I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  In 1978 they stretched out and redesigned their clothes in Lycra and spandex, and for fun, used a lot of military fabric for “silly” clothes, to contrast with the Hawaiian prints and fruits and flowers they had scattered everywhere. In 1979 they started using little star prints, and little stripes in bright candy colors—you know, the 1950s updated.

  In process now at Fiorucci are the geometrics—futuristic fabrics derived from the futuristic 1930s and featuring flying boomerangs and starbursts of yellow, green, and blue. Similar to the ones the Big Designers are using, but the BDs do them in silk, with matched colors. At Fiorucci, the fabric is cotton sometimes, rayon a lot of the time. If you were there in time, you saw it at Fiorucci first.

  The best, biggest, most amazing Fiorucci first of all is jeans. American jeans. The ultimate American product, conceived by pragmatism, turned hot and fashionable by some upstart young designers from Milan in 1970. Jeans were invented in the nineteenth century for cowboys to wear—they were designed to be serviceable, long lasting, tough, practical, and washable by any cowboy. Easy to care for, easy to wear. Fiorucci connected with the mass-culture fact of American ingenuity and practical know-how and rocked the fashion world. The first Fiorucci jeans were almost exact copies of Levi’s, the quintessential American jeans, the originals. Fiorucci copied every detail, including the orange thread used for the welt seams and the little tiny change pocket in the front. But they went one step too far, and Levi-Strauss got miffed. Not at the whole thing mind you, Levi-Strauss is too big not to be flattered by imitation. What they really didn’t like was the little red Fiorucci label sewn into the side of the back pocket. That was the Italians going too far. And so everybody went to court and Fiorucci promised never again to put their little red Fiorucci label in the side of the back pocket. They moved it to the center back belt loop. Fiorucci fans are delighted, in 1980, to see Levi’s for sale with little red Levi’s labels on the center back belt loop. Justice is done. Fiorucci was first with the new, chic place to put labels.

  Jeans are the centerpiece, the mainstay, of the Fiorucci empire. They sell over three million pairs a year, because that’s all they can produce. The demand exceeds the supply. The jeans come in fuchsia and peach and periwinkle and jade. Some of the Fiorucci jeans turned baggy in 1978; it took a couple of years for everyone else to think baggy, but finally it happened. In 1979, some of the Fiorucci jeans turned transparent; they were produced in see-through plastic, but the idea didn’t catch on. “The plastic made you too hot,” Franco explains, as if that were the only necessary explanation. They made jeans in gold lamé, but no one at Fiorucci can remember what year. It was too long ago.

  The jeans are called Safety jeans, because their label design was derived from a box of Safety brand matches. They changed the fashion world. Simply. The Fiorucci jeans are the beginning of a whole new way of thinking about fashion. Gloria Vanderbilt owes Fiorucci a lot. As do we all. As does John Travolta, who orders his jeans custom-made by Fiorucci, dozens of pairs in every color.

  The Fiorucci people are glad to oblige. They grin and twinkle with glee at reports of their influence and success. And when something doesn’t work, when it doesn’t sell out immediately, they shrug their shoulders and go on to the next idea. Practically nothing in Fiorucci, except the jeans, is ever manufactured more than once, regardless of how well it sells or how many requests are received for it. Perhaps it is simply too boring to spend your life making only one blouse, just to get rich. The Fiorucci designers would rather try out something new; it’s more fun. And fun is what they’re after. They’d much rather try something crazy, float it, and take their chances.

  One of the funnier ideas they tried didn’t work at all, but they had a good time. In 1978, Fiorucci tried selling Paolo Buggiani’s “artist’s jumpsuits,” each individually signed by the artist, each one numbered as if they were prints or lithographs. Fiorucci threw a big party at Xenon, a New York disco, to kick the idea off. It didn’t work; the jumpsuits didn’t sell. But no one minded. Fiorucci sold over one million dollars worth of Fiorucci merchandise last year in Arab countries; the Arab Fiorucci girls wear their jeans under their chadors. So it equalizes.

