Still Breathing

by Donnelly, Anthony; Donnelly, Christopher; Spence, Simon

  Christopher: Testino was one of the world’s most famous photographers. I knew we couldn’t take our normal jeans and T-shirts so I went digging through all the boxes of samples we had to find something which actually suited the photo shoot. I had some self-doubt sitting in the car on the way and Anthony was going, ‘I’ve done my bit. It’s over to you.’

  It was all that lovey-dovey-kiss-everybody vibe. At first I was thinking, ‘Is our product going to be right?’ But as soon as I saw the Dior product, I thought, ‘We are home and free here,’ the blag was already done and dusted. We walked in and they had this long table that had all posh food on it. Anthony said, ‘Fuck me, is this a wedding?’

  They asked, ‘What are you putting Peter in?’ and the easiest answer to that was, ‘Peter will wear whatever he’s comfortable in – we know all the stuff is right, that’s what we’re about.’ We didn’t know any of that stuff but that’s what I said. ‘Everything here is right.’ And a lot of the shots that Testino actually used were all Gio-Goi product. We hijacked the whole thing. I filmed it all.

  Doherty appeared on the cover of Vogue in Gio-Goi in March 2007. He continued to lurch from scandal to scandal, often in Gio-Goi, but still seemed eminently blessed. In April it was announced Moss had become his fiancée. It was short-lived and by July the pair had broken up.

  Anthony: When they said they were getting married, we were making his suit. It was the saddest thing for me watching Peter self-destruct with Kate on his arm. We went to Glastonbury with them in 2007 and made them Gio-Goi bikes that they rode around on. I think we took the last pictures of them together. Although they had their problems I thought they looked great together. After that we were seeing less of him. His management were taking it more seriously.

  The marketing budget for Gio around that time was vast and it was my intention to spend as much on marketing as humanly possible. I lived a very, very affluent lifestyle. I was going to Cream in Ibiza and turning up with twelve people and getting massive bar bills. I took my Range Rover over there and parked it in the sea on several occasions. It was general bad behaviour. I had the time of my life.

  Christopher: We did a catwalk show with Ibiza Rocks [in San Antonio’s hottest new bar]. We were getting loads of interest from all over. Dawn, who was one quarter of [famously debauched Ibiza club night] Manumission, had started Ibiza Rocks with her fella Andy. The business paid for Anthony to stay in Ibiza for the summer making connections. We collaborated with Ibiza Rocks on some T-shirts and they were a big success. I made a decision that we needed to be in Ibiza with loads of branding. I got in touch with [Cream boss] James Barton, who was with us first time around. We struck a deal where I did his merchandise for exposure at his Ibiza night in Amnesia. I supplied them with load of graphics off the T-shirts, stuff like ‘Peace, Love and Doves’ and the next thing we were in Amnesia being flashed up on twenty screens. It was pumping, 7,000 people in there, with Gio-Goi on all the screens, the graphics spinning round. It was a big moment. Cream was the biggest superclub in the world.

  We were still stocked in independents but we were also in large chains now. We were making a commercial brand but keeping it cool by doing the craziest shit with the marketing. I know for a fact other labels were having marketing meetings and showing all the stuff we were doing, all our videos, images, and saying we need to be like this brand. No one could touch us. [Record label] Def Jam wanted to have a meeting. I was in Vegas and they wanted me to fly to LA.

  The world was closed first time around, mobile phones had only just come out, there was no YouTube. Now everything was open. Our pals were running All Saints, and they asked if we could do anything for them. We did a few little photo shoots. We shot them on the same day as Gio. We’d shoot Peter in Gio gear and then All Saints. We did two video edits, one for Gio and one for All Saints. [The Donnellys also brought The Kaiser Chiefs, Rhys Ifans, The Kills and The Fratellis to All Saints.] [Superstar DJ] Sasha wore Gio; we’d known him from day one. [French producer and DJ] David Guetta was interested in doing his clothing line with us. It was not about what the person did, it was about what they were. Why dress Alex Higgins? Because he was as rock ’n’ roll as it got and that was what we saw the brand as. We dressed Mike Skinner from The Streets [for Gio-Goi]. They were playing Manchester and the lads came down to the office and we kitted them out. We sent a load of gear down to Mike and a [branded] low-rider bike to ride on stage. There’s a video of him trying to ride it on stage. He smashed it into a speaker. Mike had gone from wearing polo shirts and T-shirts to wearing suits on stage so he didn’t wear our gear. The rest of the band did. Mike wore it later on and sent us some pictures.

