DON GIAMMETTI

Giancario Giammetti is the man behind Valentino's enduring fashion legacy. Next to the pope, he may also be the most influential man in Rome

AMY FINE COLLINS

Fashion

In Rome, across the Tiber from Saint Peter's and the papal palaces of Vatican City, lies another, smaller complex of buildings, itself a sort of city-state. It is the House of Valentino, lodged in the 16th-century Palazzo Mignanelli and the adjoining Accademia Valentino, formerly a sculpture academy. From the broad flagstone Piazza Mignanelli—the public portion of the compound—rises the Column of the Immaculate Conception, topped by the Holy Virgin. But it might as well be Venus—Beauty, not Purity, is worshiped here. From these grand, ocher-toned headquarters, couturier Valentino Garavani and his career-long business partner, Giancario Giammetti, rule a burgeoning empire that at the moment encompasses 39 freestanding boutiques, 500 employees, and scores of licensees— making everything from ball gowns to ballpoint pens—all of which generates a wholesale volume of around $675 million a year. Thanks to Giammetti's entrepreneurial genius, the same regal "V" logo that crowns the palazzo's monumental arched doorway now stands in millions of consumers' minds for a kind of dolce vita glamour that has all but disappeared from the world—except perhaps the one inhabited by Valentino and Giammetti. They have become such an institution, Mario d'Urso, senior adviser for American Express in Italy, says, that when foreign V.I.P.'s come to Rome "it is either to see the pope, the Italian government, or Valentino and Giammetti.''

The House of Valentino is, as French style editor Marie-Paule Pelle puts it, "a kingdom ruled by two kings." They are two sides of the same Roman coin—on the obverse a gentle, poetic Marcus Aurelius, on the reverse a pragmatic, bellicose Vespasian. Valentino, heavy-lidded and serene, was, Pelle says, "bom with the idea of luxe"—and a prodigious facility for creating beautifying, feminine clothes. Giammetti, mercurial and restless, was endowed with an almost feral quickness of mind. He has the alarming ability to snatch out of your head thoughts that you haven't even finished forming, much less articulated. Marco Rivetti, president of Gruppo Finanziario Tessile (producer of Valentino's high-end ready-to-wear), says, "He understands in two seconds what normally for others takes two minutes. Giammetti is the smartest man I've ever met in fashion."

Giammetti has been described to me in advance as, in ascending evolutionary order, a snake, a bantam, and a fox. When I am finally ushered into his office on the palazzo's piano nobile, I see at once that it is the last zoological simile that fits. He rises swiftly, almost jointlessly, from a tufted leather sofa to greet me. His sharp, handsome face, as tanned as his upholstery, sets off a silver helmet of hair. Dark eyebrows arc toward his forehead like a pair of parentheses, framing fast, piercing brown eyes. "Peter Marino [who designed Giammetti's new Rome apartment] told you I have good paintings. It's not true," he says in his husky voice. The modesty of his opening remark is disarming—it's a winsome gambit out of context with the drop-dead grandeur of our surroundings. Restored to their original polychrome and gilded late-Renaissance splendor, the ceilings are 26 feet high. Allegorical frescoes from the 19th century parade across the tops of the walls, while a vast Aubusson rug covers the floor. Virile fixtures are scattered about—aggressively uncomfortable buffalohorn chairs, a colossal pair of 18th-century tables adorned with lion masks, and a cluster of small marble pillars, modeled after the stanchions seen around Roman fountains. "Phallic symbols," Giammetti says with a boyish laugh, exposing a flash of white teeth. But the 1930s School of Rome painting behind his desk is a tribute to the original, feminine source of Giammetti's and Valentino's fortunes: women and dresses. The canvas, by Emanuele Cavalli, depicts a woman in a corset attended by two other females, one of whom holds a dress on a hanger.

Giammetti not only has constructed an empire around Valentino but has also built—out of loyal employees, devoted friends, and assorted hangers-on—a family for him. The business he runs is half multinational conglomerate, half Italian mom-and-pop shop. "We are a happy family with two fathers," Valentino says. "We are responsible to all these people, to give them bread." Among the Valentino brood is Daniela Giardina, head of Valentino Garavani Promotion, who has been with the company 20 years. She gives me a tour of the building, pausing longest in the sunny third-floor couture workrooms, where flocks of white-smocked women toil silently around long, tidy tables. (The couture clothes are stitched together without sewing machines.) Giardina introduces me to Anna, the premier of the tailoring atelier, who has been with Valentino 30 years. Though the couture operation loses around $8 million a year, according to a Valentino executive, Giammetti would never shut it down. Marc Vincent, foreign-business vice president, tells me later, "The couture gives Valentino credibility, it is the source for all our ideas for licensees, and, most of all, it keeps Valentino happy." Carlos Souza, image coordinator for the affordably priced Oliver label (named by Giammetti for Valentino's pug), whom I visit next, on the fourth floor, began with the company 18 years ago. He is now concentrating on the development of the Oliver Two weekend-wear line, Giammetti's attempt to keep pace with the Gapward direction of the times. "Being a family is the secret here," says Souza, a dark, good-looking Brazilian who rose from house model. His sons, eight-yearold Sean and five-year-old Anthony, make almost daily visits to the offices; Valentino and Giammetti, it turns out, are the boys' doting godfathers. Countess Marina Cicogna, who knew Valentino even before Giammetti did, says the company's clannishness is Giancarlo's method of "building a protective fence around Valentino's life, creating a secure environment for him."

