The Fashion of These Times

By David Lane

Searching for the legendary Italian style, David Lane draws on decades of living in Italy, an unrivalled knowledge of the country and a huge network of contacts that give him special strength in tackling this fascinating subject. Lane goes backstage at collections, sits beside catwalks, learns about luxury lingerie, watches hat-makers, bag-maker

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peregrine's Head
• Release date: Jul 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9780993291012

Book preview

1

LONDON AND ROME

A BOOK ON ITALIAN style, whether in clothing, eyewear, footwear, food or fast cars, must start somewhere. In Milan? Many who know the Lombard city say it is grey and some call it provincial but even so, with its collections, catwalks and fashion quadrilateral of alluring shop windows, it claims to be the capital of style. Or in Florence? A treasury of art and architecture and a paradise for food and wine, the cradle of the Renaissance was where Italian fashion took root after the second world war. Or in Rome? When Hollywood was on the Tiber in the 1950s, the Eternal City drew movie folk from California, was home to knights of fashion, and jet-setters and hangers-on joined film stars and directors to savour the dolce vita in cafés along the Via Veneto, fend off paparazzi, publicise a way of life and boost Italian style.

However suitable those three Italian cities might be, this book begins in none of them. Instead, it starts in London, at the very Italian Bulgari Hotel in posh and pricey Knightsbridge on a damp and windy November morning, in the dismal weather typical of northern Europe, far from the sunshine and sparkle of dolce vita Rome. Around two hundred journalists, many scruffy, few of them stylish, had turned up for an event in the hotel’s ballroom. I had travelled from the Italian capital, intrigued by the invitation that had landed in my email inbox and by the venue. Seeing and experiencing at first hand, albeit for a short while and just a small part, how the super-rich and super-pampered lived was not to be missed. Soon after ten o’clock we were comfortably seated having spent the previous hour snacking on the fruit juices, coffee, tea and assorted pastries that the luxury hotel had laid on in a neighbouring reception area, rich with ribbed steel, mirrors, dark stone and glass, and topped off with a cupola of white gold mosaic made by Italian craftsmen.

On display at the back of the ballroom behind the rows of seats stood three mannequins, one sporting a late-1980s fuchsia and green silk evening dress designed by Roberto Capucci, another a suit from the same period by Gianni Versace. The third mannequin was decked out in a silver sequinned evening dress with quilted white silk coat by Mila Schön. This was the outfit in which Princess Lee Radziwill, Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister who had usually favoured French haute couture, went to Truman Capote’s notorious Black and White Ball in New York in 1966, an event that everybody who thought they counted believed they just had to attend. There was also a photograph, showing the film star Elizabeth Taylor toting a fortune’s worth of Bulgari jewellery around her neck.

Italian fashion was why I and other journalists were sitting beneath two massive, handcrafted solid silver chandeliers in a room that the hotel promoted as providing timeless elegance for the most glamorous lunches, dinners, banquets and parties. The Victoria & Albert Museum which housed Britain’s, and the world’s, supreme collection of decorative arts and design was launching an exhibition, The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945-2014, that was due to run through the following spring and summer of 2014, and was doing so in the hotel’s highly exclusive surroundings.

Bulgari, which described its Diva jewellery collection as contemporary magnificence, an inspiration coming from the Dolce Vita to conjure all the essence of feminine glamour, had taken the role of lead sponsor for the exhibition and unsurprisingly had offered its hotel ballroom to help put the show on the road. For the exhibition, the Rome-based jeweller had raided its own collection for a selection of some of the jewels from the 1960s owned by Taylor and rarely put on public view which, it said, personified the exuberance and opulence of the Hollywood on the Tiber years.

The necklace in the photograph that the journalists saw in the hotel’s ballroom was of diamonds and emeralds set in platinum and was an engagement gift from the actor Richard Burton that Taylor wore on their wedding day. In the photograph she was wearing it at a Venetian masked ball in 1967. While the couple was filming Cleopatra at Cinecittà in 1962, Burton is reported to have said, The only word Liz knows in Italian is Bulgari. According to the jewellery firm, both Burton and Eddie Fisher, Taylor’s husband at the time, indulged her in the most sought after, stylish and precious Bulgari jewels.

