The legacy of Valentino

Whenever luxury fashion label Valentino comes to mind, none of his most iconic works over a 48-year legacy appear in my mind’s eye. It’s not the terribly chic white mini dress that the widowed Jackie Kennedy wore to her 1968 wedding to Aristotle Onassis. Nor the pale yellow silk taffeta gown that Cate Blanchett — the very picture of elegance — wore to accept her Oscar in 2005. Perhaps the closest approximation to the single image that Valentino evokes would be the Valentino Petale Dome bag, the most obvious incarnation of the designers simplest of passions: a single blood red rose.

Red has always been Valentino’s color. It happened in Barcelona in 1949: a teenage Valentino Garavani chanced upon an opera patron wearing a red velvet dress — “She was unique, isolated, fiery — the perfect heroine. I told myself that if I were ever going to become a designer, I would do lots of red,” he once said. In the coming years, he would introduce his signature hue, “Valentino red,” to American women, send 40 red dresses down Rome’s Piazza di Spagna to celebrate the brand’s 40th anniversary in 2000.

It has been four years since Valentino said “Finito is finito” to the fashion world. Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli have since been appointed to inherit the empire of Valentino as the brand’s creative directors, having worked with the emperor himself for more than a decade. While Valentino’s clothes were the ultimate embodiment of femininity, sensuality, and undisputed beauty — having never embraced the avante garde — Chiuri and Piccioli have taken liberties with the brand’s heritage to create an unusual version of femininity and a concept of extreme elegance — a fragile and dangerous nature interweaved with a cult of uniqueness and distinction. In other words, a new Valentino woman for today’s world that has so vastly differed from the one Garavani had grown accustomed to. As Giancarlo Giammetti, Valentino’s life-long partner, both personally and professionally, has pointed out about today’s approach to couture, “Why would a young woman want to sit eight hours a day with an eye loupe sewing and embroidering a pattern?”

For their collections of Valentino, Chiuri and Piccioli have established a new harmonious balance between a woman’s personality, body, and clothes. The sleek, evanescent silhouette, which is knee-length or down to the ankle, seems to disappear through transparencies. Precise lines are transformed by the choice of impalpable materials: what seems thick and intense to the touch and eye is materially and metaphorically weightless. Even ruffles, which are central to the spirit of the maison, have a geometric regularity. Strapless dresses, constructed over invisible internal corsets, move away from the body with innocent shyness, accentuating the shoulders without unveiling the décolleté. Light passing through the fabric becomes a defining element: long lace skirts are worn with embroidered blouses that appear transparent seen from the side.

The Valentino Images of Maria Grazia and Pier Paolo make a real statement: the sophisticated and modern Valentino woman. Shot against the desert of Guanajato region in Mexico, the creative pair said “This purely inspirational collection is linked to Mexico as state of mind, not the typical destination, a land of ‘inner’ travels of women such as Tina Modotti and Giorgia O’Keeffe.”

Tina Modotti and Giorgia O’Keeffee, such wild and free spirits, as the muses for Valentino are also a departure from the glamorous women who inspired the man in the first place: Vivien Leigh, Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner, Katharine Hepburn, and of course, Jacqueline Kennedy — “Jackie, walking in Central Park with little pants, big scarf, and a raincoat? All by Valentino! It was sensational,’’ Valentino once exclaimed. But their differences in personality, dress, and beauty would never have mattered to him in the first place. When it comes to women, his approach is simple: It has always been about making women beautiful. And when you wear a Valentino as if it is the first thing you pull out of your closet, his legacy of beauty endures.

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Valentino is available only at Adora, 2/F and 3/F Greenbelt 5, Ayala Center, Makati City.