Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani died in Rome, the birthplace of his eponymous brand, on Jan. 19 at age 93.
Garavani was born in Voghera, a town south of Milan in northern Italy. He moved to Paris as a young man, where he continued his fashion studies and worked for French designers Jean Dessès and Guy Laroche.
Garavani moved back to Italy and launched his own brand in Rome in 1959, when he was just 26 years old; he soon became known for his elegant, romantic gowns worn by style icons like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Sophia Loren, and Princess Diana, and Hollywood stars like Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, and Gwyneth Paltrow. Garavani’s last fashion show was in 2007, and he retired in 2008. (The documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor chronicles the two years leading up to his final show.)
In 1960, soon after he returned to Rome, Garavani met Giancarlo Giammetti, who would become his romantic partner for a time and, perhaps most importantly, his long-time friend and business partner. Both men collected blue chip art over the decades, some of which has featured in high-profile sales.
Garavani sold his Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile), 1983, for just over $67 million at Christie’s in 2023. It had been in his private collection for 18 years, and had an estimate of $45 million. Two years earlier, in 2021, Giammetti sold his own Basquiat, In this Case (1983), for $93 million, almost twice its estimate.
According to a 2010 Vanity Fair article about the renovation of Garavani’s New York apartment, he also owned and prominently displayed artworks by Richard Prince, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, and Fernand Léger. Garavani was also reported to be selling art in the New York auctions this past November, including pieces by Warhol, Marilyn Minter, and Neo Rauch.
When his first collection debuted in his new salon on Via Condotti in Rome, Garavani couldn’t have known that more than six decades later, he would open an exhibition space a few blocks away. PM23, housed in a renovated 19th-century palazzo and named after its address at 23 Piazza Mignanelli, opened last spring and is run by the Fondazione Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti.
The cultural hub, as it is known, organizes exhibitions about fashion and contemporary art. The institution’s second show, “Venus,” will feature a dozen artworks by the Portuguese sculptor Joana Vasconcelos along with 33 Valentino designs selected from his archive. The show opened on Jan. 18, two days before Garavani’s death, and will be on view until the end of May.