That was expensive indulgence. Buying at Bulgari, whether the jewellery for which it was best known or its hotel accommodation, called for bulging wallets, fat chequebooks or solidly-backed credit cards. The room rates at the firm’s Knightsbridge hotel gave an idea of the money needed to indulge Bulgari-style. The cheapest room – the hotel called it a superior room and surely it was – set a guest back five hundred and ten pounds a night, and allowed him or her forty square metres of space (about four hundred square feet), a king-sized bed and a sense of what it might be like to be pampered. One hundred and twenty pounds more bought a night of what the hotel called an elite experience, in which the guest enjoyed an over-sized bathroom, opulent silk wallpaper and an extra six square metres of room.

When Elizabeth Taylor visited London, some years before the Bulgari Hotel opened its doors to the world’s wealthy, she stayed in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, a classic of 1930s art deco luxury, and however much she fell for Bulgari jewellery when she was in Rome perhaps the hotel in Knightsbridge would not have suited her taste. Certainly, whatever the size of the bathroom or the type of wallpaper, it was hard to imagine that the film star would have felt sufficiently indulged with simply a room in the Bulgari Hotel. Perhaps a studio suite with an expansive bathroom and inviting seating area with large sofas at one thousand two hundred and fifty pounds a night. Or a deluxe suite costing one thousand pounds a night more but offering bold aesthetic and the opportunity to experience the true opulence of Bulgari. Or perhaps even that would have fallen short of Taylor’s expectations and she would have opted for the very top of the range at the hotel and indulged herself in the peerless magnificence of a Bulgari suite, splashing out nine thousand pounds a night for the privilege of doing so.

The Bulgari Hotel assailed readers of its brochure and visitors to its website with a veritable dictionary of laudatory adjectives and superlatives: sleek architecture and refined interiors … desirable and admired … lavish amenities … flawless quality of service … exquisite marbles and fine woods … an oasis of comfort and sleek luxury. The cocktails served in the bar were both exquisite and fashionable, said the hotel. And perhaps they should have been at fourteen pounds plus 12½ per cent service charge for drinks like an Aperol Spritz made of Aperol and sparkling prosecco or a Sbagliato of Martini Rosso, Campari and prosecco. While the Wine Society, the leading British consumer wine cooperative, sold its members very decent verdicchio, an Italian still white wine, for less than seven pounds a bottle, the drinker at the Bulgari Hotel faced a bill of almost fifty pounds. Such was the mark-up or pricing premium that went with luxury and the opportunity to enjoy La Dolce Vita in Il Bar at the Bulgari Hotel in Knightsbridge.

Bond Street and Mayfair showed one face of elite London and Knightsbridge another. When the Victoria & Albert Museum’s press launch finished I took a walk of about five minutes from the Bulgari Hotel, across Brompton Road and around the corner at the top of Sloane Street, to find a density of shops bearing the names of leading Italian luxury and fashion brands with which only Milan’s quadrilateral could compete. You might as well be in Via Condotti in Rome, an elegant Florentine lady who worked for a leading brand that had one of those Sloane Street shops would later remark.

Indeed, the main fashion street in Rome seemed almost to lag the Italian-ness of that part of London. The first two hundred yards of Sloane Street down which I walked were packed with the big and small guns of Italian luxury clothing and footwear. Salvatore Ferragamo, the shoemaker and fashion house, neighboured Harvey Nichols, an up-market, typically British department store at the top of the eastern side, followed by Sergio Rossi, Ermenegildo Zegna, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace and a platoon of others including Bulgari’s jewellery shop. Non-Italian interlopers were few: Tom Ford, Hermès, Saint Laurent and Chanel, and The Gloucester, Sloane Street’s only public house, seeming a throwback to 1940s England. Across the street, the endless roll-call of Italian names continued undiminished from Tod’s, a luxury shoemaker on the corner of Hans Crescent, to Gianfranco Ferré, Gucci, Roberto Cavalli, Hogan and Cesare Paciotti and yet another of Dolce & Gabbana’s shops on the corner of Sloane Street and Basil Street. Devotees of highly priced, decidedly top-end cashmere could satisfy their craving for luxury at Brunello Cucinelli, closer to Sloane Square.

Like streets in nearby Chelsea and Mayfair, and more distant St John’s Wood and Belsize Park, those in the district of London where the Bulgari Hotel stood were liberally trafficked by luxury, high-performance Italian cars: red Ferraris, white Lamborghinis and black Maseratis. Italian restaurants and pizzerias abounded across all of central London; coffee from llly of Trieste and Lavazza of Turin, made espresso style, was ubiquitous; prosecco from the Veneto region was served in most smart bars and red Nero d’Avola from Sicily was on wine lists in many top restaurants; elegant kitchenware from Alessi was widely on sale; and panettoni cakes filled delicatessens’ windows at Christmas and colombe at Easter. The Italian style invasion of London was well advanced.

