I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  This is the ultimate in recycling. For it results in a product entirely different from the original in the way that a nifty little bottle-green V-neck letterman’s sweater from the 1950s turns up at Fiorucci in a color no high school would ever have chosen. And this new color dazzles the whole point of the 1950s and high school and late-fall afternoon football games and turns a relic of teenage rite of passage into something God never intended.

  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.

  “He gives people the possibilities to experiment with all expressions. Design clothes, everything. He is very wonderful choosing people. It is his big talent,” notes Cristina Fiorucci. Cristina who is beautiful in a kind of noble, tall, and blamelessly uncomplicated way, Cristina who was picked by Fiorucci very early to be a stylist. And she has simply said again what every other person at Fiorucci said whenever I asked what they believed the real secret of Fiorucci-the-store to be. And, most touchingly, these people Fiorucci has chosen so wisely, these people choose to date their personal histories, their very lives, from the time they began to work for him. They simply do not admit, or very rarely admit, to having had a life before Fiorucci. They believe this as absolutely as they believe in Fiorucci’s genius in picking them. They are probably right.

  Fiorucci is always ready to settle down to a good long talk about how different Europe is from the United States. “In Europe we are forced every day from when we are children to worry whether we are doing the right thing. In America, you seem not to bother about such things.”

  “Well,” I reply, “in America we seem only to discover God when we are about thirty-five—like Bob Dylan—and crash right into Him.”

  “In Italy, we know younger,” he says, sadly.

  “In America,” says Fiorucci, “everybody seems to know who they are. They are so much more what they are, than we are here in Europe.”

  “That’s because in America people aren’t all dragged down by centuries and centuries of facts and traditions and—I mean, look at Milan,” I said. “Here you think it’s important to preserve history. In America we know that what’s really important is a place to park.”

  “One of the main problems,” Fiorucci says, “is to know whether it is right to manipulate the environment.”

  “You mean, like your shop?” I ask.

  “Both with my shop, the clothes,” he says, “and . . . with women.”

  To speak of America with Elio Fiorucci is to speak always of New York. “I like New York very much,” he says. “It is the capital of America. You can breathe the grandiose air. People say that if I have a negative quality, it’s that I never get enough. But in New York, I get enough. The sense of power in New York
—everything is going to happen better in New York.”

  Although Elio Fiorucci spends a great deal of time in Milan, and even more time being all over the world, he has officially moved his wife and family to New York. It may be that his whole reason for moving to New York is his love of the city and his feeling that here at last is a place that has “enough.” So now Elio Fiorucci resides in an apartment on the Upper East Side in New York City where all the taxi drivers speak English. Everyone he meets at parties speaks English, the entire place more or less speaks English twenty-four hours a day.

  And of the rest of the world, what did he think of the rest of the world?

  “How do you like L.A.?” I ask lightly.

  “Los Angeles makes you frightened,” he says. “Because it is crazy. The horizon is very long, like Africa.”

  “And Tokyo?” I ask.

  “In Tokyo the town is not very beautiful but the people are terrific, very vital.”

  A beat passes while I desperately try and think up another town. Oh, Rio. A new Fiorucci has just opened there.

  “Fiorucci clothes go very well there. It is always summer, always time to go to the beach. The women are very tall and very beautiful.”

  Fiorucci loves women more, so it would seem sometimes, than life itself. It’s a good old-fashioned Frederick’s of Hollywood type of appreciation. This fascination is a theme that can be traced throughout the history of Fiorucci graphics from those first romantic, wispy posters in the 1960s of windblown, leggy blonds in cotton-candy colors to the stiletto heels and gleaming thighs on Fiorucci stationery to the most stunning rear end ever to appear on a shopping bag, an airbrushed bottom rimmed with thin, white lace.

  And it was in response to a question about the Fiorucci view of women that I heard just one thing that Fiorucci had said that made me suspect that he was not just a simple, shy, peasant genius, totally innocent of everything but hard work and neon stretch thighs. Someone I know told me, “You know, finally one day I just couldn’t help it, I had to say it, and I asked him ‘Don’t you think your clothes are degrading to women?’ ”

  “You said that?” I asked. “You said that to this man who’s taking you and all these other people out and you’re his guests and you said that?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Well, what’d he say?”

  “He wanted to know if it was really true that Americans sleep together on the first date.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  It has been said of Elio Fiorucci that “He is always six months ahead of himself and one year ahead of his time.” This is, of course, true. It is true in part because over his basic Saint Francis of Assisi humility, he is a changeling. At any moment he can be a misunderstood millionaire with a poetic soul describing the pleasures of eating a ripe fig, a lecher, a graphics junkie, a shy schoolboy, a concerned citizen worried about politics and the destruction of the ozone layer. He can be so on-the-money, so insightful about those too-young girls with their swan-like bodies, their flirtatious rosebud lips, their jailbait-green eye shadow, that it makes your head swim. He knows what red these young girls want when they ask for “one in red” and Fiorucci knows red better than any man alive. But he also knows purple brilliantly and has a natural-born genius for loud blues.

  That he is unconventional and right, well mostly right, or at least so damned close it doesn’t matter, is possible because he is not in the least afraid to fail. He doesn’t mind if he makes a mistake. Because the basic assumptions will have been correct. Fiorucci just keeps doing things that everybody else says won’t work and mostly they do work. And when they don’t, there is no gnashing of teeth, no fruitless hysteria; there is some shoulder shrugging, but no break in the pace. It’s nerve.

  “Are you glad that the store has your name?” I finally ask. “I mean, you’re so shy.”

  “Yes, I am glad to have my name on the store. Because even though I am afraid people will be disillusioned because they are waiting for someone colorful, at least they come to meet me and then I am glad.”

  And the way he listens to you, sometimes you think perhaps that he is only pretending to be shy. He doesn’t really sound all that timido when he says things like, “I want to dress the world.”

  1980

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Other Books by Eve Babitz

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Contents

  Introduction

  I Used To Be Charming Dedication

  All This and The Godfather Too

  My God, Eve, How Can You Live Here?

  Needles In The Land Of Fruits And Nuts

  My Life In A 36DD Bra

  No Onions

  On Not Being a Tomboy

  Losing Weight Made Me a New Person—A Novelist

  Shopping

  Sunday, Blue Pool, Sunday

  Venice, California

  Honky-tonk Nights

  A Californian Looks at New York

  Anna’s Brando

  The Girl from Gold’s Gym

  The Tyranny Of Fashion

  Tiffany’s Before Breakfast

  Skin Deep

  Out of the Woods

  The Path to Radiant Pain

  Sunset Tango

  Sober Virgins of the Eighties

  Attitude Dancing

  Ronstadt for President

  Rapture of the Shallows

  The Sexual Politics of Fashion

  Gotta Dance

  The Soup Can as Big as the Ritz

  Blame It on the VCRs

  Jim Morrison Is Dead and Living in Hollywood

  I Was a Naked Pawn for Art

  Life At Chateau Marmont

  They Might Be Giants

  Great Legs

  Chairmen of the Board

  Party at the Beach

  Hippie Heaven

  Billy Baldwin

  The American Scene

  A City Laid Out Like Lace

  Hello Columbus

  Nicolas Cage

  Girl’s Town

  The Manson Murders

  Jackie’s Kids

  Keeping Time in Ojai

  Santa Fe

  Love and Kisses

  Scent of a Woman

  I Used to Be Charming

  FIORUCCI: THE BOOK

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Start Here

  Table of Contents