Red, love, perfection and cruelty – Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti

Orizzonti Rosso at PM23 – Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti: an exhibition to the signature color of their story: not just parties and princesses, when Rome’s culture was a global stage

Giancarlo Giammetti: a steel mind, cruelty, fierce irony, and the charisma of a Renaissance warlord

Many say Giancarlo Giammetti can be cruel. Demanding above all. Endowed with prodigious memory and a prescient business genius, he wields a ferocious wit and commanding presence akin to a Renaissance warlord. Under those uncanny eyes, visitors feel scrutinized, fearing instant banishment—much like Bluebeard’s ill-fated wives—by the stroke of a fatal charm. His aesthetic capsule brooks no compromise: everything, from the paintings to the chosen interior designers, from the extensive staff to the food, wines, tableware, and flowers, is elevated to perfection.

Red by Valentino – red as lava and blood: the identifying hue that forges Valentino’s legend

Red like lava, blood, and passion; red like temperament, ruby, and fire. A “cardinal red”: artist’s identity and personal code, archetype and metamorphosis. “Valentino red” becomes the symbolic signature of his entire oeuvre.

From the ancient seminary to Fondazione PM23: the rebirth of Piazza Mignanelli’s spaces between memory and pop art

The rooms now housing Fondazione PM23 in Piazza Mignanelli were originally a seminary linked to Propaganda Fide. More recently they served first as Valentino’s ateliers and then as a hairdressing school. Altered over time, they have now recovered their original, spare geometries—almost dematerialized—thanks to the Foundation’s restoration. Voices lower as you step into the exhibition’s half-light, where mirror-polished steel spheres coated in transparent color—Jeff Koons’s monumental Balloon Venus Lespugue (Red) (2013–2019)—welcome visitors. Above the ancient doorframes, inscriptions mark the rooms’ original philosophical and theological functions.

Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti: a tapestry of meanings beyond chronology

Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti are more than a fashion-system duo—the last of a kind, embodiments of what was once called Le Monde. As Orizzonti Rosso makes clear at PM23, they represent a tapestry of ideas transcending any chronology: their goal is beauty directed toward the future.

Franca Sozzani used to say that no one knows how to live like those two. Anecdotes and fragments of history and legend unfurl: the grandes dames of 1960s–’70s Rome—Mia Aquarone, Ira Fürstenberg, Marella Agnelli—side by side with Audrey Hepburn and Monica Vitti. In July 2007, Iran’s Empress Farah Diba, visiting the 45th-anniversary Valentino show at the Ara Pacis, whispered to me before a vitrine, “That was the manteau I wore when I left my country, unaware I would never return.”

Liz Taylor, Nan Kempner, Gloria Guinness, and Babe Paley—Capote’s “Überswan”—populate the same gallery of memories. Giammetti recalls Babe’s first New York St. Regis reception: she wore a camaïeu gown with a pink Rothko streaked in sun-yellow, framing her shoulders like a living canvas.

Houses as semantics, the butler, and the measuring tape

In each of their homes, taste is elevated into its own language. Laure Murat, in her family memoir on Proust, dwells on the butler who, before every place setting, would unfold a tape measure to ensure the correct distance between fork and knife. This absolutism of etiquette—surviving from the Ancien Régime and dependent on image and surface—covered the yawning void of a world in decline. A metaphor for the unspoken code keeping an entire caste teetering on its apex.

From their Via Veneto meeting to global triumph: Valentino Garavani, Giancarlo Giammetti, their homes, and the contrast with Saint Laurent and Bergé

Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti built their sphere from nothing, shattering clichés and overturning established traditions; the delight in an imperceptible aesthetic became discipline.

Giammetti harbors no inferiority complex. He safeguarded Valentino’s persistent creative trajectory after meeting him in late July 1960, during the Rome Olympics on Via Veneto—one of the Dolce Vita’s epicenters. Whether they first crossed paths at Doney remains disputed. Giammetti nurtured and allowed Valentino’s vision to evolve, steering a plot driven to vertigo.

There’s a stark difference between Valentino and a tormented figure like YSL or the baroque Iberian mysticism of Cristóbal Balenciaga. Valentino penned his own fashion and social history in an almost serene happiness: passion and daily craft, obstinate commitment, and luminous detachment. Daniela Giardina—the Maison’s living memory, by the founders’ side since the early ’70s—confirms it. In contrast, nothing could be further from the self-destructive temperature pulsating between Monsieur Yves and Pierre Bergé.

Their homes mirror this philosophy of life, overflowing with art sourced from a constantly updated global panorama: from the Château de Wideville—an almost Versailles with its sweeping water parterres, where they replaced Mongiardino’s Grand Siècle décor—to commissions for Cetona in Tuscany. They engaged Jacques Grange, Peter Marino, Laura Rimini. These two did it all before anyone else, even forming an exemplary queer extended family whose normalcy and emotional stability were never flaunted as activism.

