I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  In 1967, when America was madly alive with the Byrds, Dylan, and LSD, and the object of dress was outrage, Milan was still as conservative and untouched as a prim private school. While America was throbbing with the Doors and Big Brother, there were no radio stations in Italy, let alone in Milan, playing the Beatles. Nothing. An utter wasteland. But you could go to Fiorucci. And hear anything. And dance to it in the aisles of the store.

  It was almost as though rock and roll and Fiorucci were plugged into the same amp. The raw, tough teenage romance, the slant on things, was identical. But the perspective was different. Fiorucci was rock and roll and merchandising combined as equals; neither ever took over completely. And the store’s involvement with rock maintains to this day a firm grip on both adolescent passion and minding the store.

  Even in the beginning, even in that first fledgling Fiorucci store, it was always all about fun. And, since from the very start Elio Fiorucci was amused by life itself and determined not to remain in the slipper-store business; he could hardly fail to be amused by London’s Carnaby Street, the quintessential 1960s look, one of the biggest popular fashion concepts of our day. Here the mods, young kids who listened to the Who and the Beatles and worked very hard so they could buy all their clothes on Carnaby Street—even if it meant sharing a one-bedroom apartment with five people—could look as chic as Jane Asher.

  Carnaby Street was Mary Quant’s hemlines refusing to believe in modesty, a store named Biba presenting its merchandise in mirrored swankiness while rock and roll played into the very cracks of the dressing rooms; raspberry-velvet-Indian everything, white lipstick. Carnaby Street was the utter dernier cri in fashion presented with an air of amused intimacy.

  The clothes would fall apart after you wore them only three times, but you only wanted to wear them three times anyway, and besides, they didn’t really cost that much so who cared. They were fun. They amused Elio Fiorucci. So he went to Carnaby Street, every weekend, and bought everything in sight. Especially miniskirts. And he sold them by the hundreds at the first Fiorucci store on the sedate Galleria Passarella.

  Soon actual miniskirts direct from Carnaby Street weren’t enough. Neither were bright plastic galoshes. The essential genius of Fiorucci begins with the genius for choosing the right people, offbeat people with the ability to look at an obviously popular idea or thing, send it through outer space and bring it back light-years ahead of where it started. That supersonic swerve in interpretation that makes something the rage, not merely popular. These people (including designer Cristina Rossi, now Elio Fiorucci’s wife) swiftly began to design Fiorucci miniskirts. And because they were from Fiorucci, by Fiorucci, they were utterly different from anything that had crossed the Channel before.

  By the early 1970s Fiorucci was not simply the rage in Italy. Although being the rage in Italy might well have been enough, especially since even then Fiorucci was still the only place you could go and hear the latest music. For in all of Italy there still wasn’t a single radio station playing Van Morrison or the Stones. Fiorucci had taken flight and was fascinating ladies and gentlemen of fashion all over Europe. America would know soon enough. Carnaby Street had not survived the unamused light of morning but Fiorucci had begun to sweep the globe.

  In 1974, Montedison, Italy’s largest multinational corporation and owner of Standa, Italy’s largest utility, bought 50 percent of Fiorucci. And while it is generally true that when such a giant buys 50 percent of anything the real flair tends to be the first thing to bite the dust, Fiorucci once again went against the grain of tradition. Fiorucci was not swallowed up by peculiar notions of corporate normalcy. The purchase by Montedison quite simply made Fiorucci even more Fiorucci. If such a thing is within understanding. The original small group of designers magically transformed themselves into a thing calling itself a design department. One shop in Milan became many stores and franchises until over three thousand shops all over the world displayed vivid little window stickers announcing that they were Authorized Fiorucci Outlets: PUNTO VENDITA AUTORIZZATO- FIORUCCI.

  For a line of clothing, for so many stores, for such a point of view to maintain a reputation for over a decade as the place to go if you come up with a weird thought or something new and wonderful, cannot be an accident. There must be something underneath, some structure that is forceful and yet subtle enough to support such ephemeral spirit and scatter it over the globe.

