I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz by Eve Babitz (2019)
I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz by Eve Babitz (2019)
Hippie Heaven
In the sixties going to thrift shops and dressing up in the styles of another era became de rigueur: we began recycling the past and using it to bring romance, drama, and “it’s happening” into the room with us. For very little money, girls could wear great clothes of days gone by and, because we were young and beautiful, get away with it. “Their” wives wore stuff from Paris, the couture creations that could make entrances at charity balls and opening nights at the opera, and things to wear shopping while buying other things to wear shopping.
The fact that the things in Paris now look like things you can get in the thrift stores, is, to me, amazing.
If today the women who lunch in New York are going to begin having dinner parties wearing long fringe, platform shoes, low-slung bell-bottoms, and headbands, or cut-velvet vests, brocaded-satin jacket lapels, tons of colors, tons of bracelets, and Cher-type short-skirted dresses with full sleeves and a renaissance flavor (Cher avec Bob Mackie), if thirties-style dresses by Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis cut on the bias with tons of sequins and transparent blouses, if faux-fur vests and crushed velvet from Betsey Johnson and turquoise blue gloves, if Janis Joplin-type floppy hats with ridiculous feathers return, then it’s happening, it’s happening.
But what, really, is happening?
In the early sixties, before the big buildup in Vietnam had begun and the Beatles hadn’t even left Liverpool, the polls showed that nearly 80 percent of the American public trusted the government in Washington “. . . to do the right thing.” In the summer of 1992, only 20 percent feel that way. The numbers are completely reversed. It’s hard to believe that everything we tried to free up in the sixties-the heavy-handed police dealing with “people of color,” the small minds who championed backwater values and regarded women as a “splinter group,” the ones who hated sex (or said they did, from pulpits, before they were photographed sneaking out of motels), the ones who didn’t want anyone to have fun except them, the ones who savaged the coastline with oil rigs and polluted-is still with us; it’s hard to believe that the sixties ever happened. It’s enough to make you throw out your clothes from those days, but I never did. I suffered the eighties in silence, partly because it took me a whole decade to get sober and partly because I couldn’t believe that such ugliness was so merrily multiplying. That people would forget about each other and settle for BMWs instead.
Perhaps people are just so tired of how awful everything is, they’ve given up and decided to just have fun in a cheap and simple way. We’re afraid of the environment and extinction, we’re afraid of the future, we’re afraid of “urban unrest,” and perhaps this is a way to stave off the stares of the homeless, because hippies had a great way of making being homeless seem a sensible idea. They had crash pads, and as my sister remembers, “In the sixties, panhandling meant you refused to be part of the system.”
Since today you can’t get in the system even if you’re dying to compromise your politics, recycling seems our only hope. If we can recycle the spirit of “it’s happening, it’s happening” along with those expensive clothes from Paris, maybe having fun will come back into fashion. And fun isn’t to be sneezed at. The sixties were fun. The trouble was, we thought fun was enough. But if we don’t watch out, the only people having fun are going the be the three people who own everything (288-90).
Nicolas Cage
He was born Nicolas Coppola-the son of Francis’s brother, August Coppola, a college professor-in Long Beach, California, and lived there during his childhood. His mother, Joy Vogelsang, was a dancer/choreographer. From the time he was six, “she was ill,” he said. “She was very fragile. She suffered from severe depression. She had to go away for many years at a time; she would come in and out. But she was also a very highly tuned, sensitive person, mentally capable of extraordinary expressions and words that evoked a kind of poetry, in the way she would talk. That’s the best way I can look at it, but she’s fine now.”
Nevertheless, he thought Long Beach was a great place to grow up. “I loved my childhood; things were so vibrant then.
“My first six years, my formative years of life, were from ’64 to ’70. The Beatles have always been earmarks to chapters in my life. I remember I was driving in a car with Francis [Coppola] and his family, and I must have been quite young. He was listening to ‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man,’ and the words ‘How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people’ came on, and I was thinking, ‘Yeah, he really deserves to listen to this, doesn’t he?’ He was right at the height of Godfather II, and I vowed to myself that one day I’d be able to listen to that song, too, as a reward to myself. And it wasn’t until Valley Girl came out and people liked it that I felt I deserved it” (311-2).
Girl’s Town
Ever since L.A. was invented, there has been a great battle between those who thought women should behave like they do in other places and women who didn’t think about it because they were too busy working, being in love, and not caring how they looked but rather how they felt.
From the very beginning, women coming here found that even the lowest-paid waitress was breathing the same balmy air as the richest socialite. The weather was democracy itself, and though the first women running things were the same as everywhere else, they were forgotten when the second generation began running things-women like Mary Pickford, who by the age of twenty-six, in 1919, formed her own movie company with Douglas Fairbanks, D.W. Griffith, and Charlie Chaplin. They called it United Artists so the artists could get the money.
Pickford also sold herself as “America’s sweetheart”-a nice girl content to stay home and be cute, when in reality, she was a rabid worker who had been supporting her family since she was five and known as Baby Gladys in a vaudeville act.
Unlike the rest of the world, Los Angeles was a place where girls could be inspired by the feeling that even if they didn’t wind up in a castle like Pickfair-visited by kings and queens-they were part of this same air. Even when the air turned to smog, it was still untainted by a socially stifling mind-set that insisted talented girls belonged in the demimonde-never the monde itself (316-7).