  Some of the ideas work really well. For years Fiorucci has been manufacturing transparent plastic rain slickers in bright colors that sell for $2. The pink one caused a sensation when it was worn by a bare-breasted model on the cover of the German magazine Stern in 1978. The slickers represent, in a $2 bargain, the essence of Fiorucci design. The most important thing is to be witty. The second most important thing is to make clothes that lots of people will be able to think of lots of uses for. And the third most important thing, which is always the thing you notice first, is that everything is all backward and upside down and recycled and redefined.

  Fiorucci thrives on its perversion of form, its refusal to do things the way everybody else does them. They don’t use silk; everyone else does. They used fake leopard skin when no one else would. They used plastic; everybody else was embarrassed to. They combined lush magenta and limpid yellow when no one else could imagine it. They love tacky rayon blends; everyone else who uses them tries to disguise them into looking like natural fabrics. They defy. They dare. Fiorucci is out to break all the rules, to destroy the integrity of the original form or material.

  It is quite common, for example, at Fiorucci, to see ordinary Vassar-girl type skirts, the kind that Women’s Wear Daily is calling “preppy,” as if that’s not what they’ve always been called, cut exactly as they’ve always been cut. With little pockets in the side seams and buckles at the waistband, everything just right and in place. Except that at Fiorucci they are made in shocking, fluorescent, visible-from-three-blocks-away bright yellow. So you won’t miss that this is something new and something now. Fiorucci makes ballet-dancer tutus out of stiff plastic. They make briefcases out of aluminum toolboxes. After all, if you can turn jeans into fashion, the shameless variations and possibilities for the future are endless. The only thing they seem to worry about at Fiorucci is that maybe someone isn’t getting the joke. They remind me, over and over again, as we look around the design studio, that their things are very funny. They want me to like things because they like them. They are happy in their work. Fiorucci people resent not being taken seriously. They are serious about being funny. They want us to laugh with them, not at them. And the distinction is extremely important to them. They are skilled designers, graphic artists, fashion mavens, and merchandisers. They work hard at creating an atmosphere of freedom, of devil-may-care abandon. They want it all to look casual. It does. But that doesn’t come without a lot of work and care. The Fiorucci spirit is light and bright. Like all fashion people, they work ahead. They are looking at the future, and they are amused.

  ATTENTION TO DETAIL

  It is the details that have made Fiorucci. It is buttons of red and blue and rust and green running down the front of a man’s shirt. It is lightning bolts of metallic thread darting off the surface of an otherwise undistinguished plaid cotton. It is a sliver of shoulder pad where others, less wise, would simply have avoided the issue. It is attention to detail. The exact thing that made those first Fiorucci galoshes Crayola-colored, unlike the rest of the galoshes in the world that had always been dreary black. What else but the detail of color made these galoshes into “news” for a fashion magazine? Not the fact that galoshes are rubber boots capable of keeping rain off your feet, the colds from your head, the accidental traffic splatters from your stockings. It was the idea of cheerful, playful galoshes in fanciful colors so happy that your mood would improve the instant you looked down at your feet slogging through a mess of puddles.

  Colors are often the detail Fiorucci uses most. An overgrown Shetland sweater doesn’t appear at Fiorucci in calm, Brooks Brothers colors, it comes in candy-apple red or a soaring lemon yellow. Jeans must have all that stitching on the outside, but it will be done in fluorescent orange.

  Along with all the pulsating colors and brazen necklines go
endearing details of construction. A girlish cotton skirt with scalloped trim has an elastic waistband that also has belt loops and a cotton belt to match, just in case. A T-shirt with the most flattering neckline imaginable is made perfect for all time by the detail on the back of the neck: it is reinforced like a sweatshirt, so this T-shirt that you obviously are going to love will never unravel at the neck like T-shirts you love always do.

  Because this is Fiorucci, all this picky attention to detail is not reserved only for clothes. Inside a Fiorucci store sticks of neon radiate just so, haloing a practical but unamusing pillar smack in the middle of everything. There is no such thing as whipping in and out of Fiorucci; there are only slow strolls and after an hour or so you are bound to get thirsty. Then you’ll be offered free espresso in a midget Fiorucci cup, a chance to relax or listen to the music or talk with a Fiorucci salesperson.

