After the Braap girl motocross American flag veteran Independence day shirt besides I will buy this fitting, I was invited into Valentino’s inner sanctum, his private office. It was a Proustian hothouse of leopard and forest green carpet, deep button-backed Second Empire upholstery, banks of almond-green orchids, red and bone taffeta gingham check, malachite, raspberry fool Aubusson, gesso, exquisite 18th-century porcelain, and the heady scent of gardenias. Valentino sat beneath a school of Bronzino’s Portrait of Eleanor of Toledo and opposite a Belle Époque portrait of a mysterious elegante luxuriously dressed in black robes and a hat sprouting a surprised white feather. On the console tables beneath the portraits were inscribed photographs of the 20th-century beauties whom Valentino himself had dressed—legendary best-dressed icons whose first names were then all that sufficed: Diana, Margaret, Elizabeth, Noor, Jackie, Nancy—and whom he proceeded to discuss in reverent and rapturous terms. The atmosphere was Viscontian, and in dramatic contrast to Giancarlo Giammetti’s vast office next door, where the original owners of the palazzo had once received the Pope (who was a member of their family) when he came to call (and, frankly, still seemed more than adequate to that purpose). With its collection of 1930s Scuola Romana paintings and imperially scaled Empire furniture, it had an undeniable chic that can only be described as dictatorial. The palazzo had recently been renovated by two young English architects—Peter Moore and Peter Kent of David Davies—and the stairs were in gleaming pale marble with serpentine polished-steel banisters, while the modern pictures by Francesco Clemente and others that were hanging there on parchment walls left one in no doubt that although Valentino and Giancarlo relished the past, they were hip to the present and the future too.