"Paloma told me that she thought it was one of the nicest she had seen in a private collection," Giammetti says of his Picasso.

The Valentino tribe also travels together—on Valentino's yacht, to Giammetti's country villa in Cetona, or to Valentino's houses on Capri and in London, New York, and Gstaad—usually with the addition of a few longtime friends, most of whom either patronize Valentino or have worked for the company in some capacity. Mikhail Baryshnikov, who entered the Valentino orbit in the late 70s, when the couturier underwrote a Roland Petit ballet, says, "The strategies of business and of personal relationships are tangled, tight, and polished. They know the dance so well. " Marie-Paule Pelle adds, "It's a strange house. When I was there during Easter, Valentino excused himself, saying that it was time for Mass. I thought they were going to church, but instead the church came to them. A priest set up an altar in the couture showroom, and all the people in the house—down to the workers in white smocks—were linked together."

One benefit of keeping the Valentino operation so incestuous is that all facets of the business remain well within the scope of Giammetti's vigilant eye. "I've never seen anyone put in the hours every day that Giammetti does," says Marc Vincent, who is in the unique position of having also worked for Giammetti's nemesis and counterpart, Pierre Berge, Yves Saint Laurent's formidable business partner. "Giammetti works from 9:30 to 9, even on Friday, sometimes Saturday. He wants to check, doublecheck, triple-check. He's never satisfied with anything. He's always questioning things." In contrast, "Berge is in the office two, three, four hours a day. He prefers to delegate." Valentino vice president for international organization Beatrice Bongibault catalogues Giammetti's overwhelming involvement in the company. "He's responsible for all financial matters, decides what should be bought by Valentino's boutiques, gives approval on every collection, chooses models and music for the shows, attends fittings, decides the order in which the girls walk and what each one wears. He chooses the photographers and models for the ads [all produced in-house], and he knows fabrics. He can pass from one thing to another so quickly—I don't think there are many people who can follow him."

Sitting in her fourth-floor office, which overlooks the monster-head doorway of the Palazzetto Zuccari across the street, Bongibault concludes, "He is tough on himself. So he is tough with everybody else, in the house and outside, but never with Valentino." International banker Edmond Safra, a business associate and friend (his wife, Lily, is a couture client), says Giammetti's controversial managerial style arises from "a special quality he has: he believes he doesn't need you." Giammetti admits to terrorizing his staff. "I am like a hurricane hitting Florida. They're like houses closed up. They shut their windows and doors, lie low, and wait for it to pass," he says. "But in the end we always forgive him, because he is so brilliant," Bongibault notes.

Not everybody is so willing to indulge Giammetti's temper; his sometimes inflammatory disposition has earned him his share of enemies. "I'm not afraid of people not liking me," he says. "If I want to conquer somebody, I do." In 1989 he incurred the wrath of Rome (just before packing the Valentino couture show off to Paris) by declaring at a press conference that local fashion audiences were "full of out-of-work actresses and second-rate socialites" who borrow rather than buy dresses. "It was a scandal," says Paola Pisa, fashion editor of Rome's II Messaggero. "Everybody was offended. Each client thought he was talking about her." Suzy Menkes, fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune, adds, "There was a lot of hissing among the contessas in Rome. But putting himself at the eye of the storm was a smart way to whip up excitement about moving the collection to Paris." Giammetti dismisses the incident. "When journalists want a little spice, they call me. I've been outspoken in my life. I'm less now. My opinions are the same, but I speak less.... In a vulgar world, sometimes you can't be a gentleman." Oscar de la Renta sympathizes: "Giancarlo's gotten a bum rap. He takes the blame, so Valentino always comes out smelling like a rose." Of Giammetti's contentiousness, John Fairchild, chairman of Women's Wear Daily, says, "He's not exceptional in that respect. It's part of the savage fashion beast. They're all the same breed of cat. They're competitive; they have to protect their interests—with the difference that, when the Italian designers fight, it's more in the operatic tradition. With the Americans, it's more musical comedy. We have criticized Giammetti, and he's gotten very furious. But he's very open-minded—he'll think about what you said."

