Valentino Garavani attends the Valentino show as part of the Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Spring/Summer 2017.

Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

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Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

Valentino Garavani attends the Valentino show as part of the Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Spring/Summer 2017.

Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

Italian fashion designer Valentino died Monday at his Roman residence. He was 93.

His foundation announced his death on Instagram.

Dubbed an “international arbiter of taste” by Vogue, notable women wore his designs at funerals and weddings, as well as on the red carpet. He dressed the likes of Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Onassis, as well as modern stars from Anna Wintour to Gwyneth Paltrow and Zendaya.

The image of style and lavish living, Valentino’s signature features included crisp suits and a “crème brûlée” complexion — due to his fervor for tanning. He was heavily inspired by the stars he saw on the silver screen and had a lifelong fixation with glamour.

“I love a beautiful lady, I love a beautiful dog, I love a beautiful piece of furniture. I love beauty, it’s not my fault,” he said in The Last Emperor, a 2008 documentary about him.

In the world of haute couture, Valentino embraced sophistication, elegance, and traditional femininity through his dresses and trademarked a vibrant red hue. His work embodied romance, luxury and an aristocratic lifestyle.

He was born Valentino Garavani and named after the silent movie star Rudolph Valentino. A self-described spoiled child, the designer acquired a taste for the expensive from a young age; his shoes were custom-made, and the stripe, color, and buttons of his blazers were designed to his specifications.

His father, a well-to-do electrical supplier, and his mother, who appreciated the value of a well-made garment, catered to their young son’s refined palate and later supported his fashion endeavors, sending him to school and financing his early work.

Growing up in the small town of Voghera, Italy, he learned sewing from his Aunt Rosa in Lombardy. After high school, he moved to Paris to study fashion and take on apprenticeships.

Valentino owed much of his success to his former lover and business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti. The two met in a café on the famed Via Condotti in Rome in 1960, where Valentino had opened his first couture studio.

They founded Valentino Company the same year, and its first ready-to-wear shop opened in Milan in 1969. Together, the pair built a fashion empire over five decades.

They separated romantically when Valentino was 30, but remained business partners and close friends. Valentino knew little about business and accounting before meeting Giammetti; together, they formed two parts of a whole — Giammetti the business mind, and Valentino the creative force.

“Valentino has a perfect vision of how a woman should dress,” Giammetti told Charlie Rose in 2009. “He looks for beauty. Women should be more beautiful. His work is to make women more beautiful.”

They sold the Valentino company in 1998 for nearly $300 million. It made $1.36 billion in revenue in 2021, according to Reuters.

Even after his retirement in 2008, he couldn’t completely leave fashion behind and continued to design dresses for opera productions.

Once the fashion world became more accessible to the public, millions of aspiring fashionistas bought jeans, handbags, shoes, umbrellas, and even Lincoln Continentals with his gleaming “V” monogram. By the peak of his career, Valentino’s popularity would rival that of the pope’s in Rome.

Wildflower expert Naomi Fraga was excited about the prospect of an extraordinary bloom this spring, after a winter of near-record rainfall, but this week’s unseasonably hot, dry weather has dimmed her hopes for a superbloom year.

“Superblooms are not guaranteed every year, even after lots of rain,” said Fraga, director of conservation programs at California Botanic Garden in Claremont. “When it happens, it’s extraordinary, but you need all the stars to align, with rain, temperature and timing. We’ve had some of those ingredients, but it remains to be seen if the weather will cooperate to give us a spectacular bloom year.”

California certainly has had the rainfall — it’s been the second-wettest season through January that L.A. has seen in 21 years, according to the Los Angeles Almanac. And the rainy weather came at the right time to give SoCal lots of colorful blooms this spring, traditionally around mid-March through April in Southern California, Fraga said.

But wildflowers also need at least six weeks of coolish weather to grow after they germinate. Despite the rain, Southern California had record warm temperatures in November and December, Fraga said, “and we’re seemingly headed that way in January.”

A surge of hot weather, like what SoCal is experiencing this week, can damage young plants, either forcing them into a lackluster early bloom “that fizzles fast or desiccating emerging buds that won’t make it into production,” Fraga said.

The average high temperature in January for downtown L.A. is 68 degrees, but Wednesday’s high was 83 degrees, said Rose Schoenfeld, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

The Greater Los Angeles area isn’t expected to reach record highs this week, but it will get close. The high on Wednesday was just a few degrees shy of downtown L.A.’s record high of 88 degrees for Jan. 14, which occurred in 1975, Schoenfeld said.

