In 1966, Jacqueline Kennedy proclaimed, “Valentino, live 100 years!” We’d want to echo that feeling these days, as the designer celebrates his 90th birthday — in style, of course.
Valentino Garavani has the uncommon distinction of having his own Pantone color, Valentino Red, and instead of toasting him, we’ve gathered a collection of beautiful ensembles in his honor.
“When you see a woman in a beautiful red evening dress, it’s really something special,” Valentino has said, and he’s proved the point over and over since showing his first red dress, called Fiesta in 1959.
Valentino has superstitions that became status symbols. He did red once, and now you have red in every collection. Most of our statements came to be because we are romantic; we don’t like to throw away things we like or that bring good luck. Here’s wishing continued good fortune to the designer, whose red dresses serve as a reminder that Roma spelled backwards is Amor
Before there was Valentino “PP” pink — the Pantone-official shade that made up most Pierpaolo Piccioli’s A/W 2022 collection and has been a red-carpet fixture ever since — there was Valentino red, the favored hue of house founder Valentino Garavani.
“Red is a color that is not shy,” said Garavani, who has been dubbed “the last emperor of fashion” since his retirement from the house in 2008.
Immortalized best in Deborah Turbeville’s seminal photographs of Valentino’s 1977 couture collection — whereby a mille-feuille crimson gown emerges amid a sea of women in black — the color came to symbolize Garavani’s bold approach, sensual and theatrical at once (the designer said the lifelong obsession came from watching a production of Carmen in Barcelona as a child, which had an all-red set).
It is fitting that a new exhibition to mark Garavani’s 90th birthday takes place at Teatro Sociale di Voghera, a dramatic 1842-built theater found in Italy’s northern Pavia region (until 5 June 2022).
Taking over the theater’s circular auditorium — which was renovated in 2018 after nearly three decades of disrepair — visitors will discover works from the designer’s 50 years at the helm lining the various balconies, spanning the 1960s to the 2000s.
On the stage itself is a collection of dresses in Valentino red from across the archive, “an anthology of styles that have each been able to embody the spirit of their time”. It is a metaphor in which Valentino’s women are both actresses and spectators, without differences, all belonging to a global vision that represents a total idea of beauty and femininity in which each subject is on the same level.
Alongside the archival clothing, various pieces of ephemera are also on display, from studies, sketches and drawings, to newspaper clippings and photographs that depict the time in which the clothes made their debut.