Late last spring, Giammetti and Gianni Versace were snarling at each other in the Italian press. The year before, Versace had claimed—mistakenly, it turned out—that Liz Taylor, after her wedding ceremony, would cast off her Valentino gown and step into something by Versace for the reception. Now he sneered that "at the Oscar ceremony, with that Valentino tunic, Elizabeth Taylor looked like Poppaea." (Giammetti translates: "Poppaea was the tacky, big-breasted wife of the Roman emperor Nero.")

Versace then twisted his camp dagger: "With my jeans and jacket at the Freddie Mercury concert [a memorial for the singer, who died of AIDS], she was much cuter." Giammetti, who has known Taylor since 1960, when Valentino dressed her for the premiere of Spartacus, replied, "Ms. Taylor is not easy to dress, but she looks better as a woman than a cowboy. ' ' (A Versace assistant faxed me to say that Versace's schedule would not permit him to comment about Giammetti.)

"We now do a $120 million business in Japan," Giammetti says. "We can expect to increase that to $2.5 billion over the next 12 years."

Tensions were high because the four biggest Italian designers—Valentino, Armani, Versace, and Ferre—had banded together for an AIDS fund-raising event in Milan called Convivio, which took place in June. Bringing these four houses together for a common purpose is a little like trying to forge an alliance among the Medicis, the Sforzas, the Borgias, and the Estes. Giammetti complained that "Convivio was supposed to be a group. No designer was supposed to make independent statements to the press for Convivio. It's not right to start insulting everybody. We should show more class." (Though money was raised, Convivio turned out to be a disaster. A tent set up outside the Castello Sforzesco collapsed under the weight of heavy rain, injuring eight people.)

There is some justification to Giammetti's feelings of moral superiority. He and Valentino were the first in the Italian fashion industry to found an AIDS charity, LIFE, which raises money primarily for stricken children through the Accademia Valentino's exhibitions and publications. The retrospective "Valentino: Thirty Years of Magic" opened there with three days of gala parties in 1991. Inaugurated in New York by a black-and-white ball, the show is running at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue from September 23 through October 12. (Meanwhile, Versace is staging his own AIDS benefit in New York the week before, and his own retrospective, which opens at the Fashion Institute of Technology six weeks after Valentino's opening.) "Convivio was for one time, LIFE is here to stay," Giammetti tells me. In a year and a half, the organization has raised more than $1 million, some of which has gone to Rome's Bambin Gesu hospital. "Tommaso Ziffer [who did Giammetti's and Valentino's offices] is also redecorating the AIDS nursery there. But most of what he's doing is on the ceiling, because the kids are all lying on beds."

Though Giammetti got the idea for LIFE by watching a TV show about a Calabrian hemophiliac boy who contracted AIDS, the disease has struck much closer to home. Two of his employees have died, a Spanish design assistant and an American visual consultant. "Through GraceMirabella's husband, [Dr.] BillCahan, I found [the American] a room in a New York hospital. He wrote me a note: 'You're not just my boss—you are my lifesaver.' I walked onto the plane and held his hand. Three months later he died," Giammetti recounts. "I have to change the name of the Accademia Valentino. I was very upset when the Italian fashion world did not respond to letters asking for contributions to LIFE. Only Mila Schon and Carlo Palazzi contributed. They all think, why should we give money to promote the name Valentino?"

Giammetti's feisty ways have raised French hackles, too. Just before couture week last January, Giammetti unilaterally decided to change the inconvenient show date granted Valentino by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, the powerful fashion governing body. The new slot he staked out for himself conflicted with both Hanae Mori's only show and Christian Lacroix's third, clients-only show. The Parisians lost their Gallic cool. "Such a thing has never happened before in our entire history," fumed Jacques Mouclier, the Chambre's president, to Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune. The same article quoted Giammetti as saying, "Who cares about dusty old names from the past? If Yves Saint Laurent is such a great couturier, why does his ready-to-wear line do less business than Valentino's Oliver collection? What is Lacroix's client show? Any clients he would get for those clothes would be at Les Bains Douches [a Paris nightclub]. Most of these names on the calendar are nobodies or has-beens." Pierre Berge lashed back in Women's Wear Daily: "When one has a talent as fragile as Mr. Valentino, one shouldn't even be allowed to pronounce the name of Mr. Saint Laurent.... I don't care what Mr. Valentino and Mr. Giammetti think. They make me laugh. Ha, ha, ha! I know they hope to be like Mr. Berge and Saint Laurent...but it's all just wishful thinking." Giammetti, insisting he was misquoted ("That's what he always says," Menkes grumbles), dispatched apology notes to Saint Laurent and Lacroix—who are both designers he admires greatly. "What I actually said about Lacroix is 'How can he fill a whole room with his friends—he should invite all of the Bains Douches.' But I'm sure Suzy feels she reported the truth." (Despite threats never to allow Valentino to show in Paris again, Giammetti, as usual, prevailed. During the July couture showings, Valentino and Giammetti once again seized a choice spot on the fashion timetable without the official sanction of the Chambre Syndicale.)