FIORUCCI: THE BOOK
The floors in Fiorucci shops are wood, light hard oak. Light fixtures are naked. Being inside Fiorucci is like being someplace before it’s ready. Fiorucci practically invented high tech, or at least they were the first to go commercial with it. Early in the 1970s, the first stores, designed by the Fiorucci in-house architects and the graphic-arts department, pioneered the clean, spare, industrial look that is now so vogue in shops everywhere. Though at first the idea of using laboratory beakers as drinking glasses and industrial metal shelves in your bedroom for your marabou negligees may seem like this-time-they’ve-gone-too-far, sooner or later one must admit that at least high tech works: it doesn’t fall apart the way most things do. Not even-and in Fiorucci this is a real plus-from stage fright. For everything in Fiorucci is on stage. The lights are often turned up very bright; one is invited to peer as closely as one wants at every detail, one is almost forced to. Unlike other high-priced shops where a kind of supernatural calm is imposed by soft wall-to-wall carpeting, soft music, and restrained flattering lighting and even the racks must appear discreet, Fiorucci is selling energetic, adrenaline-driven jokes.
What America sells is itself: American know-how and Coca-Cola. What Milan does is sell you what you already have, only better. In Italy, everything is designed, even bathroom fixtures; everything is a work of art. So it really should not be a surprise that it was Fiorucci of Milan who finally came up with a way to sell America back to America, to sell American jeans that cost three times as much as Levi’s but are so well designed-or redesigned-that once anyone tries them on, that is that.
In 1977, Fiorucci was featuring four main items in its line: jeans, sweatshirts, T-shirts, and windbreakers. L.L. Bean in high gear. Gianfranco Rossi, who is Fiorucci’s executive vice-president in charge of business and who now spends most of his time in New York commented, with a smile, on the line: “It was American. Only now it is designed right. Now it is Fiorucci of Milan.”
The Fiorucci phenomenon. Take an old idea, redesign it, sell it back. Or better yet, take an old idea and recycle it into a new one. In the color spectrum of human endeavor, there are those at the indigo end who wish that everything would be ultimately stationary and last forever. And then there are those opposite at the bright-red end who believe that a day without ninety-seven fresh ideas is a day without sunshine. At Fiorucci, old ideas and new ideas are woven into fresh patterns and turned into flying carpets that sometimes shoot by so quickly that they are forgotten almost before they have happened.
Elio Fiorucci, president and guiding genius, and everyone who works for him, is constantly vigilant day and night, keeping a close eye on teenagers and anyone else they see who is the least bit interesting. They are looking for any new idea, any imagination in style that might possibly be incorporated into the Fiorucci look. The fastenings on a child’s snowsuit. The spirit of a seventy-five-cent paper birthday tablecloth. Everything is constantly changing at Fiorucci. That’s the appeal. The success of Fiorucci is that if you ever become hooked, you’ll need to come back all the time, if only just to look.
Employees are given their head to travel around the world; they are shopping for ideas new enough for Fiorucci. When Elio Fiorucci hears that Milanese friends are about to embark on a business trip or vacation to Tahiti or South America, he takes them aside for a hushed impromptu conference and instructs them to keep their eyes open and send back anything, any little thing they see that might be of interest, to them, to him, to their children, anybody.
People who work for Fiorucci two years in Milan are encouraged to move to a Fiorucci somewhere else and stay two years to gain a new language and more friends; that way they’ll have more access to new ideas. Even people who quit and go to work elsewhere seem to gravitate back after a year or so, using the knowledge they gained working in “the outside world” to enforce and strengthen Fiorucci with the very latest in business advances, research, and design.
Unlike some companies, Fiorucci does not harbor wrathful resentment toward people who leave; instead Fiorucci seems to regard anyone who ever worked for the firm as family, welcome always to return home, but please bring new ideas of course, for new ideas are what Fiorucci is all about. Everything needs to change-and often.
It’s all part of the Fiorucci phenomenon, whatever that is. The Fiorucci phenomenon-the concept, the image-is almost impossible to pin down. If you don’t understand and have to ask, you’ll never know. It’s like asking someone to explain a peach.
But people do know. If they care about fashion, if they’re between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five and they aren’t complete sticks-in-the-mud, if they read fashion magazines, if they live in New York or Beverly Hills or Boston or Tokyo or London or Rio, they know. Even if they don’t live in those places or read those magazines, they know. Whenever something totally outrageous comes along in fashion these days, people always think it is something from Fiorucci, even when it’s not. There is a new adjective in the fashion world: things are described as being “very Fiorucci.”
And then there are always the stores. If you still need a definition, go into one of them; they’re like photo emulsions. If you’ve got the ability to pick up from the negative, you pick up. Some people just don’t. But even people who don’t like the stores, or can’t understand them, can always pick up something, a vibe, the music. And then, through that one thing you kind of get plugged into a network. Even the straightest, squarest person can find one little piece of merchandise or one little design detail to like. And then the whole thing just opens up for them. Suddenly it is all very familiar, and very Fiorucci.
Incredibly sexy young women who sing rock and roll onstage or get photographed for magazines wear Fiorucci, just as incredibly sexy older women at chic discos wear Halston and incredibly sexy Las Vegas bombshells wear Bob Mackie.
Celebrities arrive in limos to buy Fiorucci. Halston patrols the aisles to check out how the other half dresses. Andy Warhol is a friend of the store, a regular. Diane von Furstenberg and Jackie O buy their T-shirts at Fiorucci. And fourteen-year-olds hang out there. Wherever there is Fiorucci, there are kids.
To define a fashion outlook that appeals to rock stars, socialites, teenagers in from the suburbs, punks, and upper-middle-class fashion watchers is perilous. Elio Fiorucci himself refuses to enter the fray. As far as he is concerned, he says, “Fiorucci is either accepted or rejected.” It doesn’t matter which. They keep coming, and everybody has a good time. Controversy sells plastic evening dresses, and jeans. People are curious about what is going on out there in the future.