Visionary collectors: Bacon and Basquiat to Warhol, Picasso, and Twombly

They bought Francis Bacon canvases when they were still shocking, his shadowy expressionism evoking lemurs of the unconscious. In the early ’80s, Giammetti doubled down, acquiring two Basquiat masterpieces before the market recognized him. They often risked fortunes on art, even when they had little. Over decades, their collection grew.

Andy Warhol’s signature appears again: the 1974 portrait of Valentino, at the height of Warhol’s powers, is both sumptuous and regal like a Boldini. “Everyone wanted one—it was a must—and Warhol charged a fortune,” Giammetti recalls: it was Warhol who asked Valentino for the portrait, not the other way around. Pablo Picasso’s Le Repos (1932), a stylized figurative anchor against the surrounding abstraction, rounds out the dialogue.

Valentino, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Capri: the detonator of a global myth with the white lace icon dress

America canonized the Maison when Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy—whom Valentino met in 1962—became its medium. Their shared love of Capri, where in 1969 they moved into the Cercola (formerly Elena Serra di Cassano’s villa), was the spark. The trapeze-shaped white lace dress, suggestive of an Edwardian child and topped with a satin bow, exploded worldwide after Jackie wore it on October 20, 1968, for her second wedding to Aristotle Onassis on Skorpios before forty guests.

Part of the “White Collection” (aka “No Color”), immortalized by Henry Clarke’s photography—with Marisa Berenson and Benedetta Barzini, muses in Cy Twombly and Tatiana Franchetti’s Via di Monserrato home—set the stage amid faded 18th-century white-and-gold armchairs, Asprucci consoles, busts, and archaeological fragments on black-and-white marble floors.

Cy Twombly, Untitled (2008): storm-red brushstrokes in dialogue with the White Collection

Orizzonti Rosso presents Twombly’s 2008 gestural acrylic Untitled, whipped by tempestuous red strokes like storm-tossed waves. At the inauguration dinner beneath Palazzo Barberini’s baroque ceiling, Osanna Visconti wore a charcoal-traced haute-couture piece from the White Collection (1968).

Giammetti’s instinct still drives him to acquire monumental paintings with the eagerness of a child at a gelato counter. A small, elegiac Zoran Music greets guests in the Via Condotti apartment, revealing his eye not only for mainstream stars but also for lesser-known talents. The pursuit is always toward the very best.

Fashion exhibitions often melancholic: PM23 shatters the cliché, restoring dignity to art and garments

This two-fold exhibition breaks from the melancholy and contrivance that have dominated Italian fashion shows in the last decade, where clothes and paintings are reduced to dusty grandmother’s purses at a charity sale. Few things are sadder than an old gown if one fails to capture its shining, its stylistic force, and epochal resonance. Here, dignity is the tonal groove that intersects and unites, differentiating the show’s dual souls. “Noblesse de robe,” the Princess Bibesco might have said with her Byzantine aphorism.

The art-fashion dialogue is equal, emotional, and philological, tracing parallels and affinities. Anna Coliva curated the artistic section with scientific rigor, while Pamela Golbin oversaw the fashion side. The route is theoretical, precise, and uncluttered: from the very first 1959 creation to the final neoclassical fourreau with asymmetric neckline from 2008.

The blaze of Valentino red: Fontana, spatial architecture, and Calvinist grace

Red bursts and suspends, plays with architectural space, forges unexpected relationships, coalesces, and dives into abstraction. The true heart of Valentino’s poetics—grace—shines through, even when décor, appliqués, inlays, and ruching abound, revealing a Calvinist lightness. One sees a Helleu sketch turned into a Hartung painting. The scarlet Fiesta gown from 1959 ushers in everything.

Goya-inspired rose motifs in tulle, a dome-shaped knee-length skirt speaking to postwar Italian design and the boom-economy’s energy; beside it hangs a crimson 1959 Lucio Fontana Taglio. Works come from institutions, dealers, private collections, and Giammetti’s personal archive. The interplay intensifies along the central corridor—the exhibition’s conceptual backbone.

Silhouettes shift dramatically here: asymmetric cuts, sculptural overlaps, rhythmic pulses, electric lines. More Fontana; a Bernini-style drape drowned in Ferrari red by Agostino Bonalumi; Afro; Boetti, poised between Arte Povera and its successors; a Castellani diptych studded on the sides, imbued with a quasi-religious breath.

Rome 1962: Schifano and the Piazza del Popolo circle amid scandals and avant-gardes

A 1962 Schifano monochrome whisks us back to Sargentini’s Rome, to Plinio De Martiis’s Obelisk Club, to Marlborough under Anna Laura Angeletti, to Giorgio Franchetti’s magical salon. It evokes the Piazza del Popolo painters—wild, reckless souls who spent afternoons at Rosati’s and married cartomancer princesses, Venetian marchionesses of philosophy, and Yé-Yé duchesses amid brawls, scandals, psychedelic trips, debts, chaos, and heroin.

John Paul Getty Jr. and his wife Talita preside as patrons. Dolce Vita lurked in the palazzi of the black-gowned aristocracy, sparkling on Corso terraces and in the Cassia Bis villas of the nouveaux riches. Hully Gully dances, Mina’s cosmic scream, Peppino di Capri’s twist—lazy preludes to the Anni di Piombo, parading the era’s unmatchable Italian artistic vanguard.

