Valentino, the end of my first fashion dream

Bonjour Fashion Lovers,

Valentino’s passing struck me far deeper than I ever could have imagined.

I asked myself why, and I believe I finally understood.

Valentino was never just a designer to me.

I never experienced him “as a spectator.” I lived him as the daughter of a seamstress, as a girl raised among fabrics, dreams, and Vogue, as a woman who built her own identity within that vision of absolute beauty he both told and embodied. Valentino did not simply represent fashion—he represented the fashion that shaped me.

His death does not mark only the end of a man, but the definitive closing of an era that coincides with my own emotional origin in fashion. It feels as though the last guardian of that world I believed in is gone: a world made of ateliers, pure elegance, hands that sew (like those of my mamma Filomena), and beauty as an act of respect toward those who look.

With him, a part of my essence disappears. A part of my idea of fashion.

I did not say goodbye only to Valentino Garavani, but to the time when fashion was an absolute dream.

And that is why it hurts so deeply.

Always fashion, always black, always Paris.
Emanuela