Picasso once said, “I make things first, others follow me and make them pretty.” The creator or originator of ideas doesn’t have to be the one to smooth off the corners and soften the edges; he is too busy doing more important things. Something of this philosophy also belongs to Fiorucci; many new ideas are presented first in Fiorucci stores, where they cause an outrage. Months, or years, later the same ideas appear in other stores, made pretty and even bearable by the passage of time.
To some who loathe Fiorucci and reject the entire place as a sordid example of fashion hype at its least appealing, the notion that they’ll be wearing (perhaps in vastly toned-down shades and vastly toned-up fabrics) the very designs that Fiorucci is splattering all over his windows in multiples seems a terrible truth almost too depressing to think about.
“I go into that store,” one fashionable New York woman says, “just to get myself ready for the outrages I’m going to have to endure in two years. Because I know once it’s in Fiorucci, it’s coming, and there’s no getting around it.”
Interestingly, the Fiorucci phenomenon is criticized and rejected for reasons that are hard to explain.
“Fiorucci is very Carnaby Street and out-of-date,” one young man told me, “and it’s very directional.” Which means, I found out with some difficulty, “everybody else will be showing it next year.” Fiorucci is directional, and you either like that or you don’t. So we arrive back at the original Fiorucci paradox. It is out-of-date and also the coming thing.
Two other frequently heard criticisms of Fiorucci may help confound the issue. More than two people have said to me: “Fiorucci is terrible now. Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too popular.” A complicated idea. And the other common, convoluted criticism: “Everything in Fiorucci is just cheap junk. It’s like a dime store-everything costs two dollars. And everything is so expensive there. They’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve charging those kinds of prices.”
Obviously, ever so obviously, Fiorucci is the newest wave (360-70).
THE FIORUCCI LOOK
In the world of high fashion, clothing designers all believe that the women who wear their clothes won’t wreck the line by being larger than a size 10. All the women who wear the clothes will have bodies that are so perfect that even if they take their clothes off their bodies are sensuously held taut by muscle tone.
The invention of the notion of going braless on the top and wearing pantyhose on the bottom has changed the world of fashion. After all, a woman who doesn’t need a bra and who is sheathed below in gauze does have complete freedom of movement. For all intents and purposes, she is naked, and that’s what designers want.
It is perfectly clear in the fashion magazines that designers are only interested in customers who are lithe, who have nothing to hide, who are “comfortable” with their liberated bodies. Little black classic dinner suits worn by models who are eighteen years old, little tailored jackets with only one button and that will reveal absolutely everything if the model inclines her body a mere forty-five degrees forward, see-through fabrics, and slit skirts-all these standard elements of good design have one kind of woman in mind. She is a size 6, she is without a false sense of modesty; she buys clothes not to keep warm or conform to social custom but rather to add a touch of color to her look, or to set off her green eyes, or to complement a new and outrageous shade of nail polish.
Fiorucci designers are no different. They also believe that clothes are really created only to liven up a dull-but-perfect naked size-6 body. Fiorucci clothes are designed to be worn only by beautiful young girls with long slim legs. (The pants Fiorucci makes are cut extra long so they’ll fit these perfect girls.) Elio Fiorucci admits his preference for slim girls: “To manufacture only small sizes is doing a favor for humanity. I prevent ugly girls from showing off their bad figures” (374-5).
Fashion eclecticism of course is a very Fiorucci idea. Nothing in Fiorucci is really original, except that it all is. Everything comes from something or somewhere else, and that’s the way it is supposed to be. The Fiorucci people are information junkies. They gather information the way squirrels gather nuts, against a future use. Everything-the clothes, the graphics, the store fixtures-is all derivative.
Fiorucci people like to collect what they call “mass-culture facts.” A mass-culture fact is a piece of the culture observed. For example, the emergence of rock music as a major force in the youth culture is a mass-culture fact. The ecology movement as a seductive political cause is a mass-culture fact. The new interest in utilitarian and highly functional design is a mass-culture fact. On their own, mass-culture facts are interesting. Connected to fashion, they become inspiration. Fiorucci designers observed the new interest in utilitarian simplicity, and they turned jeans into a fashion item. They observed, firsthand in Milan, the advent of terrorism as a political tool, and they invented brightly colored parachute-cloth jumpsuits. They turned workmen’s lunch boxes into purses, in both plastic and in metal. Industrial goggles became sunglasses. Overalls now came in turquoise and it-hurts-my-eyes acid yellow.
Nothing is sacred. The Fiorucci designers are masters at taking an ordinary object or material and turning it into something else, and that something else is usually fashion. (Although Fiorucci has experimented with manufacturing nonfashion items. They have made dinnerwear, ashtrays, clocks, and other household items. Nothing fazes them. At one point they even designed, but never produced, a line of cigarettes.) At Fiorucci, design is whim, and whim is fashion.
One of the favorite words in the Fiorucci design lexicon is “recycle.” It means reuse, change, reassemble, reinvent. It means thinking in modular units. Recycling is the central principle of design at Fiorucci, and like most other things at Fiorucci, it is best explained by example. While I was in Milan the designers were experimenting with using the pebbled rubber material found on Ping-Pong paddles. They were only at the prototype stage, but I’m sure in six months they will have perpetrated Ping-Pong fabric vests or address books. They took a severe and strictly functional-looking military belt buckle and made it into a funny fashion item by manufacturing it in pastel-colored see-through plastic. The display box for Fiorucci sunglasses is an oversize version of an old-fashioned box of American kitchen matches. They make a $30 clutch purse out of Pirelli rubber floor material. And the ultimate Fiorucci recycle job: see-through plastic jeans. Fiorucci does more recycling than Alcoa.
