Valentino: The Last Emperor (2008)

It's been 4 years since Valentino's documentary that takes you through his process from start to finish of his last few collections of his life. If you are curious about how creativity can build a Fashion Empire this is must see!

Short Synopsis

Produced and directed by Matt Tyrnauer, Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine, Valentino: The Last Emperor provides a first-time glimpse into Valentino’s world of bygone glamour. Filmed from June 2005 to July 2007, the crew shot over 250 hours of footage with exclusive, unprecedented access to Valentino and his entourage. The resulting non-fiction film is a portrait of an extraordinary partnership, the longest running in fashion, and a dramatic story about a master confronting the final act of his celebrated career.

The Twilight of Haute Couture

One of the film’s brightest stars is haute couture itself. Today, haute couture appears to have entered a twilight phase amidst an era of global branding and mass retailing. The opportunity to capture, in the highest level of detail, the process of making haute couture was one of the reasons director Matt Tyrnauer was so attracted to the project. “This was something very remarkable. I felt it was very important to capture what may be the last great couture house of the golden era still operating under the man who founded it,” Tyrnauer says.

Each haute couture dress sells for tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of dollars. Valentino is often considered the last of the true couture masters, having been trained during the 1950’s under Jean Desses, who learned the craft of couture in the 1920’s. There is an unbroken lineage in the work of Valentino from the golden age of couture to the present day.

The Seamstresses

Valentino: The Last Emperor details the passion and emotion and labor that is a part of the haute couture process. From the sketchbook to the runway, the film captures the human drama of a dying art. To achieve this, many hours were spent filming Valentino’s team of highly trained couture seamstresses, who work in white lab coats in white rooms at Valentino headquarters in Rome’s Palazzo Mignanelli.

The seamstresses, for the most part, have worked for Valentino for generations. Some are the daughters of women who have worked there in the past, others have been there for nearly half a century. While the seamstresses are apprenticed and not formally trained, their mastery of the craft is unparalleled. At one time, there were two hundred seamstresses at work making Valentino couture, all by hand. At the time the movie was shot, there were approximately seventy.

Director Matt Tyrnauer was very intrigued with the couture process, and saw a lot of potential in elaborating on the process on film. “In film school, when a professor showed us Buster Keaton’s The General, about a train engineer during the Civil War, he quoted Keaton as saying that, at the film’s end, he wanted the viewer to know how to drive a locomotive,” says Tyrnauer. “I had that in mind as we filmed the movie. I told the cinematographer that I wanted viewers to feel they knew how to make a couture dress by the time the film was over.”