“IT'S CALLED GOSSIP AND OF COURSE IT'S AN OBSESSION OF MINE” -ANDY WARHOL

Throughout the 1970s Valentino and Giammetti were regular visitors to Warhol’s Factory and nightclub Studio 54 and now they own one of the best collections of the artist’s work in the world. “There were paintings everywhere, if I had bought them I would now have a colossal fortune,” says Valentino. In 1974, Warhol made four portraits of the designer. “I only purchased two of them years later, in the 1990s and paid 30 times more,” he says. “Recently I tried to bid for Warhol’s 1986 Self-Portrait (Green Camouflage), which sold for $12.3m. I become very emotional in the art market but I also have clear limits of what I want to pay. I am very choosy,” he adds.

Valentino also missed out on some of the earliest works by Basquiat to whom he paid homage in his autumn/winter 06/07 collection. “He used to loiter outside my fashion house because he was flirting with one of the English girls who worked for me,” says Valentino. “I never bought at the right moment: it was at the end of the 1990s that I bought his Eternity collages. Two are in my house in Holland Park [in London].” The same home features five late Picassos, more Basquiats and paintings by Hirst, De Kooning and Warhol.

-The Art Newspaper