If you find the concept difficult, you are on the wrong frequency. Take a deep breath, look carefully at any Fiorucci product, and think. Notice its design elements; you’re sure to have the vague feeling that you’ve seen this somewhere before. You haven’t really, but you have seen pieces of it. You’ve seen lightweight luggage made out of heavy-duty plastic cloth before, but you’ve never seen it in fluorescent colors. You’ve seen red polka dots before, but never on a $400 white leather jacket. And surely you’ve seen soap before, but never soap shaped like little macaronis. That’s recycling. And the recycling is funny. It’s what accounts for the chuckles you hear all over the store; the little shocks of recognition from pleased browsers and amused customers. They can shake their heads no all they like, as long as they walk out carrying one of those famous Fiorucci shopping bags, one of which is recycled from an old American mesh onion bag (377-9).
After the homey jumble of the inspiration room we visit the only place in all of Corsico that actually looks almost like the office of the head of a $65-million-a-year business. It is the place where Elio Fiorucci himself comes to work. Here it’s all stark and plain. Enormous windows are covered by white cotton shades to cut the industrial glare. His desk is teak and big. He has no papers anywhere, but then he has no files nor in-and-out boxes. There isn’t a hint of business in sight, unless you count a telephone with a few extra buttons. An enormous bowl filled with bourbon- and Scotch-flavored hard candies and a giant rock crystal ashtray are the room’s only nod to the human condition. Everything is the palest sand color, subdued and simple. Classico. Except for the green plastic tree with pink-and-green bows.
The placidity of Fiorucci’s office is in part due to his secretary Telma Malacrida. She is the kind of secretary, all poise and charm and savvy, that businessmen pray for and too rarely find. She appears to be in full control of the empire, all the answers at her fingertips.
People usually expect Fiorucci-the-store the first time they meet Fiorucci-the-man. But like so much here, meeting Fiorucci-the-man is a complete shock, a nice shock, but nonetheless a shock. He is dressed so conservatively that he all but fades into the muted tints of his office. His clothes, in the most reserved colors, are well made and cut from good fabrics; they are never conspicuous. “I have never dressed myself in anything coming from Fiorucci,” he has said. The look of Fiorucci-the-man is the antithesis of the look of Fiorucci-the-store. But the charm of Fiorucci-the-man is indisputable.
Elio Fiorucci, upon meeting people for the first time, is so terribly confused, sorry, and depressed that he’s not Fiorucci-the-store, that anyone expecting to meet Fiorucci-the-store is simply stunned into silence. “Oh,” Karla Otto sighed, “he is such a dear, dear man. So wanting to be friends, but so sorry that people meeting him expect things, I don’t know, you know what I mean?”
“Jazziness,” I suggest.
“Yes,” she says with relief. “Hipness. You know-worldliness. That sort of thing. He’s embarrassed to be Fiorucci in front of new people always.”
“I do not find myself a phenomenon,” Elio Fiorucci has said over and over.
He sits quietly at his giant teak desk. He is waiting for me to speak, to haul out a tape cassette or a pencil and riddle him with questions about what he thinks about important subjects. He is listening. He is perfectly available to hear anything I say.
In fact, he seems to be waiting this very moment for me to speak so he can participate by listening. And I will find that the way Fiorucci listens is more intense and concentrated and full of burning energy than most people put into telling someone they love them. His way of listening, his peculiar simplicity, naturally in the beginning confuses people into nearly being struck dumb.
The Italian I had once nearly been able to speak disappeared the moment I arrived in Milan. So usually one of the young stylists would translate for us.
“I am sometimes shy,” he says (the word in Italian is disarming: timido). “But the thing I like most is to speak with people, to communicate. I always feel embarrassed in the beginning because I never know what people expect, but I like people so much.”
Fiorucci-the-man excludes nothing, he is open to all possibilities. He listens, he watches, he travels, he asks questions. Fiorucci calls the people who work for him, that unending array of graphic artists, designers, and stylists, “technicians of taste.” And he describes what they are doing as “recomposing with taste.” They are going against the tide, creating the things they believe people yearn for in clothing. Things that “function,” things in “nonelegant colors.” Fiorucci believes that “the only vulgarity is not to be chic.”
Talking fashion philosophy with Fiorucci, however, can be as jumpy a proposition as the music in his stores, for five minutes later he is telling me that “color can be elegant.” Fiorucci believes what he is doing is providing people with a choice, that people like to be able to pick and choose, mix and match with abandon. This was what he had in mind in 1967 when he shuttled back and forth between Carnaby Street and Milan with suitcases filled with miniskirts. For at that time in Milan people who cared anything at all about fashion had two choices: high fashion or classico. High fashion was a discreetly perfect navy blue Chanel suit, the hemline held absolutely plumb with tiny brass chains sewn by hand into the silk lining of the skirt. And classico, well classico was what Fiorucci-the-man looks like today. It was, and is, down-soft cashmere, pale beiges and grays and browns, simple oxblood-colored hand-sewn loafers, snappy gabardine, and true wools.
In Milan in 1967 there was nothing in the middle. Fiorucci widened the choices, made it possible for people to go to his store and choose not just complete outfits, but bits and pieces, putting their own look together, creating their own fantasy. And about high Italian fashion Fiorucci insists, “Gucci is a no-freedom concept. By 1990 there will be no class distinctions in terms of dress or fashion. People will just wear what they want.”
“I am not a creator, I am a businessman,” he says. It is the disarming modesty that does not allow him to speak directly about the extraordinary group of people he has brought together. His collaborators, his “technicians of taste,” all attribute sheer genius to Fiorucci when it comes to picking the people to work with him (416-9).