About Berge, to whom he is constantly compared, Giammetti says, "Since I'm a child, Berge has been talking about me. In about '66 or '67, a fabric supplier told me that Berge referred to Valentino as 'that Italian designer who dresses all the prostitutes and kept women.'. . .I don't like him so much, and I don't think Berge likes me so much. You can't be like him, thinking fashion begins and ends with Yves Saint Laurent. I respect every designer even if I don't like them." Berge, like Versace, preferred not to comment on Giammetti. "It's a way of not acknowledging my existence," Giammetti says. "It was my suggestion to keep his mouth shut. Maybe Berge is following my suggestion." Suzy Menkes says, "It must be difficult for Giammetti, who has been such a major part of Valentino's success, not to feel a certain chagrin that all praise during the 30th-anniversary celebrations went to Valentino. It must affect the way he behaves, always being the power behind the throne. I'm sure Berge has experienced the same emotions. But because Saint Laurent plays the part of Garbo, Berge has been more center stage. With [his presidency of the Paris] opera, he has taken up a role of his own. Giammetti doesn't have an outlet like that, but then, he probably doesn't want it." An observer who has studied both men closely contrasts the two further: "Pierre has a lot of charm. He's convinced that he's the most intelligent person in the world and that the world is in love with him. Giammetti is more restless. He always needs to prove himself. He has the burden of making up for being in Rome."

Though Rome may be a fashion backwater, the town certainly has its compensations. Maddeningly inefficient, Romans nevertheless have an innate flair for making life agreeable. Having accepted an invitation to join Giammetti at home for lunch, I accompany him on the short trip through the Piazza Mignanelli and the Piazza di Spagna to his new penthouse duplex on the Via Condotti, where he moved in January to be closer to work. We pass clusters of windowshoppers on the narrow streets; their dilatory pace is out of sync with Giammetti's purposeful stride. He has a distinctively sinuous way of walking, as if his center of gravity were very low, or his spine were extraordinarily supple. This walk is similar to Valentino's, or maybe it's just that the cut of their elegant double-breasted suits—wide shoulders and lapels tapering to a tiny waist—makes their physiques look alike. "This is the same building where Valentino had his original couture salon," he informs me as we squeeze into the little elevator and ascend to the fifth floor. I am struck with how everything in the vast Valentino universe seems to circle back to the same center—to Rome, to the couture, to the fixed axis of Valentino and Giammetti.

"Until I was 22,1 was doing nothing exciting in life," says Giammetti. "Then, on July 31, 1960, I met Valentino."

Greeting us at the end of the narrow entrance hall is a Warhol portrait of Lenin, in vivid Communist red. "Thomas Ammann [the Swiss art dealer] says that he'd be unable to sell that painting to an American businessman today," Giammetti says, intrigued but not troubled by the fact. The Warhol canvas provides one of the few color notes in the apartment, which, Peter Marino told me back in New York, is predominantly "about darks and lights." Inspired by the rigorous linearity of the Wiener Werkstatte, with a little Cubism and japonisme thrown in for good measure, the apartment is masculine, lacquered, and plush, but not ostentatious— it is, in fact, a fairly modest 3,500 square feet. A few important pieces of furniture are scattered about—a Ruhlmann chaise longue, a Lalanne alligator chair—but most of the objects have been chosen more for their beauty than for their pedigree. (Giammetti, it turns out, is a bit of a dilettante. He has at one time or another painted, drawn, made collages, and needlepointed. "But," he says, "these hobbies never relaxed me. I would work on my needlepoint until three in the morning, as if my livelihood depended on it.")

The most impressive painting is a large, enigmatic Balthus called Le Chat au Miroir, but Giammetti is just as eager for me to see his less showy works. There are drawings by Matisse (one dedicated to Mallarme and admired by Cy Twombly when he and his wife come for lunch a few days later) and by Modigliani, as well as a bright little sketch on the back of a menu inscribed to Giammetti from Miro. Rows of handsome leather-bound books (German translations of Sir Walter Scott, the complete works of James Fenimore Cooper, many unthumbed) sit on illuminated shelves, from which a pastel by Toulouse-Lautrec and a watercolor by Schiele hang. A very spare, very white late Picasso is showcased above the mantel. "Paloma told me that she thought it was one of the nicest she had seen in a private collection," Giammetti boasts. He also takes great pride in his photograph collection—floral masterpieces by Mapplethorpe, Penn, and Horst—displayed in large black frames in his bedroom. I tell him about a Horst biography, now out of print, that he can order from a bookseller in Manhattan. To my surprise, two days later it has already landed on his desk. Giammetti acts very quickly, on instincts that seem infallible. "I'm a bit crazy," he says. "I do things on impulse. I saw my house in Cetona on a Sunday and bought it on Wednesday."

