I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  “Well, if new wave is passé,” I asked, “what hope do we have?”

  “Outer space and ska,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation.

  When Giannino and the DXing staff are not predicting the future, they catalog the past. For twenty days and twenty nights they slaved to put together an exhibit for the 1979 Triennale.

  It has long been a tradition in Milan once every three years to put on an enormous art and design show called the Triennale. In 1968 a protest closed it and Milan stopped hosting the show; the whole thing ceased to exist for eleven years. Eventually the authorities declared that if Milan didn’t hold the exhibition before 1980, the honor would be given to some other Italian city. Milan rose to the challenge in the nick of time.

  The people who run the Triennale decided to allow fashion design to be represented, and Fiorucci was allowed to be included in the show. Until this born-again Triennale, fashion design had not been thought serious enough to be on display with things like furniture, bathroom fixtures, espresso machines, bicycles, and dentist tools. To be invited to show fashions there was considered by Elio Fiorucci to be a terrific breakthrough.

  The Fiorucci exhibit took place in a kind of miniature Hollywood Bowl. Standing in front, the audience viewed the exhibit on three screens, side by side like a triptych. Three slide projectors simultaneously clicked three different sets of images on three screens, tracing the history of fashion since 1945. Rita Hayworth, Queen Elizabeth, Dior, and photos from Vogue collided with stills of Frank Sinatra surrounded by screaming girls as the tape in the background played Sinatra singing “Monterrey.” For twenty minutes the slides clicked brazenly through the years. James Dean, Frankie Avalon, Elvis, Jackson Pollock, Twiggy, Avedon, space suits, Miró, Jean Shrimpton, Calder, Liz Taylor, Kennedy, pedal pushers, Timothy Leary, Veruschka. The music hopped from Bill Haley to Marilyn Monroe singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” to “Da Doo Ron Ron” to the Beatles until the entire thing collided in one big splat, exploding in mangled color with tangled noise. Suddenly someone is singing “My Way,” Frank Sinatra’s most sacred hymn, only it wasn’t Frankie, it was Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and his way of singing “My Way” made it sound maniacal. And the clothing was equally blasphemous, a sweatshirt showing two different colored wristbands, girls with peculiar sunglasses wearing twisted mockeries of all that has ever been glamorous or beautiful, girls who were obviously going Fiorucci’s way.

  That night, after the Triennale exhibition wound up, an entourage of various colorful people came along from the main event for dinner at La Torre di Pisa, Elio Fiorucci’s favorite restaurant.

  Like many busy Milan businessmen, Fiorucci takes almost all of his meals in a restaurant. And, because like all of us he likes what he is used to, Elio Fiorucci seems to only think of La Torre di Pisa when he says, “Let’s go eat.”

  La Torre di Pisa is a kind of bohemian-looking trattoria tucked into an alley. A place you must know about in order to find it. The sort of place that always has a little white sign on the front door indicating they are full. But La Torre di Pisa is always ready, no matter how crowded, to seat Elio Fiorucci and however many people he shows up with.

  It was here I sat at a longish table, in a room decorated with framed strips of antique wallpapers, talking to an Italian woman journalist who writes for Vogue and her friend, a designer of Olivetti typewriters. The conversation we were having was slightly, well, slightly more serious than those I had previously had with Fiorucci designers who tend to be very young and therefore so enchanted merely being in the kind of dazzling fashion world of Fiorucci that nothing on earth but Fiorucci seems to matter. So the conversation drifted toward the protests that had forced the closing of the Triennale in 1968. I couldn’t believe terrorists stopped a thing like a design show.

  So far I had been unable to bring up the idea of terrorists. It seemed to take just too much political nerve to mention them amidst the perfections of La Torre di Pisa’s fresh tomato-and-basil appetizers. But terrorism had been on my mind. That week five professors and five students from a Fiat management school had been lined up and neatly shot in the kneecaps. This terrible event had been bleeding all over the headlines. The people of Milan were dumb with sadness and pain, making it almost impossible for them to smile when they shook my hand, though, for an Italian not to smile somehow when they meet you would, of course, indicate the end of the world.

