I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  Publicity is Fiorucci’s expertise and it comes their way readily just because they are Fiorucci and do sensible things like stay open for twenty-four hours so you can get your Christmas shopping done. It’s a question of style. When one remembers a few years back that one of the TV networks paid some advertising agency a million dollars to design a new logo only to discover at the unveiling that the logo was almost exactly the same as the one used by a small station in the Midwest (they’d designed it for practically no money), it pays to remember just how far an abundance of style can get you. It is one of the mysteries of this age that Fiorucci, which can’t remain the same for one minute, is always being recognized for its “image” by the media, whereas companies that lavish trillions of dollars on marketing research and psychological folderol all look alike. If you pay the right kind of attention to the right details, things like publicity seem to take care of themselves.

  Nobody at Fiorucci pays more attention to detail than Franco Marabelli, one of the original employees from Fiorucci’s early days. Besides supervising all the graphics and inventing how the stores look, Franco does lots of the actual designing himself. Clothing, posters, purses, gift items—at one point or another Franco gets involved.

  For the past several years, Franco has lived in New York City and had to speak English from morning till night, practically. He is sent out to circulate everywhere—Los Angeles, Chicago, Hong Kong, Zurich, Paris, Tokyo, Rio. Franco spins around the world like a top and poor Franco is a homebody who really would be quite glad to live in Milan and walk his dog. Only now he lives in New York and his apartment is so small the only kind of dog he can fit inside it is a teeny-weeny Lhasa-looking thing.

  “When I am back in Italy,” he told me, “I again will have a big dog. A dog I can put my arms around like this . . .” (his arms encircling an imaginary future dream dog the size of two Santa Clauses).

  “What kind of dog is that?” I asked.

  “A Great Danish,” he said. “My favorite dog. You know this breed, Great Danish?”

  When Franco zeroes in on an interesting detail, one that completely strikes his fancy and that you’ll see in two months as, say, a belt buckle, the evidence of a sighting is announced by Franco’s involuntary chè bella. Following Franco around during one of his rare earthbound periods is to be misled into thinking that the entire spectrum of the Italian language begins and ends with chè bella. Chè bellas ebb and flow, constant signs that Franco is picking up on details.

  Fiorucci doesn’t forget any of the little things, including children. Fioruccino (little Fiorucci) is a Fiorucci sentimental nicety. In the natural order of things, there is the time between birth and perhaps twelve years of age called childhood. It is the time before a person is big enough to fit into a size-6 pair of jeans and certainly before feet have made it to the satin-mule stage. It was for this time that Fioruccino, the children’s version of Fiorucci, was born.

  Fioruccino is winsome right down to the poster of a small child dressed in Chinese peasant blue, knee-deep in a vegetable patch, head buried deep inside an unfurling head of cabbage, peering fruitlessly for the exact place babies come from. In Milan, where they love babies—even babies born from cabbages—the Fiorucci store has an enormous Fioruccino department. Elegant Italian matrons outfit their bambinos here for any occasion. “Ecco. I really think Fiorucci is practically the only one who should be allowed to design children’s clothes,” one pleased mother told me. “Everything else is so boring.”

  All the other Fiorucci stores also have special small areas for Fioruccino. Fioruccino has its own shopping bags, clear plastic ones with a giant red robot or a goose looking at itself in a mirror. A Fioruccino poster will feature robots marching around on it performing homey, unindustrial tasks like sweeping floors and watering plants. A robot dog in the far corner of the poster is observing their spacey domesticity. Fioruccino clothing is somewhat miniaturized grown-up Fiorucci, the milder sort. It’s vivid little T-shirts and sweatshirts, practical little overalls in sassy colors, socks with silly trim. With Fioruccino clothes, again the detail is the thing.

  THE STORES

  You can tell you’ve arrived at Fiorucci before you walk in. The windows are spectacular. You absolutely have to stop and stare. Something is different here; something is going on. They’re peculiar, not like other windows. In the 1960s what went on in Fiorucci was called a happening; that word isn’t au courant anymore, and we don’t seem to have come up with another. But it is still going on at Fiorucci, only more so. And weirder.

