Happy Birthday, Mr. Valentino! Hamish Bowles Pays Tribute to the Magisterial Designer

Today, Valentino celebrates 88 years, most of them spent making people and places look and feel exceptionally beautiful.

He was only a teenager when he landed his first job in fashion in 1952, as an assistant to Jean Dessès. That Athenian-born couturier was famed for dressing both the crowned heads of Europe and a bevy of elegant actors in his signature evening gowns, which often incorporated very fine needle-pleated draperies. Today, only the Valentino haute couture ateliers in Rome hold the secret of this art. As an apprentice at Dessès, Valentino sketched a series of flamboyant “Dream Dresses” for his own amusement, which were never realized at the time. In 1991, however, for an exhibition celebrating the 30 years of his eponymous fashion house, the ateliers finally made them—as a secret surprise to their creator—and they became the glorious finale pieces in the retrospective.

I remember them well: a sheath dress embroidered with Meissen china motifs with panels of yellow, mauve, and gray chiffon draped around the bodice, for instance, and another of chocolate velvet licked with turquoise coral branches and shrouded in a turquoise satin opera coat cuffed in sable. There was a dress with yards and yards of knife-pleated cornflower blue chiffon that looked as though he had dreamt it up for Elizabeth Taylor. It was clear that even at that age, Valentino was determined that no one was ever going to pass unnoticed in one of his creations.

At the time of the exhibition, I was the fashion editor at Harper’s & Queen magazine in London, and I used to travel to Rome for the haute couture shows when Valentino still showed them there (in a ballroom of honeyed elegance), and to Paris for his ready-to-wear, where the collections always opened to the strains of Michel Polnareff’s loungey 1968 “Soul Coaxing,” and the designer made his curtain call—tapping his fingers against the palms of his hands as though they were castanets—to the strains of “New York, New York.” In between, there was always a lot of glamorous excitement as his cabine of superbly glamorous and supercilious models, including Dalma and Anna Bayle, slinked down the runway looking like idealized versions of the women who would actually buy the clothes. “What is very important is to know what the market asks for,” Valentino confided. “Clothes have to be worn. I am very lucky—I have a special understanding of these women.”

Valentino knew the lifestyle that his clothes were intended for because he lived it himself: As soon as he was able to, he lived as well as any of his clients, and today lives as beautifully as anyone, anywhere, possibly could.

I had already been to Rome a couple of years earlier to photograph the designer surrounded by a bevy of Roman princesses in his most romantic crinoline dresses—a picture out of Visconti’s The Leopard that we could only pull off because the ladies were artfully corralled by Carlos Souza, the alarmingly handsome, Brazilian-born master of ceremonies who has alternately smooth-talked and cajoled the press, models, celebrities, and private clients for Valentino through the years and across the globe with unmatched skill.

In 1991, however, I was not only orchestrating the photographs (under the all-seeing eye of Carlos, of course), but writing the story and attending the festivities. I arrived in some trepidation to discover the designer whom I had so long admired in his studio in the Palazzo Mignanelli—a building so imposing that it then had a discreet entrance for haute couture clients just next to the top of the Spanish Steps, although its main entrance was in the square at the bottom, six stories below. The fitting room was crowded with immaculate Valentino tailleurs on gleaming dress racks amidst a thrilling backdrop of bolts of fantastical fabrics and trays spilling with embroidery samples, buttons, and trim. Valentino was fitting his “Night” collection, one of a giddy-making round of 22 collections that he then designed every year. He had woken up at 5:30 that morning, as he confided, to make notes to self to convey to the team. He looked exactly like a couturier in a movie: immaculately groomed and dressed in perfectly cut, sludge-colored British tweeds that set off his lustrous tan. He flitted between Italian, French, or English, depending on who he was talking to amongst his cosmopolitan staff—and he didn’t miss a trick. “Is this woman a marsupial?” he asked, disdainfully tweaking a sagging panel on a bodice as the sheepish fitter frantically adjusted her mistake.

