Valentino Garavani, Jet-Set Couture Icon, Dies at 93 (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: The Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani has just died at the age of 93 and Valentino, who was known as the last emperor and one of the great Italian couturiers, was known for creating the look of the glamorous jet set of the 1970s and he also pioneered this idea of the fashion designer as a lifestyle tastemaker. So Valentino dressed every celebrity from the 1970s onward, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Audrey Hepburn. He created the magnificent dress that Julia Roberts was wearing at the 2001 Oscars when she won her Academy Award for Best Actress and he had an incredible lightness to his design so he could cover something with beads or with feathers and you looked at ease. You looked at home anywhere in the world and this was the sort of dress that was newly appealing in an era where traveling by plane, by zipping around the world, was suddenly an interesting and exciting thing. Alongside dressing these celebrities, royals, politicians, wives, he was also becoming something of a celebrity unto himself. He loved yacht travel. He was someone who had five or six pugs at any given time. They often traveled in their own car to the airport and he liked this idea that his clothing was a part of a universe of a lifestyle that you could aspire to and this was something that impacted countless fashion designers. Ones who you wouldn't even think of such as Ralph Lauren with his preppy empire or someone like Rick Owens who has a kind of romantic and goth universe.