About a year and a half before the Victoria & Albert Museum opened its exhibition in South Kensington, not far to the west of the hotel where it held the press launch, the Embankment Galleries of Somerset House, behind the Courtauld Institute at the end of the Strand in central London, had opened an exhibition of Valentino’s creations. The show displayed over one hundred and thirty hand-made designs that had been worn by public figures like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Grace Kelly and Sophia Loren. I tried to see the exhibition towards the end of its run but was thwarted by the huge public interest that had caused a sell-out. It was the most popular exhibition ever held at the Embankment Galleries, the press officer told me when I expressed disappointment at having been unable to buy a ticket, and by the time it closed, at the beginning of March 2013, it had attracted a record number of visitors.

In the spring and summer of 2012, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had put on Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, an exhibition that looked at the work of two iconic Italian designers from very different eras. The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945-2014 would travel to America when it closed in London, giving Americans in Minneapolis, Portland and Nashville the opportunity to see the Victoria & Albert Museum’s take on post-war Italy’s achievements in styles of dress. The exhibition would not travel to Italy, Sonnet Stanfill, its American curator, said at the press launch. Her work had drawn on original research in Italian archives and in preparing the exhibition she studied, among other things, the impact of film stars like Elizabeth Taylor as ambassadors of style in promoting international interest in luxury, made in Italy clothing.

Martin Roth, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s German director who had previously spent ten years heading Dresden’s state art collections, was thrilled to celebrate Italy’s immense contribution to the international fashion world in this first major exhibition on the subject. He told the media pack at the Bulgari Hotel that the V&A had a long tradition of working with Italian designers and that the exhibition would chronicle the development of the legendary Italian style.

So what was the Italian style to which Roth referred? The Bulgari Hotel in Knightsbridge boasted that every detail of its restaurant exuded Italian style. Certainly the menu fitted an exclusive Italian bill that would have found takers among the well-off in northern Italian cities, with tagliolini al tartufo bianco and ravioli di ricotta con funghi porcini, both expensive treats in Italy, among the seasonal dishes to begin a dinner, and risotto alla milanese and burrata, puntarelle e acciughe marinate among the evergreen starters. There was nothing down-market in what the Bulgari Hotel offered but a poorer Mediterranean diet had won approval from doctors and dieticians as a balanced way of eating. The stainless steel bar was, said the hotel, inspired by the craftsmanship of Italian silversmiths. Italian furniture and silk fabrics added luxury touches to rooms and suites. Clothes and shoes in the Knightsbridge shops and Bulgari’s jewellery were also promoted on what seemed to have become an important selling point. Depending on what product they were pushing, for marketing people, Italian style arrived tasty, healthy, attractive, desirable, beautiful, elegant, well-made, presented with flair, fast, sexy or any combination, and rarely cheap.

My first brush with Italian style occurred in the mid-1960s in the person of a young Italian architect who would drive to London in his open-top Alfa Romeo, parking the car on Notting Hill Gate itself beneath Campden Hill Tower, a block of then stylish flats. Four of us celebrated his engagement to a peaches-and-cream English girl who lived in one of those flats by dining in nearby Hillgate Village, in a small trattoria called La Paesana, candle-lit and decorated with the Chianti flasks which in that era of little-travelled people seemed the marks of romantic Latin authenticity. I would later learn that truly Italian trattorias were usually starkly lit and Chianti flasks far from Italian ideas of restaurant décor. But Alfa Romeos with their distinctive crackle of exhaust were certainly authentically Italian. Around that time a red Spider 1600 Duetto, the actor Dustin Hoffman at the wheel, played a part in a successful Hollywood film, The Graduate.

Alfa Romeo sports cars from the 1960s may have become museum pieces and collectors’ items but much of what came labelled and sold as Italian style was ephemeral. Indeed it was more a matter of fashion, a prevailing style, appropriate or acceptable in a particular period of time. By far the greatest part of clothing and footwear was designed, made and destined not to last. Of the huge number of fashions and fads blown up and pumped out by the stylists of Italian clothing in their various collections every year, from genuine luxury to accessible luxury to simply accessible, few would endure over time. They would occasionally be worn until they wore out, but mostly left in wardrobes until they were thrown away or given to charity shops to be bought and worn by people who would never have thought of stepping into those elegant boutiques on Sloane Street.

