Valentino’s most famous phrase “I love Beauty, it’s not my fault” stood out at the entrance to the ‘Orizzonti Rosso’ exhibition, set up at number 23 of Piazza Mignanelli, headquarters of the maison, in Rome. Printed in large letters on a large mirror, the quote dominated the entrance to the space as a sort of warning to the visitor, only then perhaps a little more aware of being about to enter a little piece of the world that had nothing to do with the world out there.

“I love beauty, it’s not my fault” I read it in silence one morning last July, sighing at the idea that my image was reflected in the thoughts of a capable man. Capable in a multifaceted way – in words as in deeds – to make people understand an aesthetic sense sublimated in form and to expose it so clearly, as a sort of indispensable vocation. It was an area suspended between reality, imagination and the desire to be understood in its exceptionality, that place which today is collected in a memory, relived while Valentino’s name is expressed in countless homages and advances the consideration of how this predisposition to beauty has marked his life and also, with due proportions, that of others. Of those who were able to afford to buy and wear his clothes and also of those who only stopped in front of a shop window to imagine them on.

Valentino and the eternal “obsession” with beauty

For Valentino, beauty was the end and means of his actions, to be sought and found in everything. “His is a visual obsession” Tom Ford said of him to describe the level of perfection demanded by everything around him, be it houses, boats, people. Interviewed by Fabio Fazio on Che Tempo Che Fa in 2008 on the occasion of the release of the documentary film on his last years of activity, ‘Valentino: The Last Emperor’, the designer spoke of his innate “obsession with visual things”, indulged since he was a boy and then mitigated over the years. “For me, everything that was visually beautiful attracted me. Unfortunately, only beautiful things. And sometimes it’s not right to be attracted only by beauty,” he observed. And reflecting on the excess of at times excessive research: “I have now learned not to go only where there are beautiful things, beautiful houses or beautiful people. Because I find that beauty is a very internal thing, too.”

“A very internal thing, too.” “Also”, because the assumption was that the appearance was first and foremost impeccable and that the substance was manifested through, with embroidery, cuts, stitching, bows, ruffles. Meticulous details on which to shape a model of beauty that best conveyed her very personal idea of ​​femininity, conceived from an imaginative perspective where the male eye also played a large part. “I dress them, and I find that my women are very feminine and successful because men like them”, he explained to Gianni Minoli in 1981: “Trousers are a woman’s enemy because I love a very feminine woman. I find that a woman who is used to often wearing trousers has too masculine attitudes”. A vision perhaps a little detached from a reality that even back then wanted women to be in a hurry just like men and always splendid, whether wearing a dress with a long train or with a tuxedo stolen from their partner’s closet. But in any case a vision to be contextualized in those years, an era of princesses and queens still thought of as unattainable models by an audience that today has very different aspirations.

The (fake) rivalry with Giorgio Armani

A way of conceiving female beauty and elegance, that of Valentino, diametrically opposed to the thoughts of Giorgio Armani. A lover of his “bright red that enhances the woman and makes her happy to be noticed by everyone”; the other creator of “greige” because “elegance is not about being noticed, but about being remembered”; one with the conception of a fashion that was “high”, evening, formal and absolute; the other lover of the essentiality of lines, of practical clothes that accompany women from the early hours of the morning, the two designers have always proposed two diametrically different ways of interpreting women’s style. “Valentino has his own attitude towards fashion,” Armani told Mixer in 1982: “He has chosen a path and continues along that path, probably thinking that women are ethereal beings and do not live today’s life. Valentino’s are particular women.”

There was often talk of rivalry between them, always promptly denied by both as soon as the opportunity arose. The last one four months ago, at the news of Armani’s death: “I mourn someone who I have always considered a friend, never a rival”, Valentino wrote: “I can only bow to his immense talent, to the changes he brought to fashion and above all to his incredible loyalty to a style: his own”. An affection that returns today in the words of the Armani family who remember Valentino as “the undisputed master of grace and elegance, for whom Giorgio Armani has always had great respect, who embodied the excellence of couture, the rigor of craftsmanship and a unique vision of fashion made of pure lines, iconic colors and absolute beauty”. One king, the other emperor. In manners, even before in fashion.

Valentino ended his career 18 years ago with a phrase remembered today by Mariella Milani: “I would like to leave the party when there are still people”. People left to remember him as the lord of a scene on which, yes, the curtain is now falling.

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