  What if Milan is the fashion capital of the world and flooded with buyers and journalists and media types of all sorts? Don’t those people need help finding a place to eat, shouldn’t they at least be reminded of La Scala? Thoughtful Fiorucci issues a casual-looking brochure including a map of Milan, a listing of restaurants and their prices and directions for how to get places with the least aggravation.

  Nobody in the fashion industry expects to pay full price for anything to wear; they are walking advertisements. To receive a discount in a Fiorucci store you must have a card to present to the orange-haired person with the long lime-green fingertips tapping the till at the cash register. And the card should be a nice plastic one like a credit card. It will have a cluster of brilliant red cherries drooping somewhere on it: the discount percent will appear in a floodlight beam.

  Attention to detail is spotting military medals in an antique shop, being captivated by their stern glitter and crisp ribbons and understanding everyone should have a Fiorucci medal. Soon there is a poster that is more than a poster. Twenty medals march smartly across a Hong Kong red background, each medal a gum-backed sticker ready to be peeled off the poster and smacked onto a chest in need of a bit of dash.

  Nothing sits still at Fiorucci. Everyone is constantly in midflight, on-the-wing, going in circles, jumping up and down. Ceaseless motion. No one can stay still long enough to be concerned about the overall impression, the flamboyant splash, the outright commotion Fiorucci creates in the outside world. They are hummingbirds.

  The details are what count, the details are interesting. Real life pales when you are preoccupied with designing skirts with gathers in the back that flare out over a woman’s behind and make her look like a Fabergé penguin.

  While it is true that occasionally even in the fashion business one must sit still long enough to write something down, there is no rule that says you must do this on plain white paper. Fiorucci stationery changes as often as the Fiorucci logo does, and then some. There is special stationery for the New York store, for various departments in the New York store, for Zurich, for London, for Boston, for Beverly Hills. The public-relations office in Milan has its own stationery design while three offices away the press-liaison people have yet a different design on theirs. When the Via Torino Fiorucci opened in Milan in 1975, it had its own private stock, even though it was less than a mile away from the original Fiorucci. A “flight” theme was invented and matching stationery duly issued during the brief period Fiorucci organized charters and made travel arrangements for fashion buyers. Even interoffice stationery, which the public never sees, never remains the same for very long. If a graphic somehow manages to hang on for more than three weeks or a month, somebody is going to notice that detail and immediately move right along with a new one to replace it.

  Then there are the labels. Quite aside from the fact that almost everyone else used to put them on the inside and Fiorucci found it more amusing to always put them on the outside, these never remain the same for long. One day a pair of jeans may sport a small fabric label with a row of caballeros, but when the next shipment arrives they’ll sport a tiny three-frame cartoon or a stately buffalo.

  Whether or not the price of things at Fiorucci is a painful shock or a delightful surprise, one thing is certain. The design of the actual price tags themselves doesn’t change any less frequently than the stationery or the labels. One is a pinup girl in shorts whose legs are scissored up in the air, looking as though she’s just landed on her fanny, very surprised. Another is a voluptuous smiling brunette wrapped in a towel, leaning forward so her cleavage shows. The pain of the price you pay can be made amusing if the price ticket looks like a joke drinking glass from the 1950s. Another label, with bright red in the background, shows a cutie pulling a T-shirt up over her head, exposing a fraction of her gorgeous self, just a fraction.

  The price of things at Fiorucci is very uneven. Cheap plastic slickers that come neatly tucked into plastic envelopes cost $2. Dresses that are lined, have delicate and elegant designs and complicated sleeves cost $170. Funny-looking rough leather belts stamped to look like leopard skin with a leopard’s head at one end and the tail used as the tip that slides through the buckle cost about $12.

  A velveteen suit in pale yellow costs $75 and looks just like an usher’s uniform from the 1930s with an epaulet on one shoulder and a string of jet black beads looped under and over the shoulder’s arm. You could search the rest of your life for such an outfit—$75 is just fine.

