I can’t tell you how much Keith and I enjoyed watching ‘Valentino: The Last Emperor’. It’s interesting to note that, as often as I’ve been into his atelier in the Piazza di Spagna, it has seemed less vaunted and rarified than it probably should be. 
Let me take a look at my selection of Valentino ties: after the documentary, they will be revered, and with his retirement, worn less often.
That I was less impressed than I might otherwise be by the atelier emphasizes the distinction between prêt a porter and haute couture. Face it, couture exists internationally for only 1,000 women, maybe fewer, and all the rest of us- including all the men on the planet- are followers, by which I mean ‘storefront patrons’. That doesn’t in any way diminish the effect of Valentino’s couture collections. Far from it- it merely emphasizes what tremendous influence they exert with the highest of high style emanating from a very small sphere. With all that, a couture house is always something small, reliant as it is on the creativity of one guiding force and it succeeds only with his single-minded vision and iron-fisted control of the finished product. It is, though, the spread into mass marketing with the cachet of couture that makes the money.
A truism in business, nothing substitutes for capital, and, at least in Valentino’s business, he’s been blessed with ample amounts of it. Although now effete, Valentino was clearly in his earlier days something of a mensch and always extremely talented and blessed with ample male pulchritude. He leveraged all his assets, including some family connections, to start in business, 
but it was his relationship with Giancarlo Giametti, whose attributes matched the scope of Valentino’s, that sustained the couturier’s creative platform for five decades. Giametti’s talent for business and personal administration was seemingly the equal of the couturier’s talent for design- and arguably as important.
So it goes, really. Would the world have beat a path to Valentino’s door had it not been for Giametti? Probably not, as it was Giametti whose acumen kept the door open and kept all mundane matters at bay, allowing the maestro complete freedom to create. And that’s what it takes, of course, complete freedom, as the clutter of ordinary matters functions as something of a sop to the creative juices.
They all have them, these seeming dog’s bodies whose entire lives are devoted to the one who receives the accolades. Rembrandt had Flinck, Walt Disney had his brother Roy. I’m reminded of a story my good friend Gene Reese told me that occurred when he worked post-retirement as PA for the famed interior designer Anthony Hail. Hail was stapling fabric samples to a mood board for a client when he abruptly threw the stapler in the wastebasket. Gene asked him why he did that, and Tony answered ‘It’s broke!.’ The stapler had, it seems, just run out of staples. Gene dutifully retrieved the stapler and replaced the refilled implement in Tony’s hand.
While it seems those intensely creative function to treat others like a doormat, it is, I think more of a general indifference toward anything other than their métier. Looked at another way, theirs is a worldview of the narrowest focus, with only the barest of conscious regard for anything, be it human or be it stapler bereft of staples, outside their own intellectual realms in which they are, in effect, wizard kings of creativity.