People

Valentino obituary

After Valentino Garavani retired in 2008 from a fashion world in which the meaning of luxury had changed, his half-century of couture creation was marked with exhibitions.

The one at Somerset House in London in 2012, Valentino: Master of Couture, displayed more than a hundred of his outfits within close peering range, each with a card bearing the name of the woman – royal, diva, star, social leader – for whom it had been created.

In another room were samplers of the superlative techniques of Valentino’s ragazze, the ‘‘girls’’ in white coats in his couture ateliers who had sewn those gowns. The definitive Valentino dress was patchworked of handmade lace, so light it could have been posted in an A3 envelope.

Valentino, who has died aged 93, was a specialist in a high level of luxury without undue grandeur, dressing the world’s most photographed women from the Dolce Vita period of Italian cinema in the 1960s to J-Lo at the Oscars in the 2000s. He never led, or wanted to lead, fashion in cut, line or mood, and, although he was proud to be the first Italian couturier fully, if reluctantly, accepted by Paris as one of their own by training and aspiration, he kept a direct connection with a more personal Italian tradition of skilled dressmakers: the needs of the wearer always came first.

Glamour was his metier – he had been enchanted into the business as a boy by the glittering, shimmering, robes of the showgirls processing down endless stairs in the 1941 Hollywood musical Ziegfeld Girl. Long before red carpets at film premieres and the steps of the New York Metropolitan Museum on gala night became major fashion venues, Valentino designed gowns that would have been show-stoppers on them.

He was far ahead of Paris when the actual red carpet business took off in the late 80s.

Valentino was born in Voghera, Lombardy. From his babyhood onwards, his parents, Mauro and Teresa (she named him after the silent film sensation Rudolph Valentino) indulged the boy’s tastes, and later his aunt Rosa and another local dressmaker allowed him into their workrooms. From 1949, his parents funded his education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and supported him through five years of apprenticeship in the house of the couturier Jean Dessès; then he did two more years with Guy Laroche

Valentino’s father and a fellow businessman backed his first couture studio, on the Via Condotti in Rome in 1959, and Valentino, determined to equal Parisian couture, spent without limit on fabrics, furs and French mannequins. It might have ended in bankruptcy, but in a cafe, one hot night in July 1960, he met the 19-year-old architecture student Giancarlo Giammetti. Giammetti, who had a natural aptitude for business, gave up his studies, and joined Valentino to refound the company in a small apartment on the Via Gregoriana. Gradually, they took over the rest of the palazzo.

Their business was in the right place at the right time. Italian craftwork was relatively cheap, compared with France, for the making of fashion, and California for the shooting of movies. Valentino made a dress for Elizabeth Taylor, visiting the then Rome studios Cinecittà for a premiere, and in 1962 Giammetti persuaded Valentino to show at the Italian collections in the Pitti Palace in Florence, which attracted American department store buyers unwilling to pay ever higher Paris premiums for the rights to reproduce catwalk designs.

Valentino began to sell directly in New York in 1964, his most valued customer the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy; he later made her delicate lace dress for her wedding to Aristotle Onassis. As John Fairchild of Women’s Wear Daily said: “Valentino just wanted to dress very important, beautiful women.”

Jackie O was his perfect customer, moneyed yet devoid of vulgarity, as were most of his private clients. Through the 60s and into the 70s, he was court dressmaker to the beautiful people, including the empress of Iran, Farah Pahlavi, and the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland; he dressed them all with featherweight majesty, though Yves Saint Laurent’s business partner, Pierre Bergé, once sneered at him for dressing ‘‘whores and kept women”.

As Paris couture turned theatrical from the mid-70s, Valentino remained the safest salon for wealthy women, and Giammetti ensured that he and Valentino could live at a similar level to their clients through up to 42 lucrative licensing deals. Their style was high – parties, travel with a retinue to five fully-staffed, antiques-stuffed homes around the world, a yacht, a jet and, in Italy’s most turbulent years, a bullet-proof Ferrari in Valentino’s signature shade of red. “You feel cosy around them,” Joan Juliet Buck, former editor of French Vogue, said of the pair, “wondering when they’ll bring out the next quail egg.”

All this was more extravagant than the Parisian couturier manner. Even Hubert de Givenchy never assembled an art collection to compare with that of Valentino, who hung his beloved Bronzino portrait of Eleanora of Toledo behind his desk. In 1990, he opened an art gallery, the Accademia Valentino, in Rome, where he was, teased Giammetti, “a state power”.

