Five months after bidding farewell to the Paris catwalks at a final haute couture collection in January, Italian designer Valentino is back in the French capital with a major retrospective of his five decades in fashion. The exhibition entitled "Valentino, themes and variations," is the first time the Musee des Arts Decoratifs has paid such a compliment to a living Italian designer.
It is also a unique opportunity to be able to assess a career immediately after a designer has stopped creating," says Pamela Golbin, who curated the exhibition. The show was already in the pipeline when Valentino announced that he was retiring at the age of 75, which gave an added impetus to make it happen.
The 225 models on display, almost exclusively from his haute couture collections, were selected by Golbin from the fashion house's archives to illustrate the designer's distinctive style, which has made him a firm favorite with Hollywood stars and crowned heads.
While Valentino never claims to have changed the face of fashion like some of his contemporaries, notably Yves Saint Laurent who trained in Paris in the golden age of couture, he has always been true to his own interpretation of how to make women look beautiful.
As early as 1959, when he opened his house in Rome, he created a stylistic vocabulary, which he has spent the next 49 years refining," says Golbin. This is why she chose to order the exhibition thematically, rather than chronologically.
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