Legendary Italian Fashion Designer Was 93

Legendary Italian Fashion Designer Valentino has died at the age of 93, his foundation announced on Monday.

The foundation said the designer, whose full name was Valentino Garavani, died in his home in Rome on January 19.

Across his career, Valentino dressed a host of stars including Sharon Stone, Nicole Kidman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Barbra Streisand, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, and Monica Vitti.

His other famous clients included Jackie Kennedy for whom he designed the wedding dress for her second marriage to Aristotle Onassis in 1968.

The designer was born in the Northern town of Voghera in 1932 to a well-off bourgeois family. His mother named him after the 1920s Italian-born Hollywood film star Rudolph Valentino, and from a young age he obsessed with Hollywood glamor.

He enrolled at the L’Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne fashion school in Paris at the age of 17, and then secured apprenticeships in the workshop of fashion houses Balenciaga, Jean Dessès and Guy Laroche.

After a close to a decade living and working in Paris he returned to Rome and with the support of his parents set up his own fashion house close to Piazza di Spagna in 1960.

That same year, he met Giancarlo Giammetti who would become his lifelong partner and the business brains behind the Maison Valentino fashion house.

Valentino began to gain international fame in the early 1960s following a commission from Kennedy for six haute couture dresses in black and white, which she wore during her year of mourning following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

She became a life-long client with the wedding dress he would later design for her wedding to Onassis hailed as groundbreaking for the shortness of its length.

The fashion house would become synonymous with glamour and a jet-set life-style which Valentino embodied himself, splitting his time between statement luxury homes in Rome, New York, London, and Gstaad as well as France where he owned the Château de Wideville outside Paris.

His star-studded parties at the A-list festivals such as Cannes and Venice were also legendary.