After the fitting, I was invited into Valentino’s inner sanctum, his private office. It was a Proustian hothouse of leopard and forest green carpet, deep button-backed Second Empire upholstery, banks of almond-green orchids, red and bone taffeta gingham check, malachite, raspberry fool Aubusson, gesso, exquisite 18th-century porcelain, and the heady scent of gardenias. Valentino sat beneath a school of Bronzino’s Portrait of Eleanor of Toledo and opposite a Belle Époque portrait of a mysterious elegante luxuriously dressed in black robes and a hat sprouting a surprised white feather. On the console tables beneath the portraits were inscribed photographs of the 20th-century beauties whom Valentino himself had dressed—legendary best-dressed icons whose first names were then all that sufficed: Diana, Margaret, Elizabeth, Noor, Jackie, Nancy—and whom he proceeded to discuss in reverent and rapturous terms. The atmosphere was Viscontian, and in dramatic contrast to Giancarlo Giammetti’s vast office next door, where the original owners of the palazzo had once received the Pope (who was a member of their family) when he came to call (and, frankly, still seemed more than adequate to that purpose). With its collection of 1930s Scuola Romana paintings and imperially scaled Empire furniture, it had an undeniable chic that can only be described as dictatorial. The palazzo had recently been renovated by two young English architects—Peter Moore and Peter Kent of David Davies—and the stairs were in gleaming pale marble with serpentine polished-steel banisters, while the modern pictures by Francesco Clemente and others that were hanging there on parchment walls left one in no doubt that although Valentino and Giancarlo relished the past, they were hip to the present and the future too.

(Valentino and Giancarlo were thinking beyond the brand as well. They had recently established an AIDS foundation that they named L.I.F.E.—for Lottare Informe Formare Educare: to fight, inform, train, and educate.)

I photographed some of the archive pieces from Valentino’s retrospective for my story in his pretty apricot-colored house on the storied Appian Way. He had conceived the interiors with the legendary Lorenzo Mongiardino, and they were a riot of chinoiserie and Orientalism, of tiger silk velvet, silk taffeta checks, and giant rose-patterned chintz. There was such a profusion of precious objects on every surface that the impeccable Brazilian butler and footmen moved sideways to avoid unhappy encounters with them. (At the time, Valentino also had atmospheric homes in Gstaad, London, Manhattan, and Capri, as well as a 140-foot yacht, TM Blue One.)

To celebrate the exhibition there were cocktails at the Capitoline, its staircase lit with flaming torches, and a tour of the exhibition installed at the Accademia, a former sculpture school owned by the Vatican. Trent Anni di Magia, it was called—“Thirty Years of Magic”—and it had been operatically designed by Jean-Paul Scarpitta with a battalion of Valentino’s red dresses, for instance, shown to a soundtrack from Carmen and jungle noises amongst the animalier prints.

The gala was at the Villa Medici, and the American glamazons of the day were out in force, racing to avoid the light fall of rain as they stepped from their limousines: Susan Gutfreund wore Valentino’s black-and-white crinoline; Lynn Wyatt wore his oyster, black, pink, and beige crinoline (both of these dresses are now in my collection, @hamishbowlescollection). Ivana wore a skintight dress of black satin that looked as though she’d been filleted down the front, and had spilled forth a king’s ransom of pearls (Givenchy designed it—sharp intake of breath). That night, at the buffet banquet in the midnight blue marquee, Valentino cut a cake with a marzipan maquette of the Palazzo Mignanelli on top; Claudia Schiffer danced with Prince Kyril of Bulgaria; Dalma danced with Mikhail Baryshnikov; and Linda Evangelista swished about in a stiff, hot pink shantung to set off her new hair that she had just colored flaming Lypsinka red. Soon the fireworks of silver and gold lit the beauty that is Rome spread at our feet. And Valentino? He danced the night away with Elizabeth Taylor, whom he appeared to have dressed in white chiffon and moonlight and, caught in her violet gaze, he was beaming like the cat with the double cream as he lived out the dream that he had first dreamt as a boy.

Thank you for the memories, Valentino. They are all magical. And a very happy birthday.

Originally Appeared on Vogue