Rome bid farewell to Valentino Garavani last month, when hundreds of mourners gathered for his funeral at the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, the vast Renaissance church built within the ancient Baths of Diocletian and adapted in the 16th century by Michelangelo. Long associated with major civic and religious ceremonies, the basilica offered a setting that reflected the stature Valentino held in Italy, not only as a couturier but as a cultural figure whose name became synonymous with elegance and beauty.

Garavani died at home in Rome at the age of 93 on January 19. In the days following his death, the city marked his passing with a two-day public viewing at PM23, the headquarters of the foundation Garavani founded with his business partner Giancarlo Giammetti. The location is minutes away from the historic Spanish Steps, and the Via Condotti address where the designer first established his couture house in 1959.

If there was a single idea that shaped both the clothes and the man, it was beauty. From the symbolic power of Valentino red to the precision of his couture ateliers, his work offered elegance that was designed to endure. “I love beauty – it’s not my fault,” he once said. For Valentino, that pursuit was not trend-driven, but a lifelong commitment that shaped both what he designed and the glamorous lifestyle he lived after retiring in 2008.

The coffin was carried down the central aisle, flanked by friends and family and business partners. Along with Garavani’s extended family and longtime collaborators, among those in attendance were fashion media figures including Anna Wintour, Hamish Bowles and Suzy Menkes; designers including Donatella Versace, Brunello Cucinelli and Tom Ford; industry executives Antoine Arnault and François-Henri Pinault; and actress and Valentino muse Anne Hathaway.

In March, Valentino is set to return to Rome for the Fall 2026 ready-to-wear show, a rare homecoming that underscores the city’s enduring place in the brand’s identity. And as the house continues to interpret his legacy on the runway, the ceremony in Rome marked a farewell for those who knew and worked with him.

Valentino was a specialist in a high level of luxury without undue grandeur, dressing the world’s most photographed women from the Dolce Vita period of Italian cinema in the 1960s to J-Lo at the Oscars in the 2000s. He was proud to be the first Italian couturier fully accepted by Paris as one of their own by training and aspiration, he kept a direct connection with a more personal Italian tradition of skilled dressmakers: the needs of the wearer always came first.

Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani was born in Voghera, Lombardy on 11 May, 1932. From his babyhood onwards, his parents, Mauro and Teresa (she named him after the silent film sensation Rudolph Valentino) indulged the boy’s tastes, and later his aunt Rosa and another local dressmaker allowed him into their workrooms. From 1949, his parents funded his education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and supported him through five years of apprenticeship in the house of the couturier Jean Dessès; then he did two more years with Guy Laroche.

Valentino’s father and a fellow businessman backed his first couture studio, on the Via Condotti in Rome in 1959, and Valentino, determined to equal Parisian couture, spent without limit on fabrics, furs and French mannequins. It might have ended in bankruptcy, but in a café, one hot night in July 1960, he met the 19-year-old architecture student Giancarlo Giammetti. Giammetti, who had a natural aptitude for business, gave up his studies, and joined Valentino to refound the company in a small apartment on the Via Gregoriana. Gradually, they took over the rest of the palazzo.

Their business was in the right place at the right time. Italian craftwork was relatively cheap, compared with France. Valentino made a dress for Elizabeth Taylor, and in 1962 Giammetti persuaded Valentino to show at the Italian collections in the Pitti Palace in Florence, which attracted American department store buyers unwilling to pay ever higher Paris premiums for the rights to reproduce catwalk designs. Valentino began to sell directly in New York in 1964, his most valued customer the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy; he later made her delicate lace dress for her wedding to Aristotle Onassis. As John Fairchild of Women’s Wear Daily said: “Valentino just wanted to dress every important, beautiful women.”

Jackie O was his perfect customer, moneyed yet devoid of vulgarity, as were most of his private clients. Through the 60s and into the 70s, he was court dressmaker to the beautiful people, including the empress of Iran, Farah Pahlavi, and the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland; he dressed them all with featherweight majesty. As Paris couture turned theatrical from the mid-70s, Valentino remained the safest salon for wealthy women, and Giammetti ensured that he and Valentino could live at a similar level to their clients through up to 42 lucrative licensing deals.

The history of the fashion house is best traced garment by garment, who wore it and when. His dressmaker’s good manners in physically flattering his clients brought movie-star and later pop-star custom, including Taylor, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, and Cate Blanchett, who had not a measurement or a gesture in common – “you need to know the body,” Valentino warned, “you need to know the mood of the lady, and you need a very good seamstress”.

The couture ateliers lost a few million annually out of a billion-dollar turnover, but were an investment in prestige, research and development. In Valentino: The Last Emperor, a 2008 documentary film, the links between Valentino, his clients and the workhands who clad them are visibly close: many customers and seamstresses were with him all their adult lives, and his few key upper-level personnel stayed for decades too. The film was an unexpected pop phenomenon, and made Valentino’s retirement feel even more like the end of an era.

Giammetti had persuaded Valentino to go directly into high-end ready-to-wear, menswear and accessories, and in the 90s terminated all licences except for perfume, jeans and sunglasses. In 1998, when couture houses were being transformed into brand trophies, he and Valentino were paid $300m for the company by the Italian conglomerate HdP.

It was sold on in 2002 to the textile firm Marzotto Apparel: a private equity group bought it in 2007, and sold it to a Qatari consortium in 2012. Valentino showed his final collection in 2008, but in retirement still designed for a few favoured clients, and the ballet

Of all his Italian, American, British and French awards, he was most pleased at becoming a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2006, and with his 2008 Médaille de la Ville de Paris. He remembered when the French did not believe that there could ever be serious Italian couture.