  Most of the people I had met in Milan were connected with Fiorucci and several things prevented me from talking with them about the terrorists. For one thing, the young people who are lucky enough to work at Fiorucci consider the capitalist system not so bad, especially since it is the capitalist system that has gotten them this job where they are involved with such a glittery public and designs that have received worldwide acclaim. And when the job at Fiorucci means you have connections with the rest of the world—London, New York, Tokyo—and all the glamour of those places is somehow yours.

  It was much easier for me to learn about the Autonomy and the Red Brigades from the people sitting next to me at dinner because they were not actually working for Fiorucci, not so bound up in glamorous Fiorucci ambitions.

  “It isn’t so much that I’m against the terrorists,” the designer said, “but rather the violence. It is the institutions that they object to. But the institutions have treated the workers violently themselves. It is a terrible paradox. A complex situation. One must be very careful not to make judgment. I think it all started with the Autonomy . . . but then. . . . ”

  The Autonomy, it seems, was a time in Italian politics a few years ago when it was suddenly decided by terrorists and students that it would be a much better idea if there were really no government, no police, and no laws. Instead, the people themselves would decide how much they could afford to pay for a movie, and then just pay it. This Autonomy, which was particularly strong in Milan, was supposedly kept in check by a group called the Red Brigades, who would see to it that nobody went overboard and simply “liberated” TVs from stores.

  During this period Fiorucci graphics and various Fiorucci projects reflected some of the more peaceful aspects of the Autonomy’s solutions to problems. It was a time when people talked about growing their own food, using solar energy, and living in communes. Even though Fiorucci is obviously a capitalist organization, it had somehow managed to reflect some of the philosophies of the Autonomy.

  Though I am not really a deep student of the political situation in Milan, I can nevertheless draw some conclusions about all this. It seems to me that Fiorucci managed to be on the side of the Autonomy while maintaining a perfectly respectable capitalist business, merchandising the profitable output of workers—and yet being on the side of the young and their dreams. Of course, Fiorucci is full of paradoxes, but this particular one is a gaily waving flag.

  The journalist and the designer sipped their wine in silence, and by this time, since they’d explained as best they could what the Autonomy was, I too felt that the problems of Italy would never be solved.

  “But,” I said, remembering when I lived in Rome over ten years before and everything, or so it seemed to me, was perfect. “It seems so un-Italian for these terrorists not to want to have fun.”

  “What do you mean?” the designer asked.

  “I mean, revolution and kneecaps are so serious.”

  “I think the terrorists do want to have fun,” the designer said. “Terrorism is an act of pure form. Terrorists just don’t know exactly what they are doing. Just as we don’t know what we are doing.”

  Of course, it’s occurred to many people in all countries, capitalist and otherwise, that no one quite knows what they’re doing, but it now dawned on me that to say that terrorists don’t know what they’re doing too isn’t altogether true.

  Everyone went back to sipping their wine again.

  The sounds of La Torre di Pisa picked up. A three-piece band made up of a bassoon, a sax, and a clarinet, suddenly swooshed into the restaurant playing a
ridiculous oom-pah-pah version of La Traviata.

  A blond model who’d been eating dinner across the room and had now finished was coming toward our table to talk to Elio and some of the designers. She leaned forward to smile, in spite of kneecaps and sadness, and to be kissed hello. The girl had removed her jacket and lifted her shirt, showing her incredible new rust-colored satin Fiorucci jeans which, when she turned around in a movement of splendor and elegance, revealed a derriere of such primal glory and shininess that she nearly brought La Torre di Pisa’s roof down, and the music oom-pah-pahed euphorically into heaven.

  She held the pose, continuing to stand there, an incredible display.

  “Enough of terrorism,” the designer said, “now for satin asses.”

  From movies like Red Desert one remembers the wildly sprawling suburbs of Milan covered with refineries, wheezing machinery, and smokestacks. And Corsico, where Fiorucci’s main office is located, fifteen minutes from downtown Milan, is just such a suburb.

  Standing in front of a large, white, medical-complex type building, all conservative and serious, for the first time Fiorucci looks like Business. You can understand how a corporation like Montedison would come to buy half of what would seem to be a frivolous fluke. For here, if nowhere else in one’s encounters with the world of Fiorucci, they aren’t kidding.