Lunch is served by Giammetti's valet Joaquim (his staff also includes another valet, a chef, two maids, and a driver) on one of the dining room's two Swedish neoclassical tables. Carefully restored 17th-century Italian leather panels—painted in the Chinese manner— line the walls, which have been plastered and waxed to simulate parchment. The shrimp salad and zucchini-and-potato frittata, followed by blood-orange gelatin, could lead Saint Anthony into gluttony. The neat little bunches of pale roses on the table could not be more flawless if they were made of Vincennes porcelain. I am beginning to understand why all of Giammetti's and Valentino's friends—even Oscar de la Renta and Mica Ertegun, who are famous hosts in their own right—spoke to me so dreamily of their visits to Cetona or Capri. "They are spectacularly generous. They spoil you. The flowers and food are perfection. They have the best taste," says Nan Kempner. On another, cloudless day, we have lunch (this time tomatoand-basil salad, pasta pesto in a pastry shell, and strawberry mousse with chocolate sauce) on the terrace. The air is sweet, and a dome-filled panorama of Rome stretches before us, a Corot canvas come to life. In the charmed, settled Giammetti-Valentino universe, "everything always looks, smells, and feels beautiful," says fashion consultant Jane Hsiang. "You know, workers scent the hallways of the Palazzo Mignanelli every day just before Valentino enters." One longtime observer remarks, "Giammetti and Valentino have always lived a very sybaritic life. But they were never decadent or self-destructive. They were not promiscuous, they didn't do drugs— they were never hip or cutting-edge. Their decadence is more in their houses and decor."

Giammetti enumerates over lunch the projects he has before him. "I am very flattered to have on my desk four major projects," he says, brandishing a breadstick. This week he met with Linda J. Wachner, head of Wamaco, to renew the license for Valentino Intimo (intimate apparel) and explore the possibility of expanding their Intimo and accessories business worldwide. (Despite Giammetti's reputation as a tough negotiator, when I speak with Wachner, she is just as pleased about the negotiations as he is—and for good reason. She tells me Wamaco has already been doing a $20million-a-year retail business with Valentino.) Then there is a deal with the Japanese conglomerate Mitsui to enlarge its production of all the Valentino-licensed merchandise in Japan. "We now do a $120 million business in Japan," Giammetti says, sipping from a demitasse. "We can expect to increase that to $2.5 billion over the next 12 years." He has also negotiated an agreement with the Anglo-Dutch giant Unilever for the production of Valentino's Vendetta perfume. (Launched last year in Italy— where it became the top seller—Vendetta will debut in the U.S. in May 1993.) And with Elizabeth Arden, a subsidiary of Unilever, he is working on a plan for the international distribution of Valentino cosmetics, yet to be introduced. "The biggest potential for growth with Valentino," Marc Vincent explains to me later, "is in cosmetics and perfumes. Saint Laurent does a $500 million annual volume just for perfume. Valentino is in exactly the same situation YSL was in during the early 80s. Berge and Saint Laurent are definitely richer than Giammetti and Valentino. But they're going to catch up in another five years."

The designer's name became an instant household word in 1968, when Jackie Kennedy married Onassis in a Valentino suit

A new wrinkle is put in the Arden deal during my visit with Giammetti when his meeting in Milan with Joseph Ronchetti, president of Elizabeth Arden, is suddenly called off. Rumors—which later prove to be true—filter back to him that Ronchetti is leaving the company. (It is officially called a retirement.) "Maybe this will hold up the contracts in the States, but it may move them along faster," he says, weighing the consequences. Still, he is disturbed by Ronchetti's departure. "We don't do that sort of thing—what do you call it, 'sack' people—like you do in America. It's not moral," Giammetti says. "This man put in 26 years with Arden. I never understood how Vogue could fire Diana Vreeland.... Diana Vreeland was the most modem woman I ever knew—she took Valentino and me to see Hair. We were shocked by the lyrics about masturbation, but she had already seen the play four or five times before. She was a young girl until the day she died." While he speaks, he lights several cigarettes, extinguishing each one after a few puffs and flourishes of the hand.

As the visceral loyalty between Giammetti and Valentino is the unspoken model for all behavior at the House of Valentino ("One would put his hand in the fire for the other," Souza says), dismissals are as unacceptable there as what Giammetti refers to as "betrayals." Sounding vaguely Christ-like, he tells me he has "been betrayed twice." Recently, the manager of the Milan boutique left after 25 years to work for the competition—Armani. "It's tragic. She disappointed me deeply. It shocks me that she felt the pressure to leave," he says in a pained voice. The second, more egregious betrayal, Giammetti says, "is a subject I cannot touch. I felt betrayed as a friend and as a person."

