Why Italian fashion rules the world
JOHN DAVIDSON
Today, up to five thousand international fashion professionals are arriving in Milan for the seasonal calendar of runway shows. While designers pull together the final details of their collections for Spring-Summer 2005, the most privileged of these attendees will be checking into their luxurious hotels, remonstrating (unsuccessfully) for a room upgrade and then spending a couple of hours slicing open coveted invitations from Prada, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana and Cavalli.
They’ll check the gift-cards on flowers and other tokens sent by pro-active public relations offices, admiring the artfully forged designers’ signatures, before filling up their diaries with dinner dates at Bice and Bagutta - assignations that allow the host designer to cultivate better coverage or a bigger order next season. They’ll hope to deal with this in time to reach the designer boutiques on Via Montenapoleone before closing time for a spot of heavily discounted shopping.
Does this sound rather like the stuff of escapist fantasy or soap opera? It’s anything but. Milan’s fashion shows, chi-chi suppers, designer discounts and fabulous freebies represent the carefully-oiled machinations of Italy’s mightiest industry in full-throttle market mode. Just scratch the surface glamour and what you find beneath is a deadly serious multi-billion Euro business in which nothing is done for mere effect or left to chance. Everything from the lavish shows to those welcome gifts and shopping discounts is geared to maintaining the commercial success story that is Italian fashion. Paris may remain fashion’s undisputed capital, characterised by its insistent chic. And London clings to its reputation as the cradle of new ideas - some of which, it has to be said, are rather better than others. Milan, however, is the city where executives from any upscale store can still confidently commit the biggest share of their buying budgets. For, as Valerie Steel suggests in her recent volume, Italian Style, "Although Italian fashion varies from the very sexy Dolce & Gabbana to very wearable MaxMara, overall the strength is in real clothes for real people - although admittedly rather rich people."
Just 50 years ago, Italy had no fashion industry to speak of.
An unrivalled ability to produce high quality apparel in luxurious fabrics makes Italy the country to which British, French and American designers all turn to realise their exacting manufacturing requirements. Labels as diverse as Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent and Donna Karan entrust production to capable Italian hands. For, although there are now very much cheaper labour markets capable of producing decent clothing at modest prices, the Made in Italy label still commands an enduring and widely understood cachet.
Yet, just 50 years ago, Italy had no fashion industry to speak of. In marked contrast to the current roster of Milan-based fashion superstars; no Italian designer enjoyed an international reputation. The country’s moneyed elite commissioned their precious couture clothes from tiny ateliers in Rome, but most Italians found their sartorial requirements met by small, local, artisanal businesses. Gentlemen ordered suits from traditional bespoke tailors, while their wives and daughters patronised whichever local dressmaker exhibited the greatest skill in replicating the fashion diktats from Paris. Italian women of more modest means invariably had to hunt the markets for fabric and run up their own clothes at home.
The upheavals of the war years changed everything. For in the wake of trauma came opportunity. Three significant developments concurred. Firstly, and thanks to the influx of industrial investment by way of the Marshall Plan, new factories were created. These welcomed skilled artisans, uprooted from the hill towns of the north and the decrepit villages of the south in search of a livelihood. This combination of the very latest machinery with an exceptionally skilled workforce would create an unrivalled garment manufacturing capability.
Secondly, instead of aping the French, a new generation of native design talents, finding their own creative voices, conceived a fashion identity that seemed singularly and idiosyncratically Italian. This capitalised on the love-affair with everything Italian, from espresso coffee to leather-goods, that swept America and beyond throughout the post-war years.
And thirdly? The fledgling Italian fashion industry quickly developed an innate flair for marketing, together with something that might now be termed brand focus. Talented new designers certainly showed impressive commercial savvy in addressing an important emerging fashion consumer who was, as yet, poorly served by more established fashion centres: the post-war working woman.
"We could still hear bombs going off on the beaches when we moved into our first atelier in Rome".
The three Fontana sisters, Zoe, Giovanna and Micol, were typical of those emerging talents who grasped the new possibilities. During 1943, they moved from their home town near Reggio Emilia (where they had all worked in their mother’s dressmaking business), to set up a fashion business in Rome, known as Sorelle Fontana.
Years later, Micol described their daring move. "We could still hear bombs going off on the beaches when we moved into our first atelier in Rome. But that didn’t matter. It was our dream to own an atelier."
They established themselves there amid a burgeoning fashion fraternity that included Roberto Capucci, Simonetta Fabiani, Fernanda Gattinoni, and the Russian émigré Principessa Irene Galitzine. Like many of their peers, they began to find favour with American tourists who were visiting the Eternal City in ever greater numbers, and with the screen stars who were converging on the Cinecitta studio complex to work with the likes of Fellini and Rossellini.
Actresses such as the young Audrey Hepburn (whom Gattinoni costumed for War and Peace, and the Fontanas dressed for Roman Holiday) most especially warmed to these new Italian designers’ glamorous evening gowns and, more importantly, their chic but understated daywear.
"The French were more sophisticated, more complicated," the Principessa Galitzine suggested in later life. "Whereas the Italians were light-hearted and young. They loved life."
This disposition resulted in clothes that combined ease and luxury - a low-key kind of glamour, as typified in the Principessa’s own invention of wide-legged pyjama-style trousers, memorably dubbed "palazzo pants" by fashion maven Diana Vreeland.