The history of the fashion house is best traced garment by garment, who wore it and when. His dressmaker’s good manners in physically flattering his clients brought movie-star and later pop-star custom, including Taylor, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, and Cate Blanchett, who had not a measurement or a gesture in common – “you need to know the body,” Valentino warned, “you need to know the mood of the lady, and you need a very good seamstress”.

The couture ateliers lost a few million annually out of a billion-dollar turnover, but were an investment in prestige, research and development. In Valentino: The Last Emperor, Matt Tyrnauer’s 2008 documentary film, the links between Valentino, his clients and the workhands who clad them are visibly close: many customers and seamstresses were with him all their adult lives, and his few key upper-level personnel stayed for decades too. The film was an unexpected pop phenomenon, and made Valentino’s retirement feel even more like the end of an era.

Giammetti had persuaded Valentino to go directly into high-end ready-to-wear, menswear and accessories, and in the 90s terminated all licences except for perfume, jeans and sunglasses. In 1998, when couture houses were being transformed into brand trophies, he and Valentino were paid $300m for the company by the Italian conglomerate HdP.

It was sold on in 2002 to the textile firm Marzotto Apparel: a private equity group bought it in 2007, and sold it to a Qatari consortium in 2012. Valentino showed his final collection in 2008, but in retirement still designed for a few favoured clients, and the ballet. Otherwise, he sustained his perpetual deep tan between the yacht and the gardens of his houses, with his tribe of pug dogs and important guests.

The end of his emotional relationship with Giammetti after 12 years never impaired their business partnership and friendship. From 1982, Valentino lived with Bruce Hoeksema, who was vice-president of the company until its sale. His sister, Wanda, who also worked in the business, died in 1997.

Of all his Italian, American, British and French awards, he was most pleased at becoming a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2006, and with his 2008 Médaille de la Ville de Paris. He remembered when the French did not believe that there could ever be serious Italian couture.

Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani, couturier, born 11 May 1932; died 19 January 2026

The Guardian

People

Elon Musk shares heartfelt post on Father’s Day

Elon Musk shared a heartfelt post on Father’s Day today.The SpaceX, Grok and Tesla Boss shared an adorable picture with his family to cherish sweet memories on this special day.

The news came after Musk’s mother Maye Musk posted a picture with two of her sons-Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal Musk.

Kimbal is a well-known South African-American restaurateur, chef, and entrepreneur. He is famous for co-founding software companies with Elon in the 1990s, serving on the Tesla board of directors.

Maye Musk also posted a Father’s Day tribute on X that included her family photos celebrating her own father.

Additionally, Musk also tweeted a separate post for wishing everyone a very Happy Father’s Day and then followed up in a reply to the tweet with “I love all my kids so much.”

Elon Musk and his father, Errol Musk, are widely reported to have a strained and largely estranged relationship and he rarely post anything with him.

Importantly, the Grok founder also introduced a cute feature after he updated the platform’s layout on X today so that clicking the “Like” button triggered a special Father’s Day animation, causing many users to share older family pictures to test it out.

Father’s Day is celebrated on the third Sunday of June each year in many countries, including the UK and the US.

The Int’l News

People

Trump turns 80, faces a foe he can’t defeat

The main Nuremberg trial ended, Winston Churchill warned of an iron curtain descending across Europe, It’s a Wonderful Life received its premiere and, at Jamaica hospital in the borough of Queens, New York, Donald John Trump was born.

It was 1946, also the birth year of George W Bush and Bill Clinton, but on Sunday the current US president celebrates his 80th birthday in a style uniquely his own. Trump will stage a night of cage fighting on the once-pristine White House south lawn as part of events marking the 250th anniversary of US independence.

The blend of visceral bloodsport with political spectacle under metal scaffolding may offer brief respite for a president also consumed with an unpopular war, rising inflation, plunging poll numbers and a foe not even he can bully, bomb or outrun: Father Time.

“Donald Trump has been showing signs of his age for quite some time,” said Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “It’s on display almost daily as he struggles to stay awake during official meetings, he is more irritable and going on rage tangents and throwing temper tantrums when he doesn’t get his way. These are not signs of a well-adjusted adult approaching 80 years old.”

Trump is the oldest US president sworn into office and, some critics say, showing alarming evidence of decline as he becomes an octogenarian, a status that more than half his predecessors never achieved and that found Gerald Ford playing golf, Jimmy Carter immersed in humanitarian work and Ronald Reagan organising his memoirs.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll in February found 61% of Americans thought Trump had become more erratic with age, and another survey in April showed a majority concerned about his temperament and mental sharpness.