Giammetti probably acquired his keen sense of loyalty from his mother, a fiercely devoted, willful, and witty woman whom he resembles both physically and temperamentally. ("Cherchez la mere is the story here," one editor advised me.) When she's not in one of the tower suites in Cetona, she stays in the guest room of the Via Condotti apartment. (She still keeps her Rome apartment, but, Giancarlo says, "she came to visit for a few days. Now it's turned into months.") Lina Giammetti, who, like her son, looks about 15 years younger than her age, stops by the Valentino offices for a couture fitting, then meets me in Daniela Giardina's office for a chat. "As a child, Giancarlo was always closer to me than to his father," she says. "I was always giving everything to him. I spoiled him the most because he's the smallest. And because he had such a strong character. During the war, when it was hard to find things, he came home from a friend's house and told me, 'I saw a guitar, and I want one, too.' He was studying piano at the time, and I didn't want him to have a guitar. I had no idea how to find one. So.. .1 bought the guitar, and it made him happy—for one second!" She laughs. "He wanted a lot, but he gave a lot. From the age of 13 he bought me hats, because he knew how much I liked them. . . . I'm very proud of him, even if I would have liked him to be an architect. He would have been a great designer of modem buildings."

Mrs. Giammetti fumbles in her bag and pulls out a photo of a lean, darkhaired boy—Giammetti at 16. His sensual lips suppress a laugh, giving him an expression of arrogant joie de vivre. Noting my interest, she asks, "Do you want to see one of him at his first Communion, where he looks just like an angel?" Giammetti interrupts us with a phone call. When I tell him about the pictures, he says, "No! You're pulling my leg. My mother doesn't carry pictures of me. She was putting on a show for you."

Giammetti had described his upbringing to me earlier. "My mother and I have ambition in common. My family was always bourgeois. My father had an electrical-device shop next to the Via Veneto. He was a terrible playboy, always at the CaffS Strega, never working. My mother had great generosity. She spent a lot of money on clothes. In summer we had a house in the country. On holidays we went skiing in the Dolomites. Whatever we wanted we had. She sent us to the Collegio San Gabriele, the snobbiest, most expensive, most aristocratic school in the most aristocratic neighborhood of Rome. We lived just outside the Parioli. All my friends had nannies, and were picked up after school in limousines. But Vittorio, an employee of my father's and my idol, came for me on a bicycle."

Mario d'Urso, who was two years behind Giammetti at the Collegio, says, "In that era—the early 50s—there was a certain style to the Pariolini. We were the upper bourgeois of Rome. We dressed very elegantly, we had our own little newspaper, we met at Mass every Sunday at noon. We all went to the same cafe, to the same debutante parties. It was after the war, and everybody was happy the problems were over. It was the beginning of a new industrial society for Italy. We were the trendsetters, the first with the Vespa motorbikes, the TVs. Yes, Giancarlo was handsome, elegant—we all were. Everybody was very promising. Giammetti fulfilled the promise." After graduating, Giammetti enrolled in the University of Rome's architecture school, because it was "my father's dream." Except for the fact that the school was close to his family's home, where he lived until he was 28, he "didn't really like it."

"Valentino and Giancarlo became part of the world they were designing fwf says Denise Hale. "Now they live better than most of their clients."

"Until I was 22,1 was hanging around, doing nothing exciting in life. Then, during my fourth year at university, on July 31, 1960, I met Valentino through mutual friends at a cafe on the Via Veneto." Giammetti had already heard of the new young couturier, six years his senior, who had recently opened a salon in Rome after 10 years in Paris working for Jean Desses and Guy Laroche. "I left the cafe about half an hour later. I was in a hurry to go, because I was leaving for Capri the next day. I remember getting into my little car that my father had given me, a [Fiat] 500. I turned around and saw Valentino's back as I drove off. ' ' He did not drive away from his destiny, however. A week later, Valentino and Giammetti bumped into each other again on Capri.

"I finally felt involved," he says about the early days of their partnership. "It was the beginning of everything. At first my involvement with Valentino's business was more for fun than ambition. But I felt I had to do it. I was not sure for the first two or three years this would be my future. Strangely enough, a certain kind of energy came out that September [of I960]. Suddenly Valentino became a name. Women came to him. There were a lot of balls in Rome. It was the year Italy had the football championship. But it was not because of me—it was too early. Since then, step by step we started our professional life."