Hippie Heaven
In the sixties going to thrift shops and dressing up in the styles of another era became de rigueur: we began recycling the past and using it to bring romance, drama, and “it’s happening” into the room with us. For very little money, girls could wear great clothes of days gone by and, because we were young and beautiful, get away with it. “Their” wives wore stuff from Paris, the couture creations that could make entrances at charity balls and opening nights at the opera, and things to wear shopping while buying other things to wear shopping.
The fact that the things in Paris now look like things you can get in the thrift stores, is, to me, amazing.
If today the women who lunch in New York are going to begin having dinner parties wearing long fringe, platform shoes, low-slung bell-bottoms, and headbands, or cut-velvet vests, brocaded-satin jacket lapels, tons of colors, tons of bracelets, and Cher-type short-skirted dresses with full sleeves and a renaissance flavor (Cher avec Bob Mackie), if thirties-style dresses by Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis cut on the bias with tons of sequins and transparent blouses, if faux-fur vests and crushed velvet from Betsey Johnson and turquoise blue gloves, if Janis Joplin-type floppy hats with ridiculous feathers return, then it’s happening, it’s happening.
But what, really, is happening?
In the early sixties, before the big buildup in Vietnam had begun and the Beatles hadn’t even left Liverpool, the polls showed that nearly 80 percent of the American public trusted the government in Washington “. . . to do the right thing.” In the summer of 1992, only 20 percent feel that way. The numbers are completely reversed. It’s hard to believe that everything we tried to free up in the sixties-the heavy-handed police dealing with “people of color,” the small minds who championed backwater values and regarded women as a “splinter group,” the ones who hated sex (or said they did, from pulpits, before they were photographed sneaking out of motels), the ones who didn’t want anyone to have fun except them, the ones who savaged the coastline with oil rigs and polluted-is still with us; it’s hard to believe that the sixties ever happened. It’s enough to make you throw out your clothes from those days, but I never did. I suffered the eighties in silence, partly because it took me a whole decade to get sober and partly because I couldn’t believe that such ugliness was so merrily multiplying. That people would forget about each other and settle for BMWs instead.
Perhaps people are just so tired of how awful everything is, they’ve given up and decided to just have fun in a cheap and simple way. We’re afraid of the environment and extinction, we’re afraid of the future, we’re afraid of “urban unrest,” and perhaps this is a way to stave off the stares of the homeless, because hippies had a great way of making being homeless seem a sensible idea. They had crash pads, and as my sister remembers, “In the sixties, panhandling meant you refused to be part of the system.”
Since today you can’t get in the system even if you’re dying to compromise your politics, recycling seems our only hope. If we can recycle the spirit of “it’s happening, it’s happening” along with those expensive clothes from Paris, maybe having fun will come back into fashion. And fun isn’t to be sneezed at. The sixties were fun. The trouble was, we thought fun was enough. But if we don’t watch out, the only people having fun are going the be the three people who own everything (288-90).
Nicolas Cage
He was born Nicolas Coppola-the son of Francis’s brother, August Coppola, a college professor-in Long Beach, California, and lived there during his childhood. His mother, Joy Vogelsang, was a dancer/choreographer. From the time he was six, “she was ill,” he said. “She was very fragile. She suffered from severe depression. She had to go away for many years at a time; she would come in and out. But she was also a very highly tuned, sensitive person, mentally capable of extraordinary expressions and words that evoked a kind of poetry, in the way she would talk. That’s the best way I can look at it, but she’s fine now.”
Nevertheless, he thought Long Beach was a great place to grow up. “I loved my childhood; things were so vibrant then.
“My first six years, my formative years of life, were from ’64 to ’70. The Beatles have always been earmarks to chapters in my life. I remember I was driving in a car with Francis [Coppola] and his family, and I must have been quite young. He was listening to ‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man,’ and the words ‘How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people’ came on, and I was thinking, ‘Yeah, he really deserves to listen to this, doesn’t he?’ He was right at the height of Godfather II, and I vowed to myself that one day I’d be able to listen to that song, too, as a reward to myself. And it wasn’t until Valley Girl came out and people liked it that I felt I deserved it” (311-2).
Girl’s Town
Ever since L.A. was invented, there has been a great battle between those who thought women should behave like they do in other places and women who didn’t think about it because they were too busy working, being in love, and not caring how they looked but rather how they felt.
From the very beginning, women coming here found that even the lowest-paid waitress was breathing the same balmy air as the richest socialite. The weather was democracy itself, and though the first women running things were the same as everywhere else, they were forgotten when the second generation began running things-women like Mary Pickford, who by the age of twenty-six, in 1919, formed her own movie company with Douglas Fairbanks, D.W. Griffith, and Charlie Chaplin. They called it United Artists so the artists could get the money.
Pickford also sold herself as “America’s sweetheart”-a nice girl content to stay home and be cute, when in reality, she was a rabid worker who had been supporting her family since she was five and known as Baby Gladys in a vaudeville act.
Unlike the rest of the world, Los Angeles was a place where girls could be inspired by the feeling that even if they didn’t wind up in a castle like Pickfair-visited by kings and queens-they were part of this same air. Even when the air turned to smog, it was still untainted by a socially stifling mind-set that insisted talented girls belonged in the demimonde-never the monde itself (316-7).