Perhaps the legendary Italian style to which Roth, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s director, referred was to be sought in the country’s lasting historical and cultural legacies whose values have proved timeless: renaissance art for instance, or the villas designed by the architect Andrea Palladio, built in the sixteenth century around the city of Vicenza in northeast Italy, that have been architectural reference points ever since. Palladio was an important influence on Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones, the architect of the Queen’s House in Greenwich in London, as well as on William Kent, the designer of Chiswick House in west London. But Palladio’s influence was worldwide. In 2010, the United States Congress described the Venetian architect as the father of American architecture.

Or in music, where Italian style has also stamped itself widely. Opera was born in Florence, spread first to Mantua and then further northeast to Venice. Italian opera was an influence elsewhere in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although the names of nineteenth century composers like Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini and Giuseppe Verdi invariably sprang to mind when Italian opera was mentioned, and it was their works that generally drew audiences to opera houses across the world. The Italian overture of the late-seventeenth century that had three movements, fast-slow-fast, was the forerunner of the symphony. And Italian style was not limited to operas and overtures, as the score of any piece of classical music showed, with andante, adagio, allegro, assai, non troppo, sostenuto, con brio, forte, piano among the words for composers’ indications of tempi and dynamics. Look at any music score and you’ll see the Italian presence all over it, Sabrina Saccomani, a musicologist with the Turin-based Istituto per i Beni Musicali in Piemonte, would tell me. Writing about Haydn’s cello concerto in C major, H C Robbins Landon, a musicologist and Haydn scholar, pointed to the Lombard rhythms in the first movement and a finale that was a worthy successor to the great Vivaldian ritornello form.

Italian newspapers and magazines tended to gush over Italian creativity in clothing. Yet creativity did not begin and end with fashion. Olivetti, a manufacturer of office equipment and computers that collapsed and came to a sad end in the 1990s, was probably the best known among large Italian firms for attention to industrial design, making elegant but functional objects like typewriters and calculators. Its reputation was such that in 1952 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition called Olivetti: Design in Industry and Olivetti products like the Lettera 22 portable typewriter would be taken into the museum’s permanent collection. But the media found little space for industrial creativity and design which were over-shadowed by glamorous and newsy fashion; probably not by chance the Victoria & Albert Museum aimed to lure the public by offering glamour in its exhibition.

Some years ago I wrote a book about Silvio Berlusconi and Italian style in politics and business during the 1980s and 1990s when glamour was largely absent, and corruption and ostentation provided the backdrop to the media mogul’s rise, with the Mafia adding a touch of local colour. After its publication, wondering what my next book should be, a friend who designed sets and costumes for ballets and operas suggested Italian fashion, and the bookshop of the Victoria & Albert Museum as the starting point. Instead, the book I wrote then was about a journey through southern Italy from Gela on the south coast of Sicily to the village of Teano between Naples and Rome, and the Mafia in its various regional guises was the constant thread. With wide spreading tentacles reaching into the most unexpected places, the Mafia was an ugly feature of Italian style.

The visit to the Bulgari Hotel was one stage of what was essentially an Italian journey that paused in Rome before moving northwards to discover the secrets of fashion – clothing, footwear, eyewear, jewellery – and of other Italian styles that were certainly better advertisements for the Bel Paese than Berlusconi, bunga bunga, bungs or the Mafia.

It is said that all roads lead to Rome. This one led away from the Eternal City, although many figures from the fashion world travelled there in November 2012, drawn by a two-day conference on luxury goods and fashion organised by the International Herald Tribune, an American daily newspaper. Those visitors were lucky to enjoy fine weather on the evening of their closing dinner. Severe rainstorms had hit central Italy and caused the Tiber to rise to levels not seen in fifty years, roar into the arches of bridges, surge over the Isola Tiberina and flood the sixteenth century Fatebenefratelli hospital. The river still churned a murky, muddy brown, but the cobbled streets of the historic centre were dry, sparing the shoes of the fashion crowd when they made their way to the Palazzo Sacchetti in Via Giulia for the gala dinner at which Suzy Menkes, a well-known British fashion writer, was the guest of honour.

In the entrance lobby, just inside the palace’s sober façade, a cluster of young women in trim black dresses greeted guests. I was among the first they escorted to the piano nobile, up broad, shallow flights of steps, every ten or so marked by carefully composed groups of white candles, their yellowish light flickering on the travertine limestone. At the top, another cluster of young women, guest lists in hand, picked small envelopes from a table by the door, each with a guest’s name in elegant copperplate. One of them gave me mine, a card inside telling me that I would sit at table number three. After glasses of prosecco in the palace’s anterooms, we were ushered through staterooms to dinner.

