Movie Review: Valentino The Last Emperor
Valentino The Last Emperor is a poignant and touching exploration of the last few years of Valentino Garavani’s career. The film delves especially deep into the relationship between Valentino and his business and personal partner of many years, Giancarlo Giammetti. The documentary was superbly edited and unexpectedly hilarious. It provided an insider’s look at both the design process and the personal life of the man at the helm of Valentino SpA. The night I viewed the film at Film Form in New York City, the Q&A with the director Matt Tryauno was conducted by Andre Leon Tally who showed up just in time, after a slight delay on the FDR, wearing a bedazzled “Obama” skull cap and “the New America” across the back of his jacket- an added bonus to an already entertaining screening. Tally makes a few dramatic cameos in the course of the film. The film posits the idea that haute couture is dying. As a young art student in the early 2000s, I always wondered what place fashion would hold within the realms of art institutions. I thought that haute couture- fashion for art’s sake- held the key to that equation. In the last several years many prestigious Art museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the V & A in London have launched major fashion exhibitions. Some were successful and widely acclaimed, and some like the Met’s Channel retrospective fell flat. In a world where handbags and sunglasses bring in the big bucks and the couture on a runway is more of a marketing scheme- serving as a brand identifier, sadly it seems fashion will move in a different direction now. This new direction has already brought fashion to the masses with some very interesting juxtapositions of Comme des Garcons and Karl Lagerfeld with H&M and soon to come, Jill Stuart for Uniqlo. But with Yves Saint Laurent’s passing, Valentino’s retirement, and Karl Lagerfield designing for Channel instead of for his own label, it truly does seem that the era of the couturier is dead. It often is the case that the ideals in a society change rapidly and that one must change with the tides or get carried away with the waves. The future of haute couture is yet to be determined but it will be interesting to see what happens. In the words of Valentino “après moi, le deluge.” -Lyndsay Skeegan Valentino, the Last Emperor is now playing: click here: http://www.valentinomovie.com/#theatre to find a theatre new you.
6 months ago • 1 note