  What Fiorucci has done is to capture a kind of international ideal of teenage promise and bottle it. Fiorucci’s aim, the illusion it creates, is that all your conventional reservations and stubborn navy blues are nothing more than prissy hangovers from a past life that is no longer useful. We’re going to have to live on what’s left, to recycle the remnants of things past, to survive. And in this future time, which is now, we’ll be glad for a little color, a little black joke in sticky orange plastic that has been wittily designed into a belt shaped like a cat with ruby rhinestones for eyes. And we’ll be glad that instead of stores that have become browbeaten into beige, elegant subtlety, there is a store with the wisdom to produce sunglasses in purple and chartreuse with glitter rainbowing into rims the size of Cadillac fins.

  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.”

  When a woman who is a size 12, like me, goes into Fiorucci, it’s a very cold shower to find out that there aren’t even any size 10’s left; the one they had last week is already sold. A size 12 can only conclude one thing looking at all those size-6 clothes: Fiorucci clothes are really silly, and they’re not for real people anyway. For people who are a 6 or 8 or 10, the clothes in Fiorucci are designer clothes sold at cheap prices. For people larger than a size 10, it is perfectly obvious that Fiorucci clothes are nothing but a collection of sleazy, flimsy, tacky things that would fall apart if you wore them more than once and besides, who can wear them anyway?

  But it’s nice, I suppose, that somebody can wear the stuff. After all, the Fiorucci experience is not confined to wearing it. Watching other people who can dress that way and then do is something to be grateful for too.

  After the issue of size is settled, Fiorucci’s approach to fashion diverges sharply from the mainstream. Fiorucci is antifashion; it is, first and foremost, a creator of new trends
. The Fiorucci look is a delirious shambles of fragments from everywhere, every time, everything. It is easy to get confused in a Fiorucci store and conclude that they’ve gotten America and history all mixed up. They’ve piled up images from the 1950s atop the 1940s and mixed it in with the 1970s and some futuristic punk. And it is the preoccupation with glamour, with every Vargas pinup, with every B-movie starlet, with every overdone chorine, which sets the tone. In Fiorucci you are far from the elegant understatement of fine cashmere and slippery silk.

  The obsession with Frederick’s of Hollywood garishness is not a failure of education on the part of the Fiorucci design department in Milan. They know what’s cooking in the couturier world; they just don’t care. And the Fiorucci customers love them for their nerve.

  The Milan store began in 1967 as a revolutionary new idea. Elio Fiorucci wanted to provide an alternative for shoppers. He brought the youth culture from London and presented it to young people in Milan who went gaga. They had barely seen jeans and T-shirts and glitter; now they could buy it in the chic ambiance of the Galleria Passarella. The Milan customers today, thirteen years later, are almost the same people. They are young, slightly intellectual and/or artistic, a little bit “fringe” in a nice sort of way. They are the people who don’t want to become bankers. They disco, they work in the day in shops or offices, and they pride themselves on their awareness of the world outside Milan.

  In America, Fiorucci customers pride themselves on the same virtues: they are young, or young at heart; they are chic, and they like to think of themselves as being very avant-garde. In New York, wearing Fiorucci used to mean that you ran with Andy Warhol and the Interview magazine crowd, that you spent all night flouncing around discos, and that you were booked every late afternoon for art gallery openings. But Fiorucci merchandising is more sophisticated than that, and now the typical Fiorucci New York customer is practically anybody. A secretary on her lunch hour can’t resist buying a pair of $50 jeans. A wild and crazy advertising guy runs in after work to pick up a T-shirt for his weekend at the beach. A college professor buys, on sale yet, a crew-neck sweatshirt with little flowers on it. The wife of an accounting mogul breezes in and finds herself unable to resist a satin cowboy shirt with glitterized fringe. Anyone can afford something at Fiorucci and everyone wants to wear the Fiorucci look, or at least part of it. Only the fashion purists, the serious disco people, ever dress entirely in Fiorucci. Eclecticism is much more workable.

