Valentino Garavani has finally exited the stage at the age of 93, presumably because he couldn’t find a cloud in the afterlife that met his exacting standards for drapery. The 'Last Emperor' of fashion has folded his final bolt of silk, leaving the rest of us to wallow in our increasingly polyester existence. It is the end of an era, or so the sycophants in the press would have you believe, as if the ability to make a Hollywood actress look slightly less like a human being and more like a gilded mannequin is a feat of civilizational importance. We are told to mourn the loss of a 'giant,' but in reality, we are just watching the final shuttering of a high-priced illusion factory that specialized in dressing the world’s most useless people for their most vapid moments.

Let’s talk about 'Valentino Red.' This wasn’t just a color; it was a branding exercise in class warfare. Valentino understood the fundamental insecurity of the wealthy: the desperate need to be seen from across a room full of other wealthy people. He didn't just give them a dress; he gave them a visual scream. It was a shade of crimson designed to mask the lack of a pulse in the wearer. For decades, if you were a woman of 'substance'—which in the context of the 20th century meant you either inherited a fortune or married a man who plundered one—you wore Valentino. It was the uniform of the elite, a way to signal that you were part of a club that wouldn't have you as a member if you actually had to work for a living.

The roster of his clients reads like a police lineup of the cult of celebrity. Elizabeth Taylor, a woman who treated marriage like a seasonal hobby, was a devotee. Julia Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow, the high priestesses of Hollywood’s performative sincerity, draped themselves in his creations to walk down red carpets that lead to nowhere. We are meant to find this glamorous. We are taught to look at a piece of fabric that costs more than a family’s annual grocery budget and see 'art.' But let’s be honest: it’s just camouflage for the hollow. Valentino spent nearly a century perfecting the art of the surface. He was the master of the superficial, the man who realized that if you put enough lace on a vacuum, people will start to worship the void.

The political implications of the Valentino empire are equally nauseating. On the Right, he was the gold standard for 'traditional' elegance—a code word for a time when the help knew their place and the rich were allowed to look like they were made of marble. On the Left, he was the darling of the champagne socialists who weep for the poor on camera while wearing a five-figure couture gown off-camera. Both sides of the aisle are united in their pathetic reverence for a man who essentially sold the world’s most expensive napkins. The fashion industry itself is a monument to human vanity, a multi-billion dollar machine that thrives on making people feel inadequate so they’ll buy something they don’t need to impress people they don’t like. Valentino was just the most polite of the vultures.

At 93, his death isn't a tragedy; it’s a release from a world that has grown too ugly even for his retouching. We have moved from the 'Grand Couture' of the mid-century to the age of the fast-fashion sweatshop, where the clothes are as disposable as the influencers who wear them. Valentino’s exit marks the final collapse of the 'Old World' pretense. He was a man who lived in a permanent state of suntanned luxury, surrounded by pugs and private jets, while the rest of the planet worried about trivialities like survival. He was the ultimate symptom of a diseased society that values the aesthetic of a person over the substance of their character.

So, let the eulogies roll in. Let the fashion editors, those professional vampires of the trend-cycle, weep into their kale salads. They will tell you that the world is less beautiful today. They are wrong. The world is exactly as ugly as it was yesterday; we just don't have a 93-year-old Italian man to sell us a $40,000 distraction from that fact anymore. Valentino is gone, but the vapidity he curated is immortal. We’ve traded silk for spandex, but the desperation to be noticed remains the same. The Emperor is dead, but the citizens are still naked, clutching their credit cards and praying for a miracle in the shape of a new handbag.