  Anthony: We started getting sent random pictures from around the world. Sienna Miller walking in LA in a Gio T-shirt, Scarlett Johansson was wearing it, Mark Ronson, Jenny McCarthy – Jim Carey’s wife – did a shoot in Hollywood. We hit it off with Kid Rock at MTV Awards and he loved our vibe. We were introduced to Jason Statham. It was a constant flow of people getting in touch. Sara Cox was into it, Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas liked the label: ‘Can we get something over to the States?’ Fergie then did a shoot wearing Gio-Goi. Amy Sacco from Bungalow 8 – she’d just opened a club in London; Victoria Hervey; Daniel Craig – he was just walking down the road and Gordon Smart saw he had a Gio coat on and in The Sun he put, ‘Even James Bond is wearing the gear now.’

  Because we’d been going down that indie front with Peter, we decided we had to resurrect that football terrace vibe. My mate Scully introduced us to Tom [Meighan, the singer in Kasabian] and took me to meet him in Leicester. The easiest place to meet him was sat on the seats in the bus stop outside a store that we supplied with clothes. Tom walking up dressed immaculately. We just had some beer in a bag. Kasabian had recently been offered a big deal from a major brand to model for them, so Tom and Kasabian were big news. We never went through the correct channels, it wasn’t done through management; there was no hair or make-up. We walked in the store with Tom, he got his kit off, we cracked off 200 pictures and went to the pub. Tom said he liked the striped scarf I was wearing that Chris had got me for my birthday. He said it was like John Lennon’s, and that was what I gave him, a scarf. He was as cool as he looks, a real gentleman, a real man’s man. We have since become great pals with his manager Coyney [John Coyne], who we respect massively so all contact now goes through him.

  Then I got it in my mind that I would target Rhys Ifans and Liam Gallagher to go with the Kasabian photos. I wanted to use a photo of them all showing the badge on the same Gio coat that was like a Stone Island type badge – it was more of a laddy garment than an indie garment. I’d made friends with Rhys on several pissed-up occasions. I’d supplied him with clothes for his band, Chrystal Peth, when they were making a video. He rang me to say thanks and said, ‘If I can ever do anything …’ He was photographed in a pub with the jacket on.

  The same day Liam was in a pub in Primrose Hill. Liam was wearing a lot of our gear when Oasis first came out with Definitely Maybe. He wore it in the video for ‘Live Forever’.

  The first time Liam met Chris was in the heat of the Oasis thing. Chris was wearing a white plastic Stone Island jacket and Liam came over, pleased to meet us. He said, ‘I love your coat.’ Our style was always wearing the button-up, wear your coat high, and treat your coat as a jumper. Two days later Liam was in the paper with the same coat on. We were the first rocking that style. Liam copied it from us.

  So Liam went to the toilets and did an impromptu photo shoot with the garment on. Now I had the three. I got in touch with Gordon Smart at The Sun and we were away again [October 2007, the photos of the three stars in the same Gio-Goi jacket featured as a picture spread]. That appealed to a whole different audience. We had more stars than Glastonbury on our books.

  Christopher: The brand crossed all genres. You could go to the football and see a load of football lads in Stone Island and they’d have a Gio hat or a T-shirt on. That same day you could go see Peter play in tow
n, or any indie band, and you’d see a kid in a black leather jacket, skinny jeans, a Gio T-shirt and a pair of winkle-pickers. At the same time we’d be sending gear to America for the hip-hop stars like the Wu-Tang Clan. It was the coolest brand around. Amy Winehouse wore the gear. She was famous for all the right reasons then. She was playing the Academy in Manchester and we’d done some ladies’ T-shirts, vests and stuff. I didn’t go down. I think Anthony took some stuff down and Amy put it on straight away and took a couple of pictures. She may have been friends with Peter at that time, I’m not sure.

  Anthony: We bumped into her at a festival. Amy was on our bus and the tour managers said, ‘We’re in Manchester next week. Come down.’ When it came to it, I was on the phone and I said to Rhianwen, ‘Just go down there and have a chat with Amy.’ Rhianwen and her mate went in and got talking to her. Amy was saying how lonely she was, then she stripped off good as gold and put the T-shirts on. They could clearly see she’d been self-harming. I went back and told the manager about the images, told him we’d airbrush the scars out. We did it and then we put the images in the paper.