  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.

  In a way, the shopping bags are the key to the whole thing. They carry the goods, they carry the ever-changing logo, and they catalog the years of Fiorucci success marching along. The shopping bags, like everything else at Fiorucci, are designed with care; they must “represent,” with exactitude, the ideas that Fiorucci is recycling at any given time. The shopping bags are themselves a form of recycling. They carry the stuff and the image simultaneously. Their imagery is the best of Fiorucci graphics, carefully supervised by Fiorucci’s graphics department head, Franco Marabelli.

  Judging time in chunks of graphics is perfectly natural to Franco. He talks easily about various graphic phases in Fiorucci’s history. Sometimes the dates overlap, sometimes the graphics. But he always seems to be remembering some very specific notion or concept that the Fiorucci people were interested in that year. Thus, Franco talks about the Year of the Angel, because in 1979 Fiorucci produced shopping bags with an image of two Victorian cherubs looking very foxy in Lolita-style heart-shaped sunglasses.

  In 1975, Fiorucci people got interested in the ecology movement, and the graphics reflected their concern; thus, a Period of Nature. The Year of the Fruits (1978) presented lush tropical Hawaiian prints, white pants, and panama hats. (The graphic phases reflect what’s going on in Fiorucci fashion as well as being connections to mass-culture facts.)

  And then there was the Year of the Pinup, which seems to have been almost every Fiorucci year. Also the phases of time called Fiorucci Fly and Fiorucci Space, both in 1976, both having to do with mass-culture facts about spaceflight and other kinds of air travel. Recently, there has been another Airplane Period. And for the 1980s Franco predicts a Geometric Period, to be followed shortly by a Fluorescent Period.

  Take a look around you. Franco is never wrong, and he is never just talking about his own graphics presentations. Franco is a good index of the fashion future always, because he has a lot to do with making fashion at Fiorucci, which, as we all know, means it will get to the rest of us in very short order. As one Fiorucci poster puts it (this one with the angels in sunglasses). “Fiorucci,
Since 1492.” These people know what they’re doing.

  The Fiorucci phenomenon is more impressive than you might think. I asked Franco Marabelli and Mark Sawyer, who does the New York windows, to list some Fiorucci firsts, things they can remember they pioneered—notice how common these ideas have become. In the realm of merchandising and store display, which is increasingly important in this consuming-crazed society, Fiorucci was first with: flat two-dimensional wooden mannequins for in-store display; mass displays of a single item; clothes displayed pressed between two sheets of Plexiglas; “theme” windows that tell a little story or set a dramatic scene, and metal poles instead of mannequins. They didn’t invent hardwood floors, but they certainly understand what many layers of polyurethane can do.

  As pioneers in the fashion world, the Fiorucci designers are relentless front-runners. If they didn’t invent it, they rediscovered it first. Which amounts to the same thing in the fashion design business, since fashion historians are quick to point out that fashion runs in thirty-year cycles always: if it’s not the bosom being emphasized, it’s the legs, and then the bosom returns.

  The Fiorucci fashion firsts are difficult to catalog, because things happen so fast in the fashion world that it is sometimes difficult to track an idea, and because the Fiorucci people don’t care about chronology.

  They are delighted when one of their ideas becomes everybody’s idea. That’s the point. A partial list of Fiorucci firsts should suffice.

  In 1976 Fiorucci popularized gold lamé. They made it into everything: shoes, bags, boots, jeans, belts, and luggage. Ditto colored metallics. They made lamé in different colors.

  In 1977 they reintroduced fishnet stockings to a world which had sorely missed them since their last reappearance in the early 1960s. And just for the shock of it, they tried miniskirts again in 1977, but bombed with them. They’ve had to wait for everyone to catch up with them, and sure enough, miniskirts are back on the streets of New York and the runways in Paris. In 1977 they also got interested in animal skins, and suddenly everyone was wearing leopard, zebra, tiger, or snakeskin anything.