FIORUCCI: THE BOOK
The floors in Fiorucci shops are wood, light hard oak. Light fixtures are naked. Being inside Fiorucci is like being someplace before it’s ready. Fiorucci practically invented high tech, or at least they were the first to go commercial with it. Early in the 1970s, the first stores, designed by the Fiorucci in-house architects and the graphic-arts department, pioneered the clean, spare, industrial look that is now so vogue in shops everywhere. Though at first the idea of using laboratory beakers as drinking glasses and industrial metal shelves in your bedroom for your marabou negligees may seem like this-time-they’ve-gone-too-far, sooner or later one must admit that at least high tech works: it doesn’t fall apart the way most things do. Not even-and in Fiorucci this is a real plus-from stage fright. For everything in Fiorucci is on stage. The lights are often turned up very bright; one is invited to peer as closely as one wants at every detail, one is almost forced to. Unlike other high-priced shops where a kind of supernatural calm is imposed by soft wall-to-wall carpeting, soft music, and restrained flattering lighting and even the racks must appear discreet, Fiorucci is selling energetic, adrenaline-driven jokes.
What America sells is itself: American know-how and Coca-Cola. What Milan does is sell you what you already have, only better. In Italy, everything is designed, even bathroom fixtures; everything is a work of art. So it really should not be a surprise that it was Fiorucci of Milan who finally came up with a way to sell America back to America, to sell American jeans that cost three times as much as Levi’s but are so well designed-or redesigned-that once anyone tries them on, that is that.
In 1977, Fiorucci was featuring four main items in its line: jeans, sweatshirts, T-shirts, and windbreakers. L.L. Bean in high gear. Gianfranco Rossi, who is Fiorucci’s executive vice-president in charge of business and who now spends most of his time in New York commented, with a smile, on the line: “It was American. Only now it is designed right. Now it is Fiorucci of Milan.”
The Fiorucci phenomenon. Take an old idea, redesign it, sell it back. Or better yet, take an old idea and recycle it into a new one. In the color spectrum of human endeavor, there are those at the indigo end who wish that everything would be ultimately stationary and last forever. And then there are those opposite at the bright-red end who believe that a day without ninety-seven fresh ideas is a day without sunshine. At Fiorucci, old ideas and new ideas are woven into fresh patterns and turned into flying carpets that sometimes shoot by so quickly that they are forgotten almost before they have happened.
Elio Fiorucci, president and guiding genius, and everyone who works for him, is constantly vigilant day and night, keeping a close eye on teenagers and anyone else they see who is the least bit interesting. They are looking for any new idea, any imagination in style that might possibly be incorporated into the Fiorucci look. The fastenings on a child’s snowsuit. The spirit of a seventy-five-cent paper birthday tablecloth. Everything is constantly changing at Fiorucci. That’s the appeal. The success of Fiorucci is that if you ever become hooked, you’ll need to come back all the time, if only just to look.
Employees are given their head to travel around the world; they are shopping for ideas new enough for Fiorucci. When Elio Fiorucci hears that Milanese friends are about to embark on a business trip or vacation to Tahiti or South America, he takes them aside for a hushed impromptu conference and instructs them to keep their eyes open and send back anything, any little thing they see that might be of interest, to them, to him, to their children, anybody.
People who work for Fiorucci two years in Milan are encouraged to move to a Fiorucci somewhere else and stay two years to gain a new language and more friends; that way they’ll have more access to new ideas. Even people who quit and go to work elsewhere seem to gravitate back after a year or so, using the knowledge they gained working in “the outside world” to enforce and strengthen Fiorucci with the very latest in business advances, research, and design.
Unlike some companies, Fiorucci does not harbor wrathful resentment toward people who leave; instead Fiorucci seems to regard anyone who ever worked for the firm as family, welcome always to return home, but please bring new ideas of course, for new ideas are what Fiorucci is all about. Everything needs to change-and often.
It’s all part of the Fiorucci phenomenon, whatever that is. The Fiorucci phenomenon-the concept, the image-is almost impossible to pin down. If you don’t understand and have to ask, you’ll never know. It’s like asking someone to explain a peach.
But people do know. If they care about fashion, if they’re between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five and they aren’t complete sticks-in-the-mud, if they read fashion magazines, if they live in New York or Beverly Hills or Boston or Tokyo or London or Rio, they know. Even if they don’t live in those places or read those magazines, they know. Whenever something totally outrageous comes along in fashion these days, people always think it is something from Fiorucci, even when it’s not. There is a new adjective in the fashion world: things are described as being “very Fiorucci.”
And then there are always the stores. If you still need a definition, go into one of them; they’re like photo emulsions. If you’ve got the ability to pick up from the negative, you pick up. Some people just don’t. But even people who don’t like the stores, or can’t understand them, can always pick up something, a vibe, the music. And then, through that one thing you kind of get plugged into a network. Even the straightest, squarest person can find one little piece of merchandise or one little design detail to like. And then the whole thing just opens up for them. Suddenly it is all very familiar, and very Fiorucci.
Incredibly sexy young women who sing rock and roll onstage or get photographed for magazines wear Fiorucci, just as incredibly sexy older women at chic discos wear Halston and incredibly sexy Las Vegas bombshells wear Bob Mackie.
Celebrities arrive in limos to buy Fiorucci. Halston patrols the aisles to check out how the other half dresses. Andy Warhol is a friend of the store, a regular. Diane von Furstenberg and Jackie O buy their T-shirts at Fiorucci. And fourteen-year-olds hang out there. Wherever there is Fiorucci, there are kids.
To define a fashion outlook that appeals to rock stars, socialites, teenagers in from the suburbs, punks, and upper-middle-class fashion watchers is perilous. Elio Fiorucci himself refuses to enter the fray. As far as he is concerned, he says, “Fiorucci is either accepted or rejected.” It doesn’t matter which. They keep coming, and everybody has a good time. Controversy sells plastic evening dresses, and jeans. People are curious about what is going on out there in the future.