  A heavy cotton T-shirt with a flattering collarbone-level neckline, that is impossible to find anywhere, with sleeves ribbed at the wrist, a loose T-shirt that makes a body look sexy without trying—the sexiest way to be—costs $21. A small price to pay for a casual deception.

  A summer dress of 100 percent cotton is $64. The cotton print looks like it jumped off the French Riviera from a Lartigue photograph in the elegant 1920s. It’s an old-fashioned sundress for wearing on the yacht. Large sloppy 100-percent-wool sweaters that cost $60, as they would in any store, come in red so bright, green so vivid, and blue of such mad desire that you’d pay $60 just for the color alone.

  I suppose one of the reasons it is so often thought that Fiorucci things cost the earth and fall apart the second time you wear them, is because of the overlayer of glitz and razzmatazz, the sequins and glitter and acrylics in tiger skin seem all that’s in the store at all when you first walk in. But the price tags on the well-made things, which a newcomer naturally gravitates toward as a haven of subdued sanity, indicate the place ain’t cheap. This confusion is easily overcome by anyone who refuses to let the glitz and music mow them down and who makes a determined, stoic effort to discriminate from the $15 T-shirts with neon glitter spelling DISCO BABY and the hundred-dollar ladies’ dresses that are lined and faced and designed and which, when worn, look like a true creation of wit and style and detail that you can wear, as my mother says, “Anywhere.”

  What is made cheaply and fly-by-night and only for fun is not expensive. What is made carefully, lined, and studded with details used on “better” dresses is expensive, not enormously expensive, but what you’d expect to pay.

  The price of things ought to bear a relationship to the quality, and the Fiorucci people are the first to admit that not everything sold in every Fiorucci store was intended to last a lifetime. It is also true that there is a certain charm in having something that costs $50 last longer than a quart of milk in your refrigerator. Fiorucci is a company that specializes in design, not in manufacturing.

  Fiorucci clothes, which are sometimes complained about for having poor workmanship, are produced in such small quantities that it would cost too much to sell them if they were manufactured with the same quality controls used when millions of units are manufactured. And since virtually nothing Fiorucci makes is ever produced more than once the problem becomes clear. Especially when one remembers a lot of Fiorucci manufacturing is done in Korea (rubber things like shoes) or Romania (knitted items).

  Does it really matter, this question of quality? If what you are buying is outrage, or the knowledge that you are just ahead of what
is about to happen, quality is not your prime concern. You have to keep your sense of humor and come back next week. Maybe there’ll be a party.

  Fiorucci is always throwing parties; for Valentine’s Day, to celebrate the publication of Andy Warhol’s new book, or because Wet magazine of the West Coast should be properly introduced to the East Coast. Part of throwing parties, parties that are more fun to be at than anywhere else that night or afternoon, is paying attention to the details. Champagne is one of the most enduring allures of party giving. “Fiorucci must have the best,” protested Angelo Careddu, a former Fiorucci person and now a public-relations consultant to the Fiorucci New York store, in a recent somewhat heated conversation with a liquor store proprietor. It was party time once again. Angelo had noticed that the champagne sent for the last party had simply not been of the same high quality as that sent for the party before last. “You must understand,” he said, “Fiorucci must have the best.”

  A Fiorucci party doesn’t necessarily get planned down to a gnat’s eyebrow. Organizing a party in conjunction with Interview magazine or with Studio 54 (during its respectable heyday) is likely to require some restraint to keep the guest list under control. But for other more informal, though equally festive occasions, the more-the-merrier rule applies. During Christmas 1979 the New York store either stayed open awfully late one night or had a Christmas party. You decide. There was no advertisement in The New York Times, no mention in New York Magazine’s Best Bets section, no babbling radio commercials. But somehow, someway the word circulated. The store would be open for twenty-four straight hours the Saturday before Christmas Day. Hundreds of people milled around outside waiting to be allowed inside by friendly but efficient guards. For inside Christmas shopping had become one big party. Betsey Johnson was there in a pink net tutu and a clown’s face autographing her T-shirts, Fiorucci’s version of a stocking stuffer. A spirited punk rock band set the pace while Fiorucci employees on roller skates whizzed around offering panettone (Italian Christmas bread), and the very best greetings of the season.