While Paris embraced the structured, exaggerated silhouettes of Christian Dior’s new look, Rome was developing a fashion identity of its own. "We broke away from the French," Micol Fontana told fashion trade bible, WWD, in 2000. "The Americans were instrumental in shaping our attitude toward fashion. They were practical and needed clothing they could live in. And we were ready to deliver. We were more informal; our fashion was more linear and more practical. You could wear it on the street and no-one was going to stare at you."
This new Italian emphasis on wearable elegance most certainly clicked with Americans, not least Ava Gardner, who became the Fontanas’ most effective ambassador throughout the 1950s. The movie star insisted that these talented sisters should dress her for The Barefoot Contessa in which she starred opposite Humphrey Bogart. Later, in 1959, they would dress Anita Ekberg for a seminal movie moment in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. The black frock worn while the pneumatic sexpot actress splashes about in the Trevi Fountain is possibly the most famous Fontana creation of all. Yet, the Fontanas’ daywear, which Gardner wore so well both on and off-screen, was very much more restrained, offering the new, working woman a viable wardrobe that was elegant and feminine.
MaxMara, established in 1951, was one of the first manufacturers to identify the significance of this emerging consumer.
"The war changed the role of women so much," Luigi Maramotti, president of this family-controlled company, recently told American fashion glossy, W. "The new woman was a working woman. She was active and dynamic. The whole idea of femininity changed and clothes with it. A woman needed something to wear to the office."
How could the fledgling Italian fashion industry ensure that the wider world would learn of its response to this challenge? By tempting American store buyers and journalists to visit Italy right after the Paris shows, of course. As head of Italy’s largest buying office, Gian Battista Giorgini was already channelling fine Italian linens and other homewares into the huge American market. But he was sufficiently passionate about the possibilities of exporting Italian fashion that he conspired to stage the very first designer shows in 1951 at his own home, Villa Torrigiani, in Florence.
Although ambitious, this was to prove a highly effective initiative. Two days in historic Florence as guests of a wealthy Tuscan nobleman? Giorgini’s invitation tempted an elite band of American retailers from such select stores as Bergdorf Goodman and I Magnin, all of whom agreed to prolong their stay in Europe as his guests. The opportunity to show collections to such influential buyers surely galvanised the efforts of the participating designers, who included Sorelle Fontana and Simonetta Fabiani from Rome, plus Emilio Pucci - an aristocrat and former Olympic skier, who, like Giorgini, lived in a Florentine palazzo.
Photographs of Pucci dressed in skiwear of his own innovative creation had already appeared in American Vogue and he was already rolling out a string of boutiques in fashionable resorts such as Capri, show- casing his first colourful attempts at the jet set chic which would fuel the phenomenon dubbed Pucci-mania by American fashion commentators.
This fashion happening was repeated in subsequent seasons, quickly outgrowing Giorgini’s home and relocating to the magical setting of Sala Bianca within the Pitti Palace. Here, Italian designers continued to show each season, in ever greater numbers until Milan asserted itself as Italy’s fashion showplace in the early 1980s. Over half a century since that first show at Giorgini’s home, Italy remains an essential stopping point on the international fashion calendar.
Several of the designers who involved themselves in that very first show, back in 1951, built enduring international businesses that inspired subsequent generations. They generated an unstoppable momentum and they demonstrated a remarkable willingness to try new things. Whereas French fashion houses regarded TV film crews with inherent suspicion, fearing an outbreak of mass-market copying, the Italians simply welcomed the exposure.
What Italian designers rarely offer is a flight of fashion fantasy. Everything remains very real.
The Fontanas were one of the first Italian fashion houses to branch out into accessories and ready-to-wear. Until this time, store buyers attended the couture shows in Paris to select designs that would be purchased for copy or adaptation back home in the US. The designer brand, as we know it today, was born. In the early 1950s, this concept of designer-name, luxury ready-to-wear seemed revolutionary. Within a couple of decades, it would become the driving force of fashion.
During the 1970s, Gianfranco Ferre, Gianni Versace and Giorgio Armani each established labels that fused their creativity with Italian production prowess. Rather than a spin-off from couture, their factory-made collections were their main lines. These three quickly became the starriest names in an explosion of Italian labels, fuelled by manufacturers such as Gruppo Finanziario Tessile (GFT) - the family-owned uniform supplier that developed into a leading powerhouse of luxury fashion, manufacturing for Armani, Valentino and Ungaro.
The problem with Italian fashion today (if there is one) is its failure to engender and promote new talent. Labels seem to sustain themselves against all possible odds. Pucci, a participant in that very first show, is still a hot ticket on this week’s Milan calendar, although now designed by Christian Lacroix. Ever since the launch of Dolce & Gabbana in the mid-1980s, Italian fashion has never been threatened with a youth-quake. In the continuing absence of significant new brands, the biggest fashion news from Italy during the last decade has been the successful regeneration of old luxury goods houses such as Prada and Gucci. Italian designers still love to dress celebrities, in much the same way that the Fontanas were doing 50 years ago. In fact, a great deal of what happens in Italian fashion today is still inspired by those early years. Designers such as Versace and Cavalli can be relied upon for blatantly sexy clothes. Armani and Prada seem to corner today’s market in understated elegance. But what Italian designers rarely offer is a flight of fashion fantasy. Everything remains very real.
Which, of course, explains why even the most cynical fashion pros will be setting time aside during their hectic Milan schedules for that all-important blast of retail therapy on Via Montenapoleone. Half a century into its history, Italian fashion still focuses on giving women what they want.
....what a way to do it! 
