Valentina (fashion designer)

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Valentina Nicholaevna Sanina Schlee (Kiev c. 1899–New York 14 September 1989), known professionally simply as Valentina, was a Russian émigrée fashion designer and theatrical costume designer active from 1928 to the late 1950s.^[1]

Valentina was studying drama in Kharkov at the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. She met financier George Schlee (d. 1974), who would later become her husband, at the Sebastopol railway station as she was fleeing the country with her family jewels. The Schlees arrived in New York in 1923 and became prominent members of café society during the Roaring Twenties^[1], where Valentina "stood out for her clothes and her style. When other women were wearing short skirts, she appeared in floor-length styles; when others wore low-neck dresses, she wore covered-up styles."^[2]

Valentina opened a dress shop on Madison Avenue in 1928. Her first stage commission was costumes for Judith Anderson in 1933's Come of Age. The costumes were better received than the play, and established her reputation as a designer for the stage.^[2] Valentina dressed such actresses of the era as Lynn Fontanne, Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Gertrude Lawrence, and Katharine Hepburn. Her Broadway successes included the costumes for the stage version of The Philadelphia Story. She also dressed prominent New York society women including members of the Whitney and Vanderbilt families.^[1]^[3]

Valentina's made-to-measure, flowing styles combined the intricate bias cut of Madeleine Vionnet and the grace of gowns by Alix Gres. "Simplicity survives the changes of fashion," she said in the late 1940s. "Women of chic are wearing now dresses they bought from me in 1936. Fit the century, forget the year."^[4]

Valentina closed her fashion house in the late 1950s. She died of Parkinson's disease in 1989, aged 90.