ByGuy Martin,
Senior Contributor.
His body was laid in state not far from the Spanish Steps — thousands queued over the two days to bid their farewells to the designer, the first, and in many ways the only, Italian to break into French haute couture back in Fifties, a postwar epoch when things like that were thought impossible. On the bright crisp Roman morning of January 23, Valentino was moved to the at the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri (the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels and Martyrs) on the Piazza della Repubblica, where the service celebrating his long life was held.
Pictured top, two imposing caribinieri, replete in their formal uniforms of traditional bicorns, shining sabers and capes, stationed as an honor guard to flank the church doors, dwarf the mourners and pallbearers. Aptly, the regulation scarlet lining of the carabinieri’s capes, buttoned back on the right side to ease the handling of weaponry, provides an unwitting echo of the world-famous “Fiesta red” that Valentino debuted on a dress in a couture show in 1959, a color whose popularity rooted it so deeply in the fashion lexicon for the following half-century of his career that it became “his.”
