Word: valentino
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...This attentive, affectionate portrait, which traces the final year of the designer's career, shows that it's good to be the king. Valentino is the creative wellspring, the man whose intricate demands have to be satisfied. And he is not easily satisfied. One of the last designers whose couture was handmade - his assistants, one of his backers noted, never touched a sewing machine - he relies on his invisible artists, the seamstresses of northern Italy, for the anachronistic grace of his frocks. He designs the dresses; they make them. Antonietta de Angelis, the head seamstress of the house, has some...
...emperor might never have succeeded if not for his prime minister: Giancarlo Giammetti, who from the beginning ran the business, ran interference, made the deals and, for much of their 45 years, was Valentino's lover. They met in a cafe on the Via Veneto in 1960, the year Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita made that street famous, and established Rome as the Mecca and Gomorrah of European society. (Nino Rota's music from La Dolce Vita and other Fellini films ornaments the sound track.) Valentino had just come from Paris to open a salon; Giammetti was still...
...Happiness is accommodating a man whose certainty can sound like petulance. ("People have to be on their knees in front of me," the master says.) It's no small challenge, Giammetti tells Tyrnauer, "to be with Valentino as a friend, as a lover, as an employee." He must deliver the emperor's whims to others: "Valentino says, 'If the bathrooms are set up like that, I'm not coming.'" At times the boss is ready to wave the whole business away with his expressive hands. "I don't care about the collection," he fumes. "My dogs are much more important...
...emotional vectors of their relationship are both constant and complex. When Giammetti pursues one line of argument, Valentino huffs, "Once you get an idea in your head..." "And you're not stubborn?" asks Giammetti. "No," Valentino insists. A pause. "Almost never." Yet everyone in the couture world knows that each is an incomplete half of one fabulous organism. Even Giammetti is impressed: "I've never seen two people so close for so many years, not being married." For the designer of couture inspired by American movies, it's only fitting that he and Giammetti should live out an old-fashioned...
...Every love story needs a threat, and here it's money and the people who wield it. Valentino's lifestyle is beyond lavish; with the villas and chateaux, the extravagant parties, he's been more of a jet-setter than the people who buy his clothes. Somebody had to subsidize all that luxe, and in 1998 he and Giammetti sold their company to the HDP conglomerate, which four years later turned it over to a textile group run by Matteo Marzotto. Giammetti treats the young plutocrat as a nuisance at best: "Matteo is a very nice guy. I like...