How do you make a woman look beautiful? Simple, Valentino Garavani would tell you: Dress her in red, add ruffles and a bowtie.
“I always look for beauty, beauty,” the last of the fashion emperors who outlived contemporaries such as Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld said long before his passing on the 20th of January, 2026, at the age of 93.
“It is very, very simple. I try to make my girls look sensational,” he added.
Valentino founded his namesake company in 1959 — choosing his first name over his last. In the next half-century, he would dress some of the world’s most glamorous and beautiful women — becoming a royalty in his own right, with callings such as “The Last Emperor” (incidentally the title of a 2008 fashion documentary on him) and “the Sheik of chic”.
He built his empire with fellow designer Giancarlo Giammetti, their Valentino label becoming the first to list on the Milan stock exchange — building a fortune in licensing and paving the way for other Italian iconic brands like Armani and Versace.
“In Italy, there is the Pope — and there is Valentino,” Walter Veltroni, a former mayor of Rome, told The New Yorker magazine in 2005.
Valentino didn’t care about setting trends or, for that matter, being on the cutting edge of fashion.
What mattered to him was the outcome: It had to be a stunning product; transforming the wearer into one too.
From the 1960s to the 90s and 2000 and beyond, he was couturier for Jacqueline Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Julia Roberts and Cate Blanchett — some of the most powerful names in femininity and celebrity.
Electrician’s Son to Power Couturier
Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani was born on May 11, 1932, in Voghera, a small town south of Milan. His father, Mauro Garavani. owned an electrical supply company.
Valentino moved to Paris at age 17 to study fashion. He eventually returned to Rome to open his own celebrated studio.
Throughout his career, he knew what he wanted to create. “Very beautiful cocktail dresses,” he would say. “Very glamorous evening gowns. Very small red dresses. Glamorous. Glamorous. Glamorous.”
His signature included ruffles and bows, placed strategically to ensure maximum aesthetics on the Valentino red gown, his hallmark.
“Red will be my lucky color,” he said, adding that when placed next to his logo, it created “an iconic element of the brand, a value”.
At its height, Valentino had approximately 42 fashion licenses worldwide. In 1984, the Italian Olympic team wore the brand to the Los Angeles Games and, the next year, President Sandro Pertini made Valentino a Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.
While he officially launched in 1959, Valentino had always regarded 1962 as the year of his label’s founding due to the international breakthroughs he had then. In 2007, after a 45th anniversary gala, he called it a day.
“I had done enough,” he said, when asked about it later. “l didn’t want to be part of a system that is not so much about designing but about managing the companies, about money, about conglomerates. Why did I need to go through that? I had everything in my life.”
* Compiled by Barani Krishnan, Americas Editor & Founder at Neverforget, from tributes by the New York Times and others
