A documentary pays tribute to Valentino and his opulent ideal of feminine raiment

-STEPHEN HOLDEN

Short, majestically coiffed, with hooded eyes, an orange-tinted tan and the peevish impatience of an absolute monarch: that is Valentino Garavani, the Italian couturier known simply as Valentino, as he appears in Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary portrait, Valentino: The Last Emperor. Watching the movie is a little like gorging on chocolate and champagne until that queasy moment arrives when you realise you’ve consumed far too much.

Valentino, 77, has created hundreds of beautiful gowns for the most glamorous women (most famously, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) since the 1960s. Born to do only this, he insists, he never had much aptitude for the business aspect of fashion or for anything else. As you observe him in his workshop supervising helpers who hand-stitch every sequin on every dress (there’s not a sewing machine in sight), you begin to appreciate his single-minded perfectionism in the service of a fantasy.

From early adolescence, when he fell in love with 1930s and ’40s American movies, he remembers, he was enthralled with Hollywood’s screen goddesses. A clip of stars descending a staircase in the 1941 movie Ziegfeld Girl suggests the template for all that followed.

Asked to answer Freud’s famous question, “What do women want?,” he declares in oracular tones, “They want to be beautiful.” As evidenced by the fantastic gowns he has created, he has fulfilled those wishes to the extent that clothing can confer beauty where there was none. Valentino’s opulent, royal ideal of feminine raiment has always been largely untouched by trends.

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