The Last of the Red Hot Lovers

The end of the millennium did not occur at midnight on January 1, 2000. The end of the millennium occurred eight years and 23 three days later with Valentino's retirement. It was then that the door closed not just on a designer's career, but on a way of life.

Valentino was in business for 45 years, and during those four and a half decades that business never lost its focus. What Valentino sold was celebration. While Chanel's forward trajectory aimed at the anticipated BRIC consumer, Valentino remained Gatsby-like, designing for a dying material world.

Although Valentino's couture was flawlessly worn by Princess Diana, Marella Agnelli, Audrey Hepburn, and Farah Diba, his work seemed to exemplify Park Avenue and American chic. In 2008, Park Avenue spells purposeless socialite. In 1968, Park Avenue denoted all that was right about the American woman. America still held firm to the prevailing notion that a woman's place was at her husband's side. It was her duty to effortlessly run a household and appear on her husband's arm as an object of pride. Hillary Rodham was still at Wellesley. If the Park Avenue socialite was the international glamour model of American womanhood, then we were a nation of cocktails, bouffants, and fatuous, non-threatening chit-chat. In the suburbs, where we might sew a Valentino design from a Vogue pattern, we were patio cookouts, PTA meetings, and pigs in a blanket.

The American Valentino woman posed in the pages of Town and Country magazine while underscoring the effort that went into her appearance. One could not wear Valentino without a visit to the Kenneth salon. Jackie O. went to Kenneth, Jackie O. wore Valentino. For a generation of women, Jackie O. was the WASP ideal, a patrician figurehead and style arbiter whose wardrobe choices greatly impacted the retail market. Park Avenue literally followed suit. The Valentino suit, with its genteel elegance and everyday ladies-who-lunch correctness, stood in stark contrast to the braless devolution into feminist fashion.

Valentino also dressed Hollywood. Where Jackie O. was an icon of the educated, upper-middle-class wife, Elizabeth Taylor was her cruder counterpart, and one whose allure cut across class divisions. In the pre-AIDS days, Valentino designed for celebrities who had no cause célèbre other than a commercial endorsement.

Throughout his career, Valentino was often at odds with the popular groundswell. In the sixties it was the women's libbers, in the eighties it was the working woman, in the new millennium it was the need to innovate.

Innovation is a dirty word, an offensive action verb employed to find fault with solidity and tradition. "But can he innovate?" is the question of the moment, and one that is just as readily asked in the fashion industry as it is in technological circles. Innovate or perish. Valentino never grasped evolution; he conformed only to his own vision of a social circle of diminishing numbers.

The scope of Valentino's innovation was to dress the extraordinarily rich in a tasteful manner. In the face of multiple stylistic changes, he maintained a resolute equilibrium. He celebrated good (if sumptuous) taste and answered our need for stable identification, never perverting his manifesto to appeal to trend. In Valentino's world, there were no trends. There was only an endless round of places to go and people to see.

It was the eighties, a decade in which Valentino's signature red represented the unquenchable pursuit of power, that started his long slide into supposed irrelevancy. The eighties woman with her newly minted MBA was trained to compete on traditionally male playing fields. No longer would she be content to be a trophy wife who spent her days planning soirées and having fittings at Saks. Rather, she was apt to be found in the boardroom with her tight helmet of hair and sensible automaton business suits.

The opposite of what Valentino epitomized was espoused by the 1978 book Dress for Success. This working woman's bible, written by John T. Malloy, turned fashion from an institution into the institutional. The author dictated that in order to be successful, women must reject those fashion details that signified sexuality. In this era, rules were not made to be broken. The wrong color or the wrong shoes would spell career disaster. The militant rules were immediately embraced by the new working woman, while her uptown, Valentino-wearing neighbor (and the neighbor's lifestyle) was seen as outmoded and risible.

The strong red that was Valentino's signature color suddenly came to represent career and not couture. Although Valentino employed it to signify feminine power, in the eighties it telegraphed upward financial mobility that could be achieved without a man. Valentino's woman was deracinated and told to buy a briefcase. This influence could be seen in the evolution of luncheon suits into the power suits worn by Nancy Reagan. Hats and gloves were no longer required.

Over the next quarter century, the younger socialite lost her separation from pop-celebrity culture. As the two cultures commingled and became inseparable, the allure of class insularity was no longer appealing. What used to be called "class" became a synonym for being out of step with the times. We would have our rich, but they would be illiterate. The pernicious influence of cheap celebrity dominated magazine covers and editorial. The clients who might have followed their mothers into Valentino were instead betrayed by the vulgar-chic popular culture.

It was the right time for retirement. These are difficult times where one must have a political platform or be seen as obtuse and unaware. Whatever the real motivation behind his stepping down, Valentino was seen as an anachronism who was socially conscious only as respects his own social class.

In the media, there was no mention of passing a torch, because the torch was deliberately extinguished in a parade of red-draped models. There was only the brief and impartial mention that the house would now be guided by Alessandra Facchinetti, former designer of Gucci women's wear. No one speculated on what she might bring to the design table, because no one expected a legacy transition. Being clothespinned by tradition is not the millennium way.