Last summer—before one of the glittering black-tie dinners that he holds during the couture in a ravishing moated castle where Louis XIV installed his mistress Louise de la Vallière—I lost myself in the gardens of Valentino’s Château de Wideville. I had taken a left turn after the second magnificent rose garden, wandered through a woodland glade and the potager, and found myself in the White Garden, which was embowered by an arched pergola tunnel of elaborately espaliered pear.
I had thought I was alone until I turned to see Natalia Vodianova, looking like an ambulant Botticelli in her fragile gown by the designer’s brilliant protégés Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli—the perfect girl in the perfect dress in the perfect setting. Fortunately, you need not wait with breath bated for your own invitation, embossed with the castle’s image in woodland green, to Wideville—or to Valentino’s Fifth Avenue aerie, his wood-paneled chalet in Gstaad, his handsome white stucco London villa, or the T.M. Blue One, his sleek floating mansion—because Valentino: At the Emperor’s Table (out this month from Assouline) brings his Viscontian world to your coffee table.
Encouraged by his partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, Valentino shares his tableaux—and his chef’s recipes—in a tome that can fairly be said to break the mold for vegetarian cookbooks. (The design legend’s menus these days are meat-free and generally light on dairy—there is a reason he’s so trim.) There is a goat-cheese flan for Gstaad (topped with the very Valentino flourish of a dahlia formed from tomato “petals”), a cacciucco fish stew for the boat, and an avocado-and-crab roll for Wideville, among many others.
And whether he is entertaining for hundreds or dining alone, Valentino’s settings—the fruits of a lifetime of sleuthing for treasures—are as elaborately conceived as the dresses that delighted his legions of fans for nearly half a century. Eighteenth-century Meissen porcelain swans are set adrift on a tablescape that might include monogrammed linens from Cesari, Georgian silver, imperial Russian porcelain, crystal goblets from NasonMoretti (their rims and bases touched with an edge of color), Buccellati silver cabbages, and a Qianlong boar’s-head tureen.
“I always had in my mind the idea of a life of beauty,” Valentino tells André Leon Talley in the book’s foreword, where he also hilariously recalls scoring incompetent own goals when he played soccer as a child while daydreaming about the glamorously dressed screen sirens in his older sister’s movie magazines. Goodness knows he is living that life now.
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