Valentino Garavani stood in the salon on via Condotti in 1968, pinning a hem on Marisa Berenson

Valentino Garavani stood in the salon on via Condotti in 1968, pinning a hem on Marisa Berenson. She was twenty-one. He was thirty-six. The dress was white silk crepe, cut close through the bodice and flaring from the knee. She would wear it to the premiere of Death in Venice three years later, by which time the house had already moved past her. Not cruelly — Valentino was never cruel — but inevitably. A muse is a moment, not a marriage.

The mythology of Valentino rests on red dresses and Roman grandeur, but the actual engine of the house was always smaller and more tactical: a handful of women who taught the designer what his clothes could do when worn by someone who understood them better than he did. Three in particular shaped the vocabulary. Berenson gave him American visibility. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis gave him authority. And Marisa Agnelli, more than either, gave him permission to stop being decorative.

The model who opened America

Berenson arrived in Rome in 1966 on a Vogue shoot. She had the face Richard Avedon wanted — wide-set eyes, a jawline that photographed like architecture — and the pedigree that mattered in transatlantic fashion. Her grandmother was Elsa Schiaparelli. Her mother was a Marchesa. Valentino recognised immediately that she could make his clothes legible to an American market still suspicious of Italian couture.

The relationship was professional before it was anything else. Berenson wore Valentino to parties because he dressed her for free. He put her in editorials because she moved well and didn't complain during fittings. What changed was the white dress. Avedon shot it for Vogue in 1969, and the image ran across two pages: Berenson in profile, one hand on her hip, the dress doing nothing but fall. The cut was so clean it looked inevitable. That was the trick. Valentino's tailoring in the late sixties was technically complicated — boned bodices, weighted hems, linings that took twelve hours to hand-stitch — but the effect was always ease. Berenson sold the ease. American buyers started calling.

She wore Valentino to her wedding in 1976, a long-sleeved gown in ivory silk with a chapel train. By then she had moved to New York and the house had moved on. Berenson didn't seem to mind. She told Women's Wear Daily in 1978 that Valentino had taught her how to stand still in a fitting, which was the only skill that mattered. The comment was more perceptive than it sounded. Valentino's clothes required a particular stillness. They didn't work on women who fidgeted.

The client who gave him legitimacy

Jacqueline Kennedy ordered her first Valentino in 1967, a year after she stopped wearing Oleg Cassini. The dress was black silk faille, long-sleeved, mid-calf. She wore it to a dinner at the Colony Club and again to the opera. Valentino kept the sketches. He would later say, in a 1998 interview with Vanity Fair, that the commission changed how he thought about discretion. Kennedy didn't want to be noticed. She wanted to be correct. That was harder.

The relationship was formal. Kennedy ordered by telegram, attended fittings in the New York atelier, and paid her bills on time. She never appeared in Valentino advertising and rarely mentioned him in public. What she gave him was something more valuable than visibility: the implicit endorsement of a woman whose taste was treated as a matter of state policy. If Jackie wore Valentino, the logic went, Valentino was serious.

The house leaned into the association carefully. Valentino never discussed Kennedy by name in press materials, but the atelier made sure journalists knew she was a client. The effect was cumulative. By 1970, when Kennedy wore a white Valentino coat to her daughter's christening, the house had become the default choice for American women who wanted European polish without European flash. That market — upper East Side, old money, allergic to trends — kept Valentino solvent through the recessions of the seventies.

Kennedy stopped ordering in 1994, the year the house was sold to HdP. She told a friend, according to a 2003 biography by Sarah Bradford, that she didn't trust the new atelier to understand her shoulders. The complaint was specific enough to be true. Valentino's tailoring had always depended on a small team of fitters who knew how to adjust a sleeve head by an eighth of an inch. When the house industrialised, that knowledge didn't scale.

The aristocrat who taught him restraint

Marisa Agnelli was fifty-three when she started wearing Valentino in 1971. She was the wife of Fiat's chairman, a fixture of Italian society, and famously indifferent to fashion. She wore the same Hermès Kelly bag for twenty years. She had her shoes made by a cobbler in Turin who didn't take new clients. When she walked into the via Condotti salon, Valentino assumed she wanted something for a gala. She wanted day clothes.

The request was unusual. Valentino's reputation in the early seventies was built on evening wear — gowns that required three fittings and a team of handlers. Agnelli wanted skirts she could wear to the office, trousers that didn't wrinkle in the car, jackets that looked deliberate without announcing themselves. Valentino, who had spent a decade dressing women for photographs, suddenly had to dress a woman for meetings.

The collaboration produced the least celebrated and most influential work of his career. Agnelli's wardrobe from 1971 to 1985 — archived in the Valentino museum in Rome — is a masterclass in reduction. Wool crepe trousers in navy and charcoal, cut with a flat front and a slight flare. Cashmere cardigans in camel and grey, worn over silk shirts. A double-breasted coat in tobacco linen that weighed eight ounces and packed flat. None of it was red. None of it photographed well. All of it worked.

Agnelli wore Valentino until she died in 2003. The house sent flowers to the funeral but didn't issue a statement. Valentino himself, by then retired, told Corriere della Sera that Agnelli had been the only client who made him nervous. She didn't care about fashion. She cared about proportion, which was harder to fake.

What remains

The current creative director, Alessandro Michele, has shown no interest in muses. His Valentino is archival, referential, dense with print and embroidery. The clothes don't require a particular body or a particular stillness. They require a tolerance for decoration. Whether that represents a break or a continuation depends on how you read the house's history. Valentino Garavani built his reputation on women who made his clothes look easy. Michele is building his on clothes that don't pretend to be easy at all.

The via Condotti salon is now a boutique. The fittings happen in Milan. The atelier still keeps the sketches from 1967, including the black faille dress Kennedy ordered and never returned. It hangs in storage, a size six, shoulders perfect.