Picasso once said, “I make things first, others follow me and make them pretty.” The creator or originator of ideas doesn’t have to be the one to smooth off the corners and soften the edges; he is too busy doing more important things. Something of this philosophy also belongs to Fiorucci; many new ideas are presented first in Fiorucci stores, where they cause an outrage. Months, or years, later the same ideas appear in other stores, made pretty and even bearable by the passage of time.
To some who loathe Fiorucci and reject the entire place as a sordid example of fashion hype at its least appealing, the notion that they’ll be wearing (perhaps in vastly toned-down shades and vastly toned-up fabrics) the very designs that Fiorucci is splattering all over his windows in multiples seems a terrible truth almost too depressing to think about.
“I go into that store,” one fashionable New York woman says, “just to get myself ready for the outrages I’m going to have to endure in two years. Because I know once it’s in Fiorucci, it’s coming, and there’s no getting around it.”
Interestingly, the Fiorucci phenomenon is criticized and rejected for reasons that are hard to explain.
“Fiorucci is very Carnaby Street and out-of-date,” one young man told me, “and it’s very directional.” Which means, I found out with some difficulty, “everybody else will be showing it next year.” Fiorucci is directional, and you either like that or you don’t. So we arrive back at the original Fiorucci paradox. It is out-of-date and also the coming thing.
Two other frequently heard criticisms of Fiorucci may help confound the issue. More than two people have said to me: “Fiorucci is terrible now. Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too popular.” A complicated idea. And the other common, convoluted criticism: “Everything in Fiorucci is just cheap junk. It’s like a dime store-everything costs two dollars. And everything is so expensive there. They’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve charging those kinds of prices.”
Obviously, ever so obviously, Fiorucci is the newest wave (360-70).
THE FIORUCCI LOOK
In the world of high fashion, clothing designers all believe that the women who wear their clothes won’t wreck the line by being larger than a size 10. All the women who wear the clothes will have bodies that are so perfect that even if they take their clothes off their bodies are sensuously held taut by muscle tone.
The invention of the notion of going braless on the top and wearing pantyhose on the bottom has changed the world of fashion. After all, a woman who doesn’t need a bra and who is sheathed below in gauze does have complete freedom of movement. For all intents and purposes, she is naked, and that’s what designers want.
It is perfectly clear in the fashion magazines that designers are only interested in customers who are lithe, who have nothing to hide, who are “comfortable” with their liberated bodies. Little black classic dinner suits worn by models who are eighteen years old, little tailored jackets with only one button and that will reveal absolutely everything if the model inclines her body a mere forty-five degrees forward, see-through fabrics, and slit skirts-all these standard elements of good design have one kind of woman in mind. She is a size 6, she is without a false sense of modesty; she buys clothes not to keep warm or conform to social custom but rather to add a touch of color to her look, or to set off her green eyes, or to complement a new and outrageous shade of nail polish.
Fiorucci designers are no different. They also believe that clothes are really created only to liven up a dull-but-perfect naked size-6 body. Fiorucci clothes are designed to be worn only by beautiful young girls with long slim legs. (The pants Fiorucci makes are cut extra long so they’ll fit these perfect girls.) Elio Fiorucci admits his preference for slim girls: “To manufacture only small sizes is doing a favor for humanity. I prevent ugly girls from showing off their bad figures” (374-5).
Fashion eclecticism of course is a very Fiorucci idea. Nothing in Fiorucci is really original, except that it all is. Everything comes from something or somewhere else, and that’s the way it is supposed to be. The Fiorucci people are information junkies. They gather information the way squirrels gather nuts, against a future use. Everything-the clothes, the graphics, the store fixtures-is all derivative.
Fiorucci people like to collect what they call “mass-culture facts.” A mass-culture fact is a piece of the culture observed. For example, the emergence of rock music as a major force in the youth culture is a mass-culture fact. The ecology movement as a seductive political cause is a mass-culture fact. The new interest in utilitarian and highly functional design is a mass-culture fact. On their own, mass-culture facts are interesting. Connected to fashion, they become inspiration. Fiorucci designers observed the new interest in utilitarian simplicity, and they turned jeans into a fashion item. They observed, firsthand in Milan, the advent of terrorism as a political tool, and they invented brightly colored parachute-cloth jumpsuits. They turned workmen’s lunch boxes into purses, in both plastic and in metal. Industrial goggles became sunglasses. Overalls now came in turquoise and it-hurts-my-eyes acid yellow.
Nothing is sacred. The Fiorucci designers are masters at taking an ordinary object or material and turning it into something else, and that something else is usually fashion. (Although Fiorucci has experimented with manufacturing nonfashion items. They have made dinnerwear, ashtrays, clocks, and other household items. Nothing fazes them. At one point they even designed, but never produced, a line of cigarettes.) At Fiorucci, design is whim, and whim is fashion.
One of the favorite words in the Fiorucci design lexicon is “recycle.” It means reuse, change, reassemble, reinvent. It means thinking in modular units. Recycling is the central principle of design at Fiorucci, and like most other things at Fiorucci, it is best explained by example. While I was in Milan the designers were experimenting with using the pebbled rubber material found on Ping-Pong paddles. They were only at the prototype stage, but I’m sure in six months they will have perpetrated Ping-Pong fabric vests or address books. They took a severe and strictly functional-looking military belt buckle and made it into a funny fashion item by manufacturing it in pastel-colored see-through plastic. The display box for Fiorucci sunglasses is an oversize version of an old-fashioned box of American kitchen matches. They make a $30 clutch purse out of Pirelli rubber floor material. And the ultimate Fiorucci recycle job: see-through plastic jeans. Fiorucci does more recycling than Alcoa.
