Italian designer Valentino blows a kiss towards his guests at the end of his final Spring/Summer 2008 Haute Couture fashion collection in Paris January 23, 2008. [Agencies]

END OF AN ERA

His retirement is being seen as the ending of that earlier fashion world with the modern industry's focus on profits providing little room to foster such a larger-than-life personality.

Valentino's rise to fame coincided with the start of Italy's film heyday, immortalized by Federico Fellini's 1960 film "La Dolce Vita," and his extravagant parties and jet set lifestyle meant his life as well as his designs made the headlines.

His houses alone span some of the world's most sought-after locations from a villa on Rome's Appia Antica, to a chalet in Gstaad, a castle outside Paris and an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York.

But fashion's growth into a $127 billion (65 billion pound) industry is slowly making the old guard extinct and ushering in a new breed of relatively anonymous designers who often have more in common with brand managers than couturiers.

Valentino Garavani, always known by only his first name, is replaced at his couture house by Alessandra Facchinetti, a former Gucci designer who is considered better suited to lead the group's expansion into new markets and product lines.

Just days before his final show, the group Valentino founded announced it was already making those inroads opening its first boutique in a hotel in Beijing to tap the fast-growing demand among Chinese shoppers for luxury goods.

Valentino has made clear how he feels about the fading of a world he helped to create.

"The world of fashion has now been ruined," he told Rome's Il Messaggero newspaper this week. "I became rather bored of continuing in a world which doesn't say anything to me. There is little creativity and too much business."