When I am led from Giammetti's office to Valentino's smaller, adjacent suite, I have the sense of passing from the company's mind into its heart. To enter this sanctum sanctorum, one passes first through a door, then a velvet curtain. Where Giammetti's office decor is sleek and lofty, Valentino's is dense and sumptuous—ormolu, porcelain, old masters, and more precious objets than the eye can possibly take in are heaped against luscious backgrounds of tapestry valances, leopardskin, and red leather. There is a boyish sweetness, an almost beatific purity, about Valentino that is both incongruous in this voluptuous setting and enormously appealing. It's easy to understand how he arouses Giammetti's protective instincts. Dressed in a gray glen-plaid suit and a pastel pink-and-blue-striped shirt, Valentino explains to me how Giammetti— with the same premonitory sense of timing that would propel him throughout his career—arrived on the scene at the ideal moment. Valentino's backers—his father and a family friend—had just pulled out. "They did not see a return in a short time," Valentino recounts in his soothing, gentle tones. "I immediately recognized in Giancarlo his ambition, his pride. He is just like a toro, going straight ahead into the toreador's red cape. With my first collection, I had no one to tell me to go to Florence [where the Italian shows were then held, at the Pitti Palace]. With Giancarlo, we realized we had to show there. My career really started from there. We got fantastic reviews. The buyers bought and bought until one in the morning. That gave us an injection of money.

"Giancarlo and I were bom in a moment when beauty was around," Valentino continues. "The world has changed. People want to destroy beauty," he says, injured. "I don't pay any attention to this life. I am always locked here, drawing. I am very grateful to Mr. Giammetti that he gives me the opportunity to work in a beautiful atmosphere. He hides things from me to keep me in a good mood, so I can go on working with joy and peace. We understand each other completely, without speaking. But his character is completely opposite mine."

Giammetti had the good fortune to hitch his wagon to a brilliant star—one that, without him, might just as easily have fallen as risen. The other big Italian fashion names of that period—-Simonetta, Capucci, Princess Galitzine, Fontana Sisters—have either dimmed or vanished. "Valentino's evening gowns were the most glamorous of all," recalls Countess Consuelo Crespi, an early client. "He eclipsed the others. Even the French started buying from him, and you know how chauvinist they are." Denise Hale, who was then married to Vincente Minnelli and kept an apartment in Rome, says, "There were only two real talents in Rome in the early 60s, Federico Forquet and Valentino. Valentino had the luck to have Giancarlo as his partner. He understood the importance of moving into ready-to-wear, of knowing the right people, of promoting the name." Once heard only on the most fashionable lips, the name became an instant household word in 1968, when Jackie Kennedy married Onassis in a Valentino suit. "It was like spontaneous combustion," says Lynn Manulis, who with her mother, Martha (of the Martha boutiques in New York and Palm Beach), brought Valentino's couture to America. "We sold out in two weeks. Valentino and Giancarlo were totally astounded." Marie-Paule Pelle says that between Diana Vreeland and Jackie Onassis, Martha and fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert, "suddenly the word was Valentino. America discovered Valentino."

Giammetti, for his part, had discovered the power of advertising. He takes credit for inventing what he calls groupage, the multi-page, single-designer spreads which these days add so much bulk to glossy magazines and so many more zeros to fashion houses' bottom lines. "The ads that used to run were for the great fabric houses—Taroni, Abraham—who would present Balenciaga, Dior, together under their name. In 19671 had the idea that the headlines should mention Valentino rather than the fabric house—and the fabric house still paid," he says, showing me a 25-year-old spread for Valentino's African-desert collection, in which model Mirella Petteni, photographed by Gian Paolo Barbieri, poses against studio "dunes" made of semolina.

Consuelo Crespi says, "After a certain point, everything they touched simply turned to gold." Denise Hale adds, "They became part of the world they were designing for. Now Valentino and Giancarlo live much better than most of their clients." Fashion designer Countess Jacqueline de Ribes, who knew Valentino when he was still a Desses assistant in Paris, recalls, "It was always clear that Giancarlo was running the financial side. If I asked the price of a dress, Valentino would refer me to Giancarlo, saying, 'I know nothing about figures.' " Another acquaintance says, "Valentino always lived beyond his means, expecting money would come—and because of Giancarlo it has. Valentino used to laugh at Giancarlo for not spending his money. Only in 1986 did he buy the big house in Cetona, and now there's the Roman apartment.... He's really a learner; he taught himself. You see, the Romans are not a polished race. Even Roman princesses are a little rough. Giancarlo's much more distinguished than he used to be—he even looks better than he ever did." Marina Cicogna adds, "Giancarlo is one of those people whose life depended upon whom he met. If he had met a writer, he would have gone in that direction. [Giammetti himself says that he was cut out to be "the creative person behind a creative person."] His life has developed the way Valentino led. His ambition has to do with what Valentino wants. Yet sometimes I sense there is something very deep in him still to be cultivated, something that he did not have the chance to develop." Another woman who has worked closely with him concurs. "Giancarlo never forgets in his innermost self that Valentino is first. He enjoys it, yet he suffers from it. He cannot really forgive himself for being second."

If Giammetti has remained in some way unfulfilled, that has become just one more spur in his side, driving him, as Beatrice Bongibault says, "further, further, further." To wit, one day he produces a framed quotation from the giant armoire in his office and reads it to me: " 'When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip, and the whip is meant solely for self-flagellation.' Truman Capote."