  Getting off the elevator on the top floor, thoughts of Montedison quickly disappear. The moment you step out of the elevator, things get silly again. The walls are nicely trimmed with bright yellow stripes, and little flying rectangular neon sticks swirl across the reception-area wall. The charm is back. It settles over your shoulders like a pink angora cardigan. Franco Marabelli stares at the wall for a second, tilts his head and reaches over to adjust one of the neon sticks just so.

  The people who work here in Corsico are much less fast-lane than the ones in downtown Milan or in the stores in general. Here they are relaxed, the music isn’t the Sex Pistols, and you can think.

  Without exception, everyone in the building is dressed with élan. Even the most conservatively dressed accountant has a touch of Fiorucci about him somewhere. Perhaps this is simply an example of what it’s like to have a job in Italy, but even if one has to work in Corsico out there in a blanket of industrial haze, it doesn’t seem so bad.

  Corsico is a mass of accountants, quality-control supervisors, designers, stylists, models, inventory-control people, seamstresses, textile experts, and secretaries. More than three hundred people work for Fiorucci in Milan, most of them in Corsico. In Corsico, as in every other part of the enterprise, people who work here try to explain that Elio Fiorucci’s genius is his ability to hire the right people. Like innocent children, they seem somehow to expect that being hired by Fiorucci, whether it is to add up long, dull columns of figures or to design sunglasses, is a sign of his expertise.

  Nevertheless, innocent children don’t succeed in business. Whenever people think that Milan is a deadhead city and that Fiorucci is just a bunch of happy children from sunny Italy, I can’t help thinking that if only Fiorucci would put out a postcard showing this office building in Corsico, amid the landscape of factories, people wouldn’t insist that Fiorucci isn’t really an actual business.

  This deadly earnest expanse of suburb has nothing to do with the Fiorucci posters of a blond Venus wrapped in blue plastic, those vinyl behinds on topless girls with spiked high heels, that girl in a metallic purple bathing suit gazing at a swordfish.

  Yet as businesslike as Corsico is, a feeling of coziness pervades. There is a sense of intimacy like that in a boutique, a cottage industry stranded in cement. Karla Otto steers me from one department to another. “Here are the eyeglass people, this is the department that keeps track of gift items, things like stationery and unusual soap and clocks. Do you like this bracelet? Meet Elyette. She collects Barbie dolls.”

  In the accessories department I am shown a plastic orange, about five inches in diameter, with green leaves, that has been sawed in half and turned into a purse. I meet a person named Sara Nannicini who “coordinates styles.” And what it seems she does is make sure that the jeans don’t become too impractical a color, so that they still will be worn by people who were only in the mood for jeans just the tiniest bit too far-out, not whole-hog.

  I am surprised when I realize that most of the people I am meeting here are in their late thirties and early forties. They aren’t the teenagers with scissors you think they might be.

  Rows of enormous tables are covered with patterns, just like Seventh Avenue. Scissors, pins, and rolls of brown paper for making patterns are scattered here and there. And dress dummies. Even the dress dummies in Corsico are jazzed up, not content to be merely dumb gray or tan, but instead determined to be periwinkle or turquoise, side by side, clashing. Eight sewing machines, where a new idea can be quickly run up, put on a model, thought about, adjusted—or changed or abandoned or tried again. Yards of plastic lace lie unfolded across a billiard-size cutting table, waiting to become God knows what. A glass cookie jar sits overflowing with scraps of fabric.

  I meet Tito Pastore, head stylist of Fiorucci and brother of Leonardo of the public-relations office in the Galleria Passarella. Tito has been with Fiorucci practically since the beginning. He has slicked-back hair, narrow wraparound sunglasses, a shiny black leather jacket with screaming pink velour lining, the sort of fabric usually reserved for bathrobes, and a face so classic that you’ve seen him in every painting by every Italian master. Tito understands the world of haute couture perfectly, and he could care less. For at Fiorucci he has “libertà.”

  Corsico has everything. Even a buttons and trimmings section, where everything is arranged obsessively in rows on white cardboard cards and neatly labeled. Buttons you would enjoy just owning, let alone having on a dress or shirt. Duck buttons, pig buttons, clear plastic ones shaped like little bows, mother-of-pearl ones in the shape of little crescents, heart ones, four-leaf clover ones. Plus collars of every shape and intensity of color lie waiting, spangled and sequined and shining.