  On Valentine’s Day in 1979, the New York store put a live pinup girl by the name of Niki in the window. She was lounging around in a Hollywood-bonbon boudoir, powdering her nose, and waiting for her Valentine.

  In the Beverly Hills Fiorucci on Valentine’s Day in 1980, the window featured a new album by the Specials, that month’s hot new-wave ska band. The album was propped up casually amid what looked like a burned-out Valentine store, a place where the paper hearts had survived a grenade attack, but just barely. Fiorucci had connected with another mass-culture fact, and was tuned in to the latest craze. Ska music was here to stay, for a month at least, and Fiorucci center-staged it. And of course Fiorucci loves Valentine’s Day; it is one of their favorite holidays.

  But any day can be a holiday if you’re in the right mood. A summer day, for instance. A couple of years ago the New York store created a 1950s window. It was an all-American-looking sort of patio setting—complete with Astroturf, plastic webbed chaise longues, a lawn mower, a bicycle leaning against a brick wall, a barbecue grill, and beach balls. The Fiorucci people think all that American backyard stuff is funny. And it is funny, especially in the window of a store selling sequins and glitz and crazy plastics. The connection is made; the culture is observed.

  Fiorucci also celebrates bigger holidays, like Christmas. Several years ago the Milan store did a very elegant Christmas Eve window. Two mannequins sat in the window surrounded by the clutter of a very classy party: an open champagne bottle, beautifully wrapped gifts, a huge real Christmas tree. Both the man and the woman were in evening dress, except he was wearing a plastic rain slicker over his dinner jacket, and she was wearing pointy rhinestone-trimmed sunglasses. And there was a reindeer standing in the room with them. You can’t pass that kind of window by without doing at least a double take. It arrests; it cries out “pay attention to me”; and who knows what it means? Probably somebody at Fiorucci thought it would be funny.

  Sometimes everyday objects are funny. Franco Marabelli found a Japanese artist in London who was creating fancy displays made out of tin cans. So Fiorucci did a whole production number in the London store with them—they constructed display units for the clothes out of cans and used them to spell out FIORUCCI on the wall. It was an amusing culture fact—cans are utilitarian and beautiful too. Just like taillights from bicycles, out of which they designed a very shiny window display.

  Perhaps the most outrageous Fiorucci window in anyone’s memory was the 1979 beefcake window in the New York store. Fiorucci decided to have a laugh, and cause some stir, so they invited three contestants from the man of the year contest being run by Blue Boy magazine to lounge around the window. Without exception, every passerby stopped dead in his or her tracks to stare at live male pinups doing their stuff.

  Sometimes the Fiorucci windows are more orthodox, but they’re still not like anybody else’s. Clothes are displayed pressed between giant sheets of Plexiglas; somehow that makes the clothes look like art, or at least like cultural artifacts. Other clothes are displayed hanging on metal poles or plumbing pipes; they look like crazy, happy scarecrows with their heads mysteriously gone. Shoes are displayed down front so you can see them well. And shoes don’t just sit there in Fiorucci windows; they walk along, or they dance.

  And the windows are always color coded. Not in the monochromatic, subdued, “matched” way of other store windows, but in the nutty Fiorucci way. One week everything in the window will be lime-gree
n—bright lime-green—and that may include ten pairs of the same lime-green running shorts shown with a matching lime-green briefcase, all of it lighted with lime-green neon. Or it might include a mannequin dressed in a silver lamé evening dress tying the laces on her silver lamé skates. Anything goes; the funnier the better.

  The Fiorucci windows in New York are designed by one of the true Fiorucci people, Mark Sawyer. Mark is half-Syrian and half-Italian, twenty-three years old, and has the biggest nose in New York. It is a really big nose, and it looks just great on him. He explains his history before Fiorucci: “I came to New York from Syracuse. Well, I didn’t really come to New York, I left Syracuse.”