If you find the concept difficult, you are on the wrong frequency. Take a deep breath, look carefully at any Fiorucci product, and think. Notice its design elements; you’re sure to have the vague feeling that you’ve seen this somewhere before. You haven’t really, but you have seen pieces of it. You’ve seen lightweight luggage made out of heavy-duty plastic cloth before, but you’ve never seen it in fluorescent colors. You’ve seen red polka dots before, but never on a $400 white leather jacket. And surely you’ve seen soap before, but never soap shaped like little macaronis. That’s recycling. And the recycling is funny. It’s what accounts for the chuckles you hear all over the store; the little shocks of recognition from pleased browsers and amused customers. They can shake their heads no all they like, as long as they walk out carrying one of those famous Fiorucci shopping bags, one of which is recycled from an old American mesh onion bag (377-9).
After the homey jumble of the inspiration room we visit the only place in all of Corsico that actually looks almost like the office of the head of a $65-million-a-year business. It is the place where Elio Fiorucci himself comes to work. Here it’s all stark and plain. Enormous windows are covered by white cotton shades to cut the industrial glare. His desk is teak and big. He has no papers anywhere, but then he has no files nor in-and-out boxes. There isn’t a hint of business in sight, unless you count a telephone with a few extra buttons. An enormous bowl filled with bourbon- and Scotch-flavored hard candies and a giant rock crystal ashtray are the room’s only nod to the human condition. Everything is the palest sand color, subdued and simple. Classico. Except for the green plastic tree with pink-and-green bows.
The placidity of Fiorucci’s office is in part due to his secretary Telma Malacrida. She is the kind of secretary, all poise and charm and savvy, that businessmen pray for and too rarely find. She appears to be in full control of the empire, all the answers at her fingertips.
People usually expect Fiorucci-the-store the first time they meet Fiorucci-the-man. But like so much here, meeting Fiorucci-the-man is a complete shock, a nice shock, but nonetheless a shock. He is dressed so conservatively that he all but fades into the muted tints of his office. His clothes, in the most reserved colors, are well made and cut from good fabrics; they are never conspicuous. “I have never dressed myself in anything coming from Fiorucci,” he has said. The look of Fiorucci-the-man is the antithesis of the look of Fiorucci-the-store. But the charm of Fiorucci-the-man is indisputable.
Elio Fiorucci, upon meeting people for the first time, is so terribly confused, sorry, and depressed that he’s not Fiorucci-the-store, that anyone expecting to meet Fiorucci-the-store is simply stunned into silence. “Oh,” Karla Otto sighed, “he is such a dear, dear man. So wanting to be friends, but so sorry that people meeting him expect things, I don’t know, you know what I mean?”
“Jazziness,” I suggest.
“Yes,” she says with relief. “Hipness. You know-worldliness. That sort of thing. He’s embarrassed to be Fiorucci in front of new people always.”
“I do not find myself a phenomenon,” Elio Fiorucci has said over and over.
He sits quietly at his giant teak desk. He is waiting for me to speak, to haul out a tape cassette or a pencil and riddle him with questions about what he thinks about important subjects. He is listening. He is perfectly available to hear anything I say.
In fact, he seems to be waiting this very moment for me to speak so he can participate by listening. And I will find that the way Fiorucci listens is more intense and concentrated and full of burning energy than most people put into telling someone they love them. His way of listening, his peculiar simplicity, naturally in the beginning confuses people into nearly being struck dumb.
The Italian I had once nearly been able to speak disappeared the moment I arrived in Milan. So usually one of the young stylists would translate for us.
“I am sometimes shy,” he says (the word in Italian is disarming: timido). “But the thing I like most is to speak with people, to communicate. I always feel embarrassed in the beginning because I never know what people expect, but I like people so much.”
Fiorucci-the-man excludes nothing, he is open to all possibilities. He listens, he watches, he travels, he asks questions. Fiorucci calls the people who work for him, that unending array of graphic artists, designers, and stylists, “technicians of taste.” And he describes what they are doing as “recomposing with taste.” They are going against the tide, creating the things they believe people yearn for in clothing. Things that “function,” things in “nonelegant colors.” Fiorucci believes that “the only vulgarity is not to be chic.”
Talking fashion philosophy with Fiorucci, however, can be as jumpy a proposition as the music in his stores, for five minutes later he is telling me that “color can be elegant.” Fiorucci believes what he is doing is providing people with a choice, that people like to be able to pick and choose, mix and match with abandon. This was what he had in mind in 1967 when he shuttled back and forth between Carnaby Street and Milan with suitcases filled with miniskirts. For at that time in Milan people who cared anything at all about fashion had two choices: high fashion or classico. High fashion was a discreetly perfect navy blue Chanel suit, the hemline held absolutely plumb with tiny brass chains sewn by hand into the silk lining of the skirt. And classico, well classico was what Fiorucci-the-man looks like today. It was, and is, down-soft cashmere, pale beiges and grays and browns, simple oxblood-colored hand-sewn loafers, snappy gabardine, and true wools.
In Milan in 1967 there was nothing in the middle. Fiorucci widened the choices, made it possible for people to go to his store and choose not just complete outfits, but bits and pieces, putting their own look together, creating their own fantasy. And about high Italian fashion Fiorucci insists, “Gucci is a no-freedom concept. By 1990 there will be no class distinctions in terms of dress or fashion. People will just wear what they want.”
“I am not a creator, I am a businessman,” he says. It is the disarming modesty that does not allow him to speak directly about the extraordinary group of people he has brought together. His collaborators, his “technicians of taste,” all attribute sheer genius to Fiorucci when it comes to picking the people to work with him (416-9).