Valentino Garavani passed away last Monday, in the hushed silence of his Roman residence, at an age when life already resembles a legend. Chic. “A short word, a vast kingdom.” This phrase, spoken during the filming of The Last Emperor, became the chronicle of his final fashion show in 2008 and illuminates the man in his entirety.

When he founded his house in 1959, the world was not yet ready to receive his name as an emblem. But the decades, patient gardeners of fame, did their work. By the late 1970s, and then with greater brilliance throughout the 1980s, Valentino became one of the fixed stars around which the Italian renaissance revolved. Alongside Armani, Versace, Ferré, and Missoni, he gave Italy a new voice, firm and sensual, capable of rivaling the ancient capitals of taste.

Some sought to reduce his art to a few visible signs, the evening gown as a whispered confidence, but this would be to forget what mattered most. What ran through all his work, like an inner light, was beauty itself, joined with elegance, and that singular red, a color not of blood but of destiny.

One day in 1968, history leaned toward him. Jackie Kennedy, already a figure inscribed in the memory of the world, chose for her marriage to Aristotle Onassis an ivory dress fashioned by his hands. This gesture, discreet in appearance, suddenly widened the horizon of his name, as if a door had opened onto the universal.

Valentino believed in stylistic fidelity as others believe in faith. “When a couturier has found his path, he must remain true to it,” he would say. Not out of rigidity, but out of wisdom. Freedom, in his view, is not born of renunciation, but of depth. Colors, fabrics, and embroideries offer infinite worlds to those who know how to remain faithful to their line. Above all, he feared rapid oblivion, that social death that strikes creators who submit to the whims of time. Rest in peace, Valentino Garavani, you who made beauty a dwelling.

FM