As it happens with most final acts, Valentino Garavani's career was over before it could be fully absorbed. In January this year, at the Rodin Museum, he closed the spring 2008 haute couture collections and at the same time ended 45 years in fashion. The models wore identical red dresses for the finale, so that the room seemed bathed in his favourite colour. The audience stood, the applause started, and Valentino walked briskly to the end of the runway, dry-eyed and tanned from a ski holiday in Gstaad.

One of the locomotives of Valentino's career, and that as well of his partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, was that he allowed the media — and, by extension, the public — to see how lavishly he lived, whether in Rome, London or Gstaad. Although he regarded himself as a serious-minded designer, trained in Paris, few of his contemporaries seemed to derive as much pleasure from their lives. It showed in the clothes he made.

As the milliner Philip Treacy, who did the hats for the final show, said, "He's the only designer who lived the life that people think designers should live."

Yet many of the television and wire-service reporters gathered behind ropes outside the Rodin, or jamming into the backstage area afterward, were not there for the story. They were there for the sound bite.

Last July, in Rome, Valentino and Giammetti celebrated the company's 45th anniversary with an incredible weekend-long party. In a way, Marie-Chantal of Greece said, that was the real send-off. She was with her husband, Pavlos, and her in-laws, the former monarchs of Greece. "I think Rome was the big finale, and I'm seeing tonight as a little get-together," she said.

Many clients and old friends were in the front row, as well as a handful of super models. The designers who attended were Alber Elbaz of Lanvin, Miuccia Prada and Emanuel Ungaro. News reports said Carla Bruni, the former model who is dating the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had been invited but declined. Gwyneth Paltrow was supposed to have attended, according to a Valentino representative, but she was not feeling well.

As for the collection, it was "true Valentino," as the designer himself characterised the breezy shapes and sorbet colours the night before the show. Asked if his career, at the end, seemed to have gone by quickly, Valentino thought for a moment and said: "Yes, fast in a certain sense, if I think that my collection at the Metropolitan Museum was in 1982. To me, that was like yesterday. I did a lot."