  Mark started at Fiorucci after serving an apprenticeship doing PR work at Studio 54. One day he walked into Fiorucci, and they looked at him and offered him a job. He is Fiorucci. On the day we met, he was wearing toreador pants from the 1950s, ladies’ high-heel shoes, and a gigantic shocking pink–and-yellow pullover sweater with the numerals 1980 emblazoned on it in bright colors. The sweater was designed by Betsey Johnson, who runs a concession boutique in the New York store. Betsey had asked Mark to wear the sweater to test people’s reaction to it. I reacted. Mark noticed me react, and reassured me: “I don’t usually wear stuff like this. Usually I wear very off-the-shoulder stuff, as if I’d just been dragged into an alley. You know, very Sheena stuff.”

  For all his outrageousness, he is sweet and kind and wants to please. And he does the windows. Mark recognizes the importance of the windows to the Fiorucci image, and so he tries very hard to come up with window concepts that will shock. One of his more outlandish ideas was to dress a window to look like the inside of a luxurious private jet—which had just crashed. The guys upstairs nixed that idea—too morbid they thought; the amended version was still effective. The posh jet cabin was littered with an empty glass, a full ashtray, an open magazine—but there were no mannequins. The cabin was mysteriously, unaccountably empty. It made you think. Maybe just because you never see a plane cabin empty. Maybe just because you wonder where those folks went. Maybe because Mark managed to communicate his original idea without actual evidence of it.

  He is a master. His windows create a situation, a little vignette that never has a beginning or an ending, but is clearly very dramatic. Something is always about to happen, or has just happened. The Fiorucci windows are very much of the new school of window display. Stores in New York and Los Angeles and Boston are veritable sur-realist still lifes—strange dramas being enacted by mannequins with blank stares. It is the latest gimmick in display merchandising. And of course you saw it first at Fiorucci.

  Once you get inside a Fiorucci store, you feel just wonderful. A whole new world opens up to you. Before I saw Fiorucci, I thought there were only two kinds of department stores (well, two and a half counting Bloomingdale’s). Department stores were either stately Saks Fifth Avenue style, with beige wall-to-wall carpets and the hushed-but-cultured voices of Forest Lawn or they were type two, the Sears/ Penney’s type where you just go in knowing what you want and find it and that’s that—the sensible type. But suddenly, two minutes after stepping into a Fiorucci, it dawned on me that Saks—with its atmosphere of leisured, muffled plush—was invented to make you feel old, or at least experienced. In Saks you’re supposed to feel as if you’ve been around the block a couple of times and you know the good stuff from the bad, and of course you haven’t got time for the bad. And at Sears you are supposed to feel typical, reliable, efficient; the tire department is always only steps away from the sweaters.

  But in Fiorucci, oh, in Fiorucci you feel the world is your oyster. You’re young again, and full of energy and life and that driving rock beat. Anything and everything is possible. Just sashay down those wide and gleaming hardwood aisles, boogie a little to the beat, stop and chat with a salesperson, or another customer (true, they’re often hard to tell apart), and finger the goods. No one will bother you; no clerk in Fiorucci ever hovers. Rather, they smile and wink. We’re all in this crazy world together, and isn’t life fun?

  Even the light in Fiorucci stores is perfect. They don’t use fluorescent lighting, because they think it is ugly and they think it is un-healthful, and they are sure it makes the clothes look bad. So everyone in Fiorucci looks natural, as natural as you can look with magenta hair and poison-green jumpsuits and lots and lots of makeup. Everything is geared up to look like a circus, a happy zany three-ring show that you can wander around in to your heart’s content. No one expects you to buy anything, unless you really feel you want to.

  The customers browse, the clerks browse (to look casual), and even the furniture moves around because someone might change his mind about the best way to display zebra-printed portfolios. So all the fixtures in the stores, including display and light fixtures, shelves, racks and tables, are movable. Even the dressing rooms. Anything can be recycled into another use.

  Franco Marabelli says that everything has to move and be changeable: “It helps the dresses sell.” Bigger stores have learned this lesson well; department stores are all currently redesigning themselves into movable boutiques, small departments with a theme that make the customers feel less inhibited, more intimately connected to the merchandise.