He pronounces the word "wheep," and in such a way that you can almost feel its sting. At this particular moment, he is alternately flagellating and congratulating himself over his new Valentino ad campaign, part of this season's $4 million international media blitz. Scheduled to run in the American press this fall, it features an eccentrically made-up Linda Evangelista in a series of powerful, almost abstract poses, photographed by Steven Meisel against a white backdrop. The point, Giammetti tells me, is "the change, the surprise." The stark, angular spread runs counter to the posh Valentino image. Studying the layout, Giammetti says, "I'm surprised Valentino agreed to these. Usually he wants to see the hat, the jewelry, all the accessories he used with the clothes on the runway. But, you know, a still photograph is very different from the runway, where everything moves."

The swaggering tone set by the Meisel pictures will probably not endure beyond the next Valentino campaign. Unlike Giorgio Armani and Ralph Lauren, who have carefully constructed an immutable identity over the years, Giammetti, perennially restless, relishes shaking things up frequently. "The moment I develop an idea, I move on to the next. As Picabia said, 'In order to have clean ideas, you have to change them as often as a shirt.' Thank God I have a very solid designer behind me who is always on a straight course. One would think it's the opposite, but he gives substance to my impulses, he gives rationality to my dreams."

That evening the Valentino team leaves work at the unusually early hour of 6:30 to attend the opening of a student exhibition called "Homage to Valentino." We travel in a caravan, Giammetti's red Daimler leading the way and Souza's motorbike pulling up the rear. Valentino steps out of his car and into the gallery, posing obligingly in the entryway for the paparazzi. He strikes several variations of the same graceful, contrapposto stance—one hand in his pocket, one knee bent, a crescent-moon smile bowing his lips. The cameramen and the star-struck students—who, like metal filings dragged by a magnet, trail him through the gallery—are oblivious to Giammetti, whose own watchful eyes never leave Valentino.

"Giancarlo never forgets in his innermost self that Valentino is first," says a former associate. "He enjoys it, yet he suffers from it."

The two men rarely make such public appearances in Rome, Paola Pisa informs me. "You never see them in restaurants, or at the theater. There is a great mystery, a great curiosity, about them. When they used to show the couture collection outdoors in the Piazza di Spagna, it was a magic moment in Rome. People would rent balconies of apartments, as if it were the Monaco Grand Prix. The Spanish Embassy held a dinner so the guests could watch. Everybody came, not just to see fashion, but to see them."

It is late afternoon, and the sunlight, slanting low through the enormous windows behind Giammetti's oval desk, passes through one chair's buffalo-horn armrest, turning it translucent. Giammetti is talking about the snapshots he took of the David Bowie-Iman wedding in Florence, and how what started as an exercise to help him memorize faces has turned into a picture-album mania, a compulsion to bring order to life's chaos. "I have albums for Cetona, for the boat, for Gstaad, for New York. I have pictures for my diary, and an album called 'Faces,' which contains faces of friends photographed over different years. I have one called 'The Worst,' an album of the worst pictures of everybody, including Christy Turlington. Can you believe it? Every picture I take I develop four times, for Valentino and for all my different albums." He leans forward in his desk chair to downshift into one of his introspective moods. The nervous energy that fuels his impulsive character troubles him. "I never relax. It is my great fault," he confides. "Iam tense every time I am not in control." He picks up a sheet of writing paper and a pair of scissors from his desktop. "I am prepotente," he says, buzzing his assistant for a dictionary so that he can translate. " 'Overbearing, overexcited, aggressive.' I bend things to my will." He has now begun to snip away at the piece of paper. "I am afraid of flying, because I am not in control. Once, when we were flying to Saint-Tropez—it was August 1, 1973—the plane hit a wind shear and took us down into a black hole. Valentino had his head in his hands. A Brazilian maid was holding a Madonna up high. I was the only one calm and very analytical. I know now that when I die I want to die fast," he says, cutting more swiftly. "I am very tense after our shows. That is why I hide, sweating behind the racks. I am not in control of what the audience's reaction will be. I am not in control when aspects of my work are not clear to me. Or when people betray me. But as Mr. Agnelli says, 'Cemeteries are full of indispensable people.' " He sets down his scissors and opens the piece of paper, showing me a beautiful, lacy snowflake. Embarrassed, he quickly crumples it and tosses it into his wastebasket.

"Giammetti is the opposite of what he appears," says G.F.T.'s Marco Rivetti. "He's very shy, very unsure of himself. It took me 10 years to understand how sweet he is under that tough skin." Sort of like a coconut? I suggest. "Sweeter than a coconut," Rivetti replies. The converse is also true, according to a woman who has worked with him. "He is very polisse," she says. "He has a very diplomatic air. He could have been a great church politician. When you shake his hand, you are surprised by its softness. But behind all this, he is iron."