Mario Valentino; Italian Designer Made High Fashion of Leather

Mario Valentino, 63, one of Italy’s leading designers, who turned leather into high fashion. Valentino, from a poor Neapolitan family of leather tanners, went from designing shoes to become one of the biggest names in Italy’s ready-to-wear industry. His collections, shown in Milan, were almost entirely of leather. His admirers said he could make leather look like any fabric from silk to lace. Valentino--not to be confused with Valentino Gravasi, the couturier who also uses just the single name--would create the outfits, and then was helped at different times in completing them by such top designers as Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace. He also created a market, new then, for men’s fashions in leather. In Naples on Thursday of cancer.