybe, something a bit veily at the front and never too much cleavage .
It s the timeless classiness that Jackie Kennedy instinctively grasped when she saw a friend wearing a Valentino dress in 1965 ( she was in mourning, but she was so happy with my white collection that she ordered six outfits, and that put me on the map ). It is what Elizabeth Taylor sometimes railed against in their long, fruitful but somewhat combustible relationship. She said to me once, Valentino, why do you keep trying to make me look like a lady when it s such a lost cause?
And it s what Jennifer Lopez intuited almost four decades later when she asked him to dress her, her then fianc and the bridesmaids for her second marriage. She rang me I was on the boat and she said, Listen, Valentino, I would love to look like a princess. Will you dress me?
Of course he would. He has also dressed Julia Roberts (the night she won an Oscar), Cate Blanchett (the night she won hers); Jessica Lange (she won, too); Mercedes Ruehl (ditto), as well as adding elegance to Reese Witherspoon, Salma Hayek, Elle Macpherson and Julianne Moore. He has phenomenal staying power: his creations are classic without being fusty, exquisitely made (some of his couture fabrics cost 1,000 a metre; he has had some of the same seamstresses for 30 years), and always fashionable without being fashion statements.
But more than the clothes, one senses that Val himself, with his surprisingly sardonic sense of humour and deadpan delivery, is part of the draw. Many of his clients such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Elizabeth Hurley have become friends, and as friends, they inevitably receive an education in grand opulence, old style. He is very hospitable, but then there is plenty to be hospitable with.
In addition to the London mansion, there is the New York apartment, the 16th-century ch teau outside Paris, the Roman palazzo, the chalet in Gstaad and the 132ft yacht, all of them fully staffed with butlers, maids, major-domos, chefs and bodyguards. And the hospitality food, linen, flowers and wine is of an otherwordly quality. I do like to entertain, he says with laudable understatement, as he shows me the room in his London house lined with blue and white Meissen porcelain, but sometimes I drive the people around me crazy.
The sheets on his bed must be ironed every other day. Even the TV suppers, taken at six o clock (with his five pugs), are eaten from gleaming silver. Valentino is celebrating 45 years of dressing the world s most beautiful women.
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