  I picked her up in a golf buggy six weeks later at V Festival. Peter had played a separate stage and then he’d gone on the bus to see Amy. We don’t put the words with these photos but they said Amy was the face of our women’s wear. She was a fan of Chris and me, she liked what we were about. Chris had got his bits going on too. He’s working with Calvin Harris. I was walking in with David Bentley, Ledley King, Wes Brown … it was non-stop.

  Christopher: A pal told us about this kid he was going to sign called Calvin Harris [who recently created a new UK record with eight top ten hits from one album]. I had his album, I Created Disco, nine months before it came out. Calvin came to the office because he wanted to design some clothes – tracksuit tops in really bright colours. I made all these tops for him and put his lyrics on them. I also did him a load of T-shirts when his first single off the album, ‘Vegas’, came out. We did all this stuff for him and in return we wanted pictures. His direct manager didn’t want him to put any clothes on and I shoehorned him into this Gio T-shirt. While he was saying, ‘I don’t think my manager wants me to wear this’ and his manager was saying, ‘I’m not really sure,’ I said to the photographer, ‘Take as many photos of him as you can while I’m sorting this out.’ He grabbed about sixty images. We actually went on to have quite a nice and long relationship with Calvin – he was wearing Gio for quite a while.

  We catch them early and get our pictures early. A lot of the time it was me with my ear to the ground, or our close friends who worked for record labels. It was the same with The Enemy or The View, all of them.

  Anthony: Keith Allen is a long-standing friend of ours. He rang me the day he first heard ‘Smile’ [Lily Allen’s debut hit single]. He played it me from the car. He said, ‘My daughter Lily is going to be huge.’ She was on top of her game and we got the stamp of approval from her. Our partners at Melville said, ‘The ladies’ wear is not doing as well as the menswear. We really need a face. Can you do anything with it?’

  My friend Scully rang Lily. I rang Keith. We jumped in the car with a camera and a few other bits and we went down to Keith’s. He’s got a beautiful place in the country. Lily was asleep, she got up, she came out, all relaxed, and we had a great night – and got the photos we needed.

  ‘Sales are going through the roof,’ Gio-Goi co-founder Anthony Donnelly, 42, told Reuters in an interview at the label’s brand new London offices. ‘In the last two years we have achieved what it takes other brands twenty years to do,’ said brother and co-founder Christopher, 39. Gio-Goi now ranks among the top three selling streetwear brands in Britain. With a staff of about thirty, they moved to a new London office earlier this year, and the label is now selling in Greece, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Benelux. It is also planning to tackle the United States and Japan soon. Pete Doherty, an icon of the new generation of rock musicians, has helped Gio-Goi capture the market of ‘indie kids with skinny pants’, said Christopher. The Donnellys say they were convinced Doherty, formerly of The Libertines, was right for their rock ’n’ roll brand, as they often work with high-profile bad boys of the music industry. ‘We target rock ’n’ roll types. We have always chosen that route,’ said Christopher, fondly displaying a framed Union Jack flag with the motto ‘The whole world is our playground’, a souvenir of the making of a Babyshambles video.

  The Donnellys insist that they did not pay Doherty to wear their clothes, describing the contract they have with him as a ‘gentleman’s handshake’. ‘We do not pay people to wear our clothes. That’s one of our principles. A lot of people out there like Peter, Mike Skinner or Kasabian, they like what we are about, they get the clothes and association with the brand … Peter likes the clothes and we like him. That’s it,’ said Anthony. Gio-Goi is also currently dressing British singer Amy Winehouse for her world tour with their newly launched ladies’ wear collection.

  Christopher: The press were calling us the naughtiest label in the country. We were all over the world. We were stocked in hundreds of stores in the UK alone. We were in Brazil, Karachi, all over the world. In two years, turnover had gone from £30,000 to £575,000 to now we were turning over multi-millions. Sales in 2008–2009 were £19 million. At this stage we were looking at our partners Melville, thinking this is where they’re going to come into their own. They always said, ‘You watch, when the business gets to a certain point, you watch how we take it to the next level.’