The best hope for a potential superbloom is if SoCal gets some cool, wet weather next week, Fraga said, but the chances of that are iffy. Temperatures are expected to cool some, National Weather Service Meteorologist Mike Wofford said, “but they’ll still be about 5 degrees above normal next week.”

Right now, it’s possible SoCal will see a small amount of rain between Jan. 22 and Jan. 24, Wofford said, but it won’t be a large amount, “maybe a quarter inch.”

Nonetheless, Fraga said she’s still excited to see what kind of bloom SoCal has this spring, especially after last year’s massive fires in the area.

A Plummer’s mariposa lily blooming in Los Angeles.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

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Southern California may not get a superbloom this year, she said, but we do have a good chance of seeing spectacular “fire followers,” native flowers that typically emerge after a wildfire such as native snap dragons, dense stands of lupine, whispering bells and one of the most eagerly anticipated, the deep pink, lavender, white and yellow Plummer’s mariposa lily, a species that is endemic to the SoCal. (On Instagram, San Francisco Bay Area-based naturalist Damon Tighe posted some breathtaking photos of the flowers he took in 2022.)

The region has already seen some early wildflower displays in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, probably triggered by rain last fall.

Fraga said she hasn’t given up hope of spectacular displays around L.A. this spring.

She has vivid memories of what she considers to be the region’s biggest bloom years over the last 20 years: in 2005, her first as a young botanist, 2016 and 2023, when our hills and fields were blanketed in colorful displays of California poppies, lupine, phacelia, blazing star and other native annuals.

“Obviously the visual displays are incredible,” she said, “but some of the memories that stick with me the most are the smells — the smells you don’t get in a more average year. One year I came cross a population of lacy phacelia in Red Rock Canyon State Park. You see these flowers growing in patches here and there, but this time, I found this huge mass. And this smell was permeating the air. I couldn’t help wondering what it was until I realized it was the plants emanating this perfume, and there were so many pollinators attracted by its scent.”

Sometimes, she said, the scents from these mass groupings have been overwhelming, like the time she and her plant-enthusiast husband came across a huge patch of a rather humble white annual known as linanthus jonesii, which closes its flowers during the day and opens them at dusk to attract moths.

They had been out all day, and were preparing to leave, “when this smell came into the air. I told my husband, ‘I smell Cup Noodles soup,’ and then I looked at the ground and saw all these flowers were opening. The smell had a very umami [vibe], like ramen, but then it got to be too much. And we started running to our car, because the smell was just nauseating.”

The Theodore Payne Foundation’s Wild Flower Hotline is a good way to keep track of where flowers are blooming, but it won’t start up until March 1. So in the meantime, wildflower lovers should keep their fingers crossed for cooler weather.

Fraga said she’s still hopeful for what will be coming this spring. “More moisture and cooling would help a lot,” she said, “but you never know when these superblooms will happen. It could still happen this year because we had lots of rain. So no matter what, I’m excited for the spring, because it’s a great time to enjoy the outdoors and see an incredible display by nature.”

Known for acting in big movies like the Twilight series, Kristen Stewart shows another side of herself in her arthouse debut as a writer and director. As she told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep, “I want to make tiny little movies that then don’t seem tiny.”

The Chronology of Water is based on a memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, who wrote of growing up with a beastly father and learning to deal with her own memories.

“There’s abuse involved and there’s a sort of atmosphere of ‘no’ in her household,” said Stewart. “So she defines very early on in the movie what it feels like to have no voice.”

Imogen Poots plays Yuknavitch in the film, and there are long periods where she doesn’t say a word. Often she seems to be barely whispering. There’s a moment when she’s invited to tell her story to a social worker, and she says, “I’m not telling anything to you.”

Stewart explains, “The whole movie is about processing and metabolizing and then regurgitating something that is beautiful, reflects your insides.”

The title Chronology of Water speaks to its subject. Water references the main character’s escape, in part, through competitive swimming. While Chronology references how the story is fragmented on screen, slipping back and forth in time, the way that memories do.

“It’s such a universal experience to have one memory lead to another, even if those memories are across a huge span of time and seemingly disparate,” Stewart said. “That’s what it’s like to fall asleep at night. That’s what it’s like to remember your childhood.”

Stewart has been acting in Hollywood since childhood, but she said she’s been gunning for the opportunity to write and direct for almost as long. Though she rejected the idea of directing a lighter film, like a rom-com, for her debut.

“Even though my movie has tough subject matter, I also think that it celebrates all of her release in a way that feels so exuberant,” Stewart said. “I think that there’s room for the avant garde to be totally commercial.”