The physical evidence is increasingly difficult for his aides to conceal, though they aggressively project a narrative of vigour. The president has been photographed with bruised hands and swollen ankles, ailments his medical staff continually brush off as a “slight” issue. He sees 22 medical specialists, an apparent new bar for presidents.

His public calendar has grown notably sparse, dominated by hours of nebulous “executive time” and behind-closed-doors policy meetings. After a flurry of travel early in the year, he has largely retreated to the cocoons of the White House and his clubs in Florida and New Jersey since launching the Iran war in February.

Then there is the sleeping. Trump has increasingly been caught on camera apparently nodding off at public events, most recently at an NBA basketball finals game at New York’s Madison Square Garden. When clips of his shut eyes go viral, his aides claim he was merely blinking or listening intently.

The White House spokesperson Davis Ingle has insisted that Trump remains “the sharpest and most accessible president in American history”. The president himself frequently boasts of “acing” cognitive tests that would have flummoxed past presidents.

But to observers the spin is not only unconvincing but counterproductive. Kurt Bardella, a political commentator and former congressional aide, said: “It’s not surprising that someone who’s on the doorstep of being octogenarian is showing signs of ageing. Father Time is undefeated: that applies to everybody including Donald Trump and I would have more confidence in him as commander-in chief if he would just admit that rather than try to hide it.”

Bardella added: “Hiding it is a sign of weakness. Being transparent, forthright, honest about it would actually be a sign a strength. The fact the White House seems to be going to all these ridiculous and laughable measures to try to convince us that he’s not actually ageing is insulting to American people, it’s idiotic, it reeks of desperation, and it makes everyone believe that there’s more going on than meets the eye. And what meets the eye isn’t that great. Secrecy breeds mistrust.”

If that complaint sounds familiar it is because Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, who was 78 when he took office in 2021, faced similar charges. White House officials were accused of covering up Biden’s failing capacities. Jill Biden, the former first lady, wrote in a new memoir that she feared her husband had had a stroke when he delivered a feeble debate performance that forced him to abandon his campaign for reelection.

Bill Whalen, a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Stanford,

California, said: “It’s very difficult, if not a double standard, for every Democrat to criticise Donald Trump as too old and too out of touch, with Democrats having basically zipped their lips in 2024 and not dared say the same about Joe Biden. In this age of whataboutism it is another bad case of whataboutism.”

Trump’s critics, however, reject the comparison, contending that the concerns around him are greater by orders of magnitude.

Setmayer, who now runs the Seneca Project, a female-led political action committee, said: “There is a fair discussion to be had about a president’s physical and emotional condition, no matter what age they are. However, if Joe Biden was exhibiting the same level of cognitive incoherence and physical decline in public the way Donald Trump currently is, the apoplexy on the right would be palpable.”

Such commentators argue that Trump’s already volatile psyche is fraying as his stamina wanes. Even with the nation at war with Iran and citizens strained by the cost of living, he touts a $1.4bn White House ballroom, revamp of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool and plans for a huge triumphal arch.

His speeches, which have long been rife with non sequiturs and long stories, increasingly ramble, repeat and take baffling tangents. He is prone to more scattergun statements that give Republican strategists heartburn, such as “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation”, “I don’t care about the midterms and “I love the inflation”. At dead of night he pushes election conspiracy theories and torrents of AI slop on social media.

Nowhere was this more evident than during an explosive confrontation last week with the journalist Kristen Welker on the NBC show Meet the Press. Factchecked on his false claims of election rigging, Trump flew off the handle and said Welker was either “crooked” or “stupid”, then abruptly ended the interview: “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you darling. Have a good time.”

Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, watched the broadcast with genuine alarm. “The man was out of control,” he said. “How he kept himself from having a heart attack or stroke, I don’t know. You saw his face. He’s orange at the best of times but he was oscillating between red and orange. I really did think he was going to have a heart attack.”

As for Trump’s penchant for napping, Sabato offers a silver lining of sorts. “You shouldn’t laugh but it’s the only time he looks peaceful,” he quipped. “It’s the only time his mouth is shut and he’s not saying something obnoxious, so I’m always grateful when he nods off.

“But what that proves to me is there’s nobody in his family or his staff that can control him in any way. There’s no way somebody his age should be staying up practically the whole night or intermittently waking up and sending out these crazy memes – dozens of them sometimes. It’s unbelievable.”