  12

  FAST TRACK 100

  Christopher: Anthony and me acquired a pub in Camden called the Prince of Wales. We didn’t want a pub but we needed somewhere to do business. It became apparent that the corporate environment at the London office Melville had set up wasn’t for us and it wasn’t good for the brand or our reputation. We’d take Doherty to the London office and he’d be off his tits peddling a bike around and there’d be people sat around on computers. We thought it was hilarious but the MD was going, ‘We can’t have this.’ Why? All the staff were laughing and loving it. They think they’ve come to work for this wild brand and the London office looks like a call centre. Why try and subdue a great atmosphere – we weren’t a doctor’s surgery.

  So, these kids approached us and they said they’d done a deal on a pub but they couldn’t complete because they had no money. So we said we’d do it. We put the money down for the pub and refurbished it with Brian Duffy. He’d been making the stands for our trade shows in Berlin and Barcelona. We refurbished the pub but kept the original style. I’d had my fortieth birthday there before we did it up. Everyone said they loved the pub as it was, but it was minging. We spent thousands on making it exactly the same. We put new carpets in but the same as were already in. We got all the furniture re-covered same as the original – it still had that old pub feeling. It was a great success. Finley Quaye did a night there called Cherry Cola, there was another great night called Shit The Bed, and we put our own nights on when we invited everyone out of the industry, say at Christmas, and thirty or forty clothing companies would come.

  Anthony: It was an A-list haunt. Noel Gallagher, Sadie Frost, Pixie Geldof, Erin O’Connor, Carl Barat, Jade Jagger and David Walliams were there. We went in there and refurbished it. It was doing fuck all, it was three men on stools and the owner opened it when he fancied having a drink with his mates.

  Noel came to the opening night. It was all good fun. If you asked for a vodka you got a bottle of vodka in an ice bucket and six glasses. It lost money but people came out of there very happy. It was voted the coolest rock ’n’ roll pub in Britain by Loaded. Even our decorator was rock ’n’ roll – Bobby Gillespie’s brother, Graham. Jon McClure did a little set at the opening night. Steve Craddock played there. The Hawley Arms, where Amy drank, was round the corner. She’d come up to our pub. We kept bumping into her in the Monarch chip shop buying kebabs. The manager of our pub was dating Amy’s stylist, so the relationship with Amy went on. Shit The Bed was a g
reat night. There’d be Tom Wright, Mischa Barton, Alice Dellal, the supermodel for Victoria’s Secret, Davinia Murphy and David Gardner – they’d lost a big diamond ring and they were on the floor looking for it one night. It was found and given back to them.

  The label was becoming more mainstream. It was certainly not as underground as it once was and we were trying to balance a mainstream brand that was doing tens of millions and a cool underground vibe. That was what the pub was all about.

  Christopher: At this point I’d stepped away from doing the clothes and was working more toward PR and marketing. After a while that suited me, but at the beginning I wasn’t happy with some of the clothes being made. But you personally can’t like everything, can you? You have to let things go. But some of the slogans that they would put out on T-shirts began to annoy us. There was an old track out by E-Zee Possee and MC Kinky, ‘Everything Starts With an E’, and they put a T-shirt out that said ‘Everything begins with an E’ – just naff and obvious. We felt they were trying to turn Gio into something it wasn’t and then they even started bringing people in to do marketing. Every brand in the country was copying us, the marketing that Anthony and me were doing, but the Melville corporate animal started saying we want to be glitzy and glam. That’s not what it was about, but they started to take it down that road. The business had grown so big so quickly they couldn’t cope with the finance … their arses had gone. They had started looking for other investors.

  Anthony and me were being used as a smokescreen. Every manufacturer and investor who came along Melville would pull out the portfolio from the pub, pictures of Amy, Peter, Kate, Calvin, all the stuff we were doing … that’s how they were selling it but we were being ostracised. That was a big mistake on their part.

  Anthony: People loved the attitude and realism behind the brand. We had the company in that good a position Melville thought that they could do it without us. So they started to hire people in to do PR. We were running things to 2008 and now they wanted to paint us out of the picture. They asked us to dilute our shares because they had to put more money in. That was not our problem. That was their problem. We’d maxed them out. Gio was turning over nearly £40 million. I have no idea what happened to the money but they couldn’t cope so they wanted to dilute us down. We told them to go fuck themselves. In my opinion, the MD was bullying the staff. I told him to leave the staff alone or I would bully him.