Cadogan Square is one of Knightsbridge's premier addresses, but it looks like a Dickensian slum once you step inside Valentino's door. To enter the Italian designer's empire is like walking into a parallel universe – one of infinite aesthetic perfection, where everything is in high definition and even the twin open fires seem to flicker in flawless symmetry. Courtiers glide about soundlessly, leading me to a room the size of a tennis court, furnished with objects that almost certainly cost more than the average annual salary. Tales of Valentino's dedication to beauty are legendary – this is a man, after all, who retains a professional calligrapher whenever he throws a party, just in case of last-minute alterations to the seating plan. The mythology of his excess is so fantastical that I'd half expected to find it was all an elaborate joke – until a heavy door swings open, and in he walks.
Valentino looks like a mafia boss who has been confined under a sunbed for the past 20 years, then dressed as an Edwardian dandy, dipped upsidedown in lacquer heavily scented, and manicured and moisturised to within an inch of his life. He looks quite unlike any ordinary human being I have ever seen, and gives no impression of wishing to regard himself as one – or a second. The last of the great couture generation, his career spanned almost 50 years, during which he dressed pretty much all of the world's most beautiful women, before his retirement in 2008. An exhibition of his couture designs opens at Somerset House in London this week and, in his own words, it is simply "sensational".
He draws himself up. "Sen-sational. Very beautiful, it's very, very beautiful. I choose 140 dresses, and some of them – they had never been seen." They are from his own private collection? "Yeah, private collection." He seems lost in a little ecstasy of pleasure at the very thought, until I innocently put my foot in it. These were dresses that didn't sell?
"No no no noooooo! No no no no ..." He peers across, fully registering my presence for the first time, trying to work out whether I should be
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