  All the Fiorucci units are custom designed by Fiorucci’s team of in-house (Milan) architects: Anita Bianchetti, Evelyne Zurel, and Stefania Sartori. The architects work full-time drawing renovation plans for recycling old buildings and redesigning display units and store interiors. Blueprints of everything ever created for Fiorucci are always beautifully rendered; they are more Fiorucci art, although they adorn only the offices of the architecture staff and are never seen by the public. But then everyone in Milan with the least bit of poetry in their souls has a degree in architecture—it’s the city’s favorite art form.

  This detail, this custom design work, costs plenty, but it is what makes each Fiorucci store look so distinctive and function so well. It is in the end this obsession with detail, with having every little thing done to exact specifications, that makes Fiorucci what it is.

  The first Fiorucci store opened in Milan in 1967; it is still in its original quarters. It began as one room, but as business boomed it spread first upward into a mezzanine and then down to the basement floor. Because the shop grew in a sort of catch-as-catch-can manner, it seems lopsided. You never quite feel that you’re on the main floor. Instead, it is a series of levels—a look that is now being imitated in American shops that deliberately build platforms and mezzanines to create smaller spaces for more personalized shopping. The street floor of the store is high-ceilinged and narrow—you never feel comfortable there, exactly—it seems to be mostly a checkout desk and a concourse leading you up or down. The basement is where the action is. It is wide and low and sprawling, and has a few little levels of its own. One tiny room is attached to it by a couple of steps down, and suddenly you’re in a space under a stairwell. There I found two young guys, about twenty years old, practicing the ancient Italian art of mural painting. Just like Leonardo doing the Last Supper just down the street nearly five hundred years before, these two were painting a wall decoration. This one updated. They were painting a South Seas island tableau, with a girl diving straight into the blue ocean, her hair flying behind her, and bikini tan lines the only evidence of Western civilization on her sleek body. A beach ball bobs on the surface of their blue water. It’s a lovely scene.

  “This is where we sell bikinis,” one of the salesmen told me. He was wearing an I LOVE MARCEL DUCHAMP T-shirt, and was grinning from ear to ear. He tried to tell me what was so wonderful about Fiorucci: “We are getting this wall ready so that just before everyone goes on their winter vacation to the sun, they can come here and buy bikinis. You see, no place else in Italy can you buy bathing suits in December. Only in summer. But in Italy everybody goes away around the first of January, so we sell them. Lots of them.” More Fiorucci iconoclasm, more defying of the rules. More sales.

  The music tapes played in this F
iorucci are the same as those played in all Fiorucci stores. If you happen to walk into the Milan store in the middle of a winter blizzard, you’ll hear the same raging punk rock and roll you’d hear back home in the Beverly Hills Fiorucci where it is hot and smoggy. And the merchandise is the same, or almost the same. In Milan the things are more conservative, more sedate, more subdued—if these words can ever be applied to Fiorucci. In New York, anything goes, the flashier the better; in Milan a little restraint is still required. But there is recompense: the prices are lower in Milan. Import duties and the cost of shipping merchandise account for this difference, but it is difficult to stop myself from buying one of everything. It’s like the old days—everything so cheap. Right here on the Galleria Passarella. The salespeople in the Milan store usually stick to plaid—loud plaid—pants, turtlenecks, and cowboy boots. One young woman had a poodle haircut like Elizabeth Taylor in the 1950s and she wore one of those little silk neckerchiefs knotted around her neck. She looked like a lot of the girls in my high school. A young man in the jeans department has a Blackboard Jungle ducktail, slicked back with greasy kid stuff. The two girls working in the basement were flamboyantly glamorous with blond wavy hair. One wore a kelly green sweater, plaid jeans, pink plastic galoshes, and chunky pink plastic jewelry—matching bracelet and earrings. The other had a slinky zebra-print black-and-white jersey outfit, a jumpsuit that zipped up to her chin. She wore it with high black boots, and, happily, no whip. After all, even if she does work at Fiorucci, this is Fiorucci Milan.