Giambattista Valli
By 2010, Giambattista Valli was becoming the Valentino of his generation. Not in scale—who could compete with the Last Emperor for lavish living?—but in the way the two Italians share a penchant for the jet set, as well as a mutual appreciation for the moneyed and titled women who populate it.
If Valli’s personal style tends toward the high-low mix (he wears his signature strand of seventeenth-century Mughal pearls with jeans and sneakers), his womenswear is a rocket ride into the stratosphere of chic. As the Vogue writer Plum Sykes commented, his evening dresses “are the closest to couture” that ready-to-wear could possibly produce.