  Corsico began to seem less an office building than a toy-land for adults. And when the chief accountant wearing the stodgiest clothes leans over and suddenly there is a glimpse of a Fiorucci vest sweater with silly flowers all over it, the impression intensifies. None of the offices has that scared-office-worker feeling. Typists lean against desks and chat easily for a few moments and no one comes out and turns red.

  While we toured the design studio, I suddenly noticed one of those plastic mesh bags with two small handles at the top that women all over Europe use when going to the market. Except this one was bright orange. I sighed, broke my promise to myself not to ask for any gifts, and said, meekly, “Oh, could I please have one of those?”

  “Do you really like it?” Franco asked incredulously. “We think it is so dull, so boring, not a Fiorucci color, not loud enough. We have almost decided not to manufacture them.”

  I shrugged and said that I was no marketing expert, and because I’m a size 12 I’m certainly not the perfect Fiorucci girl, but I liked it. Franco thought a moment, wrinkled his brow, and thought another moment. Then he walked over to the phone, called some distant factory, and ordered two thousand of the bags made up for shipment to New York.

  I was horrified. Me, making merchandising decisions at Fiorucci! But what if they don’t sell? Franco shrugged and said, “They’ll sell. If you like them they’ll sell.” I felt positively woozy. And then amazed at the way these people do business. So casually and with such calm. Well, not calm, but ease—with abandon.

  Strolling along the corridors of Corsico, dotted here and there with potted green plastic trees gaily decorated with pink-and-green bows, we arrived at the “inspiration room.” To truly appreciate the inspiration room it is important to remember that Fiorucci actually pays people to knock around the world looking at things, returning with new Ecuadorean embroidery, Canadian boots, or whatever the kids in Kyoto are wearing. Thirty-one-year-old Maurizio Brunazzi, wh
o used to shuffle paper in a big company, now spends his days and nights as a fashion buyer and scout for Fiorucci. He was introduced to Elio Fiorucci at dinner one night in Milan by Franco Marabelli. Fiorucci liked him, liked the way he dressed, and offered him a job. At first Maurizio turned him down, because: “I was very tired—I didn’t want to start a new job. But finally Franco and Elio convinced me, and I started to work. I cannot imagine leaving Fiorucci. It is home, it is family for me, and I love my work.”

  He ought to love his work—Maurizio has what looks to me like the best job in the world. He shops for a living.

  Everyone who works for Fiorucci shops for Fiorucci even if that is not all they do. Almost everyone at Fiorucci can tell of being kept on the payroll while they just went somewhere, possibly on vacation, and kept their eyes open.

  The inspiration room is where what they buy is kept. Here in this room with no windows are straw tourist purses plastered with sombreroed Mexicans asleep against felt cactuses, fatigue jackets, Hawaiian shirts, plastic earrings, dinner jackets from the 1940s. Plastic laundry hampers and wooden baskets overflow with bikinis, ties, scarves, mittens.

  Running down the middle of the room is a wooden platform about fifteen feet long devoted exclusively to shoes. Shoes of every conceivable sort—Bass Weejuns, running shoes, little kids’ sandals, spectator pumps, buffalo-hide sandals from the 1960s (the kind with the little loop that goes over the big toe). And these are not just new shoes, the Bass Weejuns have a penny tucked into the little slot over the arch and have certainly been to high school, if not college, and the running shoes have been around the gym a few times. When space runs out on the shoe platform, the shoes are hung here and there from meat hooks.

  The inspiration room is a dry-cleaned swap meet. All this stuff is just sitting there waiting to be considered by the stylists and designers at Fiorucci now, or maybe in two years, or when someone goes through the room and just gets caught up by a detail they never noticed before. A blouse might catch someone’s eye—the neckline is OK but the sleeves should be different and the fabric is hopeless, but when it has been run through the time machine here in Corsico and ends up in some off-the-wall window display in London or New York or Buenos Aires some months later, it has become Fiorucci. It is designed better, and it comes in nineteen colors.