The prospect of such a man having access to the nuclear codes would typically prompt discussion of his cabinet invoking the 25th amendment to the constitution to remove him from office. No one expects Trump’s team of loyalists to even remotely consider such an option. Republicans in Congress have shown flickers of dissent lately but preserved a conspiracy of silence around the age issue.

Trump is therefore expected to remain in office for his 81st and 82nd birthdays, potentially as a lame duck president facing political mortality if Democrats win one or both chambers of Congress. For many people such age

brings wisdom, wistfulness and a softening of hard edges, but for Trump it seems only to exacerbate his character and make him more truly himself.

Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, said: “Any sign of grace? Perspective? Those have not emerged. Those are the kind of rewards of being older that many people experience but not him. Instead he’s doubling down on the exact same behaviour patterns that he has always had: what’s in it for me and how can I get the maximum out of it and then more than that?”

The questions over the judgment and temperament of the world’s most powerful man, and the potential risks to the global order, will only grow louder in the coming years, according to Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota.

“The recklessness of decisions, the failure to think in a logical evidence-based way, the acting on impulse, the losing track of reality versus the talking points – all these things are being accelerated by Trump’s age. Most presidents’ skill set begins to fade as they age; Trump has got such a limited toolkit that it’s putting him over the edge.”

Jacobs warned: “America and the world are in for a frightening two years. Trump has too much power for someone with so little connection to reality. Age is making Trump an even more dangerous president.”

David Smith– the Guardian

People

Christopher Lane noticed a ‘sketchy’ detail early in relationship with Wade Wilson

Months before he brutally murdered two women in one day, Wade Wilson began a brief romance with a man named Christopher Lane.

“This was my first relationship with a guy,” Lane said during season 2 of Netflix’s docuseries Worst Ex Ever, which premiered in May 2026. “We enjoyed being together. We did a lot of stuff together. We had fun.”

The two men dated for over a month, during which time Lane claimed that Wilson — who would later be known as the “Deadpool Killer” because of the name he shared with the Marvel character — physically assaulted him with a knife on at least one occasion.

This act of violence, in hindsight, foreshadowed what was to come.

Five months after their relationship ended, Wilson strangled 35-year-old Kristine Melton while she slept after meeting her in a bar in Fort Myers, Fla. Hours later, he lured 43-year-old Diane Ruiz into his car and choked her while he was driving, Gulf Coast News Now reported. He then ran over her body multiple times.

Wilson was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in June 2024 and received two death sentences.

So, where is Christopher Lane now? Here’s everything to know about his relationship with Wade Wilson and his life after dating the “Deadpool Killer.”

Lane briefly dated Wilson months before his killing spree

The two men met in March 2019 while working at a carnival in Inverness, Fla. A week after being introduced, Wilson moved into Lane’s RV, and they started dating soon after.

He even asked Lane to make their relationship Facebook official, which came as a surprise, given that Wilson had been “so skeptical about being with a guy.”

“Wade said that he was straight when I met him,” Lane said on Worst Ex Ever. “But I was like ‘That seems a little sketchy.’ If you’re straight, you don’t move into a guy’s house with a guy and then want to sleep in his bed.”

He claimed that Wilson attacked him with a knife

After a night of partying and taking a substance Lane believed to be bath salts, Wilson allegedly began “flipping out” over someone breaking into the RV — then threatened to slit Lane’s throat with a knife.

What followed, Lane claimed, was a four-hour altercation in which Wilson choked and stabbed him multiple times in the chest and hand, before throwing him through a pair of sliding glass doors.

Wilson fled, only to return the next day alongside Lane’s sister, covered in blood.

“My sister calmed the situation down, and like, he showed back up with blood all over him and apologized,” Lane said on Worst Ex Ever. “He seemed sincere.”

Wilson wasn’t charged with attacking Lane

Lane didn’t report the incident to the police, and they moved to Key West a month later.

He broke up with Wilson after learning that he had been lying to people about the nature of their relationship.

At the time Worst Ex Ever was released in May 2026, no charges had been brought against Wilson in connection with Lane’s alleged assault.

Where is Christopher Lane now?

According to his Instagram page, Lane still resides in Florida and works in the carnival circuit.

Though he’s mostly kept his history with Wade private, he shared a screenshot on Instagram of his profile views increasing in August 2024 with the caption, “When people find out your the til tok killerWade Wilson’s ex boyfriend lol.”

Worst Ex Ever marked the first time Lane opened up about his relationship with the “Deadpool Killer.”

“Looking back, the night Wade stabbed me could have ended up very differently,” he said on Worst Ex Ever. “I could have been dead.”

PEOPLE