High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Valentina Nicholaevna Sanina Schlee, known professionally simply as Valentina, was a Russian émigrée fashion designer and theatrical costume designer active from 1928 to the late 1950s. Valentina was studying drama in Kharkov at the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. She met financier George Schlee (d. 3 October 1974 in Paris), who would later become her husband, at the Sebastopol railway station as she was fleeing the country with her family jewels.