494 illustrations, 341 in full color, plus 292 sketches in color 304 pages • 9-1/2 x 13" • Cloth ISBN 0-7892-0463-0 • $75.00

Marie-Paule Pellé skillfully interweaves the designer’s private moments of creativity with public moments, such as a ten-minute round of applause over one red dress. Patrick Mauries tells a compelling tale of the myth of the great couturier, beginning with Valentino Garvani’s departure from his Italian hometown of Vogliera at age fifteen.

In his legendary designs, Valentino musically repeats motifs of color, place, and pattern. Organized around this symphony of themes, the book contains stunning photographs created especially for this publication. These are supplemented by vast archives of photographs from the past four decades. Their pictures bear the most notable names in fashion photography—Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Giovanni Gastel, Oliviero Toscani, Mario Testino, Dominque Issermann and Steven Meisel, among others—and feature the best loved models, including Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington, and the most famous of the glitteratifrom Jacqueline Onassis to Elizabeth Taylor.

One of the most beautiful and complete volumes ever published about a fashion designer, Valentino’s Magic will delight all those interested in design, fashion and photography.

Marie-Paule Pellé lives and works in both Paris and New York. Presently the creative director of Condé Nast Traveler, she is a journalist who contributes to a number of European periodicals. She founded the review Décoration Internationale and has been editor-in-chief of Vogue Décoration as well as creative director of House and Garden in the United States. She contributes to Vanity Fair and to the German edition of Vogue. She consulted on the new interior design of Henri Bendel in New York. She is presently working with Elle Décoration (France) and Interior Design. She is also decorating the interior of a castle in France.

Patrick Mauriès is a journalist and a writer who has published a dozen essays on popular culture, art history, and literature. He is a contributor to Franco Maria Ricci and directs Le Promeneur publishing company as well as the French subsidiary of Thames & Hudson.

Angelo Bucarelli, a designer of books and magazines, was art director of Art Forum International in New York until 1989, and has worked with Mirabella and other fashion publications. He is director of the Italian Center for Arts and Culture in Rome.

Starting in 1965, Valentino’s career took on the non-stop rhythm of the different seasonal "themes" in an endless succession of "lines" and "trends." The year 1968 saw the launch of the "Collection blanche" in which for the first time the couturier’s production bore what was to become a personal hallmark: the use of white, which appears like a leitmotiv through all of his years of activity, has resurfaced in new form in the recent Hoffmann-inspired collections with their contrasting black filigree. The following years showed uncertainty about hemlines. "This miniskirt is dead once and for all. I believe that the midi is the only chance for a return to elegance," he said in an interview of 1970. Certainly, the period was marked by dramatic contrasts and reversals of tendency. The conflict hinged on a simple choice between the fresh new design of the "mini," risqué and not for everybody, and its utter opposite, a historical reference that returned women to the long-forgotten shapes of the first decade of the century. It was an unexpected swing full of exotic overtones.

The year 1967 marked the release of a film that heralded this sharp return to the past and the presentation of a nostalgic and romantic collection: Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn. Though many years have passed, we must not overlook the fact that it ushered in an era focusing on the curious events of the 1930s and initiating a vogue that would not pass until twenty years later—after an incredible reevaluation of the style and its subjects. At the time, the English proposed dubbing this style "Longuette," but the few attempts to make it stick with the press fell through; instead Barbara Huylaniki’s Biba stores headed up the commercial success of this new fashion, offering it in a hybrid form to the general public in a wide variety of inexpensive articles and clothing. Black and gold were the colors that dominated the fashion world. In less than five months the modernism and wild prints of the miniskirt era gave way to a wave of nostalgia in classical hues tending toward colors and straight lines. ("There is a lot of op," wrote Irene Brin in the Giornale d’Italia of July 20, 1965, "in the Valentino collection […] checkered, lozenged and striped composition in black and white used in a variety of ways on short coats or suits and white bluses.")

Again it was demonstrated that, like painting in classical times or opera in the nineteenth century, film is the most important and most influential art of this century. In 1969 Luchino Visconti’s The Damned was released, and Valentino does not deny his fascination with the film’s main character, his world, and his imagination nor that they were a source of inspiration fore several collections of the time. This aristocrat with finely chiseled features, a great narcissistic and brusque lord aware of his heritage and sure of his tastes and of his yearnings after he past, showed Valentino not so much a unique aesthetic or a vague pleasure in "decadence" or a deleterious fascination for virulent beauty, but rather the importance of lifestyle, of the art of living. Because, if Visconti championed a value in his life and his work, it was certainly that of aesthetics applied to the most insignificant details of our lives, to the film set as well as to a place setting for a meal, interior decoration, and conversation. The 1969-70 and 1976-77 collections are steeped in nostalgia.

Couture. Spring-Summer 1972
Elizabeth Taylor with Richard Burton at the Bal Proust at Guy de Rothschild’s Château Férrières. The actress wears a black taffeta dress with vertical inserts of Valenciennes lace and a plunging neckline with ruches in a late nineteenth-century style. Headpiece made of diamonds and emeralds.
Photo Cecil Beaton/ Courtesy Sotheby’s.

Couture. Spring-Summer 1989. Inspired by the Nike of Samothraces, a draped evening gown with embroidered insets of garlands of small silver leaves and flowers. Rome, Accademia Valentino.
Photo Daniel Jouanneau.