Capogrossi’s incised sign melts into obsidian on a poppy-red field, its plastic impulse breaking through the canvas’s objectivity. In preceding rooms parade Giammetti’s great passions: Clyfford Still’s hail-like spatters; Burri’s burnt, exhausted, liquefied red in a Combustione; a Francis Bacon bleeding crimson from the Beyeler Foundation; Gerhard Richter’s expressionism; the beloved Helen Frankenthaler; Brice Marden’s minimalism; and Louise Bourgeois’s apotropaic, desperate hands.

A 1967 Concetto spaziale—a fantastic device of painted aluminum and steel capturing sound waves—hints at Duchamp while prefiguring Anish Kapoor. Yet it remains unmistakably Fontana.

The illustrious Vogherese: Angiolillo, Arbasino, and Valentino

Maria Angiolillo, salon queen entangled in Vatican, political, and economic intrigues, and writer-prophet Alberto Arbasino, who with Valentino formed a triad of culture, politics, and high society in Rome. In D’Annunzio’s The Pleasure, Andrea Sperelli confesses his heart hangs like a pagan ex-voto between the Spanish Steps and the Column of the Immaculate Conception in Piazza Mignanelli—three icons from Voghera, as was the famous housewife later rehabilitated by Arbasino in his final essays, just two hundred meters from the piazza’s heart.

Giammetti center stage: GG, charisma, strategy, and emotion behind the scenes

Giammetti smiles ecumenically, and beneath his unfading tan one notices a veil of fatigue. This is his moment. He can finally say he never felt second fiddle—dwarfed by Valentino’s creative dominance—and you believe him. Valentino, nonchalant, introduced him as his own aide to Queen Elizabeth, and GG played along, not annoyed but clearly amused. He had expected it; as a skilled gambler, he knows when to hold his cards and when to strike. Cool and crystalline, he can seem fearsome when angered, yet is one of the most engaging, curious, and stimulating personalities you’ll meet. GG takes no prisoners—yet his vulnerability remains palpable.

Grand Horizon Panoramique and the couture army: a crescendo finale

The exhibition ends on a high note with a grand-opéra assemblage of haute-couture and ready-to-wear gowns, marching like a terracotta army beneath the shifting curve of Thomas Paquet’s site-specific Grand Horizon Panoramique °#1(2025), a silver-gelatin luminogram on colored Diasec.

The two opening nights unfolded under breathtaking baroque ceilings: Friday’s sunset cocktail at Casino dell’Aurora Pallavicini, bathed in Guido Reni’s radiant spectrum; Saturday’s seated dinner in Casa Barberini’s mythic, whirlwind setting. Few even in Italy know that Pietro da Cortona, the chief director of Roman (and global) Baroque, painted the salon ceiling. Borromini and Bernini get whispered mentions; poor Carlo Maderno is erased. Over the fireplace hang recently arrived Barberini tapestry cartoons, now in the Vatican—currently dazzling this vast, echoing hall like a cathedral. Lacquer-red, fuchsia, and purple peonies, dense Princesse Mathilde rose bouquets, and Thomire gilded bronze candelabra stand like Visconti sculptures against yellow brocade.

Celebrities and looks: Hurley, Vodianova, Abascal, and Piccioli

Liz Hurley, with her son in tow, first raised a glass to the demiurge. Pepi Marchetti Franchi (Gagosian), Laudomia Pucci, curator Cloé Perrone, Micaela Calabresi Marconi, and Claudia Ruspoli followed suit. Natalia Vodianova retained her ingénue glow; Lucia Odescalchi, in black and white, wore tubular textiles fanning like organ pipes over her shoulder. Naty Abascal shone in a scarlet and black-trim fourreau evoking Sargent and Sorolla—she is the duchess de Feria and a Valentino muse, her heraldic beauty undimmed. Many flocked to salute Pierpaolo Piccioli—arriving with his wife and shielded by oversized dark glasses—on his recent appointment as Balenciaga’s artistic director.

Caravaggesque immersion: a record-breaking private tour with Thomas Salomon

The true dessert was a journey into Caravaggio’s universe: a private visit of the blockbuster exhibition that drew nearly 400,000 visitors. Our guide was the host himself, young director Thomas Salomon, whose dynamism is revitalizing the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica and Palazzo Corsini alla Lungara—another of Rome’s sleeping splendors.

The pair’s specialty has always been grand fêtes: from the 1960 ball that inaugurated their first atelier at Palazzo Torlonia on Via dei Condotti 11, to the fairytale July 2007 celebration with its ephemeral red-and-gold Brighton Pavilion, reached via the Borghese Museum. A swan song for an unrepeatable world: jewels and astral glints, women as Isis priestesses under a summer moon.

The supremacy of an aesthetic nourished by rigor, challenge, and subtraction. Beauty is the necessary canon sustaining the entire arc traced by Valentino and Giammetti. Central to their creative process, beauty evolves over time: each new expression opens an uncharted horizon, a new terroir to conquer and interpret.

Cesare Cunaccia