Manolo Blahnik, a Spanish shoe designer who began working in London and then opened boutiques in other cities giving wealthy women across the world the opportunity to buy his highly priced footwear, was at the dinner, and so was Jean Paul Gaultier, a French stylist known for his iconoclastic designs. Blahnik spent his childhood in the Canary Islands and had earlier spoken at the conference about about the influence of North Africa on his work, while Gaultier, a gay, had spoken about diversity.

Stars of fashion glittered but there were guests who while sparkling less were arguably equally important to the industry; businessmen skilled with numbers, knowledgeable about markets and marketing, and with the ability to navigate the banking world, exploit brands and convert seasonal collections into profits. Michael Burke, then the managing director of Bulgari, was on my left and a real jeweller, Lucia Odescalchi, on my right. Further to my right was Stefano Sincini, the chief executive officer of Tod’s and to the left was Toni Scervino, the business brain and the sole director of Dernamaria, the firm that controlled Ermanno Scervino, a rising luxury fashion house. Leonardo Del Vecchio, founder of eyewear giant Luxottica, and Umberto Angeloni, president of Caruso, a maker of luxury menswear were at other tables. These were people who worked away from the spotlight but brokered corporate marriages, developed brands, took fashion firms to the stock market, decided their marketing strategies, kept them financially stable and were essential to the world of fashion, and not just in Italy.

Diego Della Valle, chairman of Tod’s and host for the evening, believed in doing things with style. And the Palazzo Sacchetti he had chosen for his dinner party provided high style that evening. The building was designed by Antonio Sangallo the Younger, one of the great architects of Rome who worked on many projects in the papal city, the Palazzo Della Valle (built for a sixteenth century cardinal of that name and clearly not the business magnate of Italian footwear fame), the Palazzo della Cancelleria and the church of San Marcello al Corso among them. The ageing architect had hoped to live in his ‘perfect palace’, but died in 1546 before its completion. The big names of twenty-first century fashion were simply adding to the roll of notables who had visited the palace during the period of more than four centuries that it had stood on the Via Giulia. One of the early owners of Palazzo Sacchetti after the death of Sangallo was Cardinal Giovanni Ricci of Montepulciano, whose enlargements included the Salone dei Mappamondi, frequented by popes and one of the magnificent rooms that the guests of the fashion world were able to admire, glasses in hand, watching, talking, looking and being looked at. The palace was also owned for a while by Cardinal Ottavio Acquaviva d’Aragona, the archbishop of Naples. A little over a century after its architect died it was bought by the Sacchetti family, a Florentine dynasty of merchants, bankers and bishops. Just across the Tiber from the basilica of Saint Peter’s, the Via Giulia was where some powerful families with ties to the Vatican chose to live.

The sixteenth century Palazzo Sacchetti hid its riches and elegance behind a plain façade, but the grand figures of the past might have understood how twenty-first century fashion and wealth paraded themselves. Yet the wealth and power of the Roman Catholic church on view centuries before were still visible. Baroque churches speckled the map of central Rome. Several lay along the half mile that took the Via Giulia from one end to the other: Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte, built in 1575; Santa Caterina da Siena, built in 1526; the Chiesa dello Spirito Santo dei Napoletani, built in 1574; Santa Maria del Suffragio, built in the late-seventeenth century; and the little church of San Biagio della Pagnotta. And beyond the palace, at the end of the street, was San Giovanni dei Fiorentini where Sangallo had a hand. Jacopo Sansovino had begun it in 1519 and his work had been carried forward by Sangallo and Giacomo Della Porta. Michelangelo had a say in the dome, built in early years of the seventeenth century. The altar was designed by Francesco Borromini who worked on many other baroque buildings in Rome and was buried in the church.

Travertine stone quarried from near the city and marble from the mountains in Tuscany behind Carrara cut into slabs for walls and floors and crafted into ornate altars, hundreds upon hundreds of paintings and sculptures, gold and silverware and richly decorated ecclesiastical vestments were and continued to be the evidence of the Church’s worldly wealth. When the Palazzo Sacchetti was built few Romans could have had a notion of the luxury of the style or the homes in which cardinals, bishops and monsignors lived, but when they appeared in public in their finery, these mighty princes of the Church wore the evidence of their wealth. Not for them the plain clothing that members of religious bodies wore: monks of the Order of Saint Benedict in black tunics, Dominican friars of the Order of Preachers wearing black cloaks over white habits, Cistercians in white habits with black scapulars, Franciscan friars known for their vows of poverty in simple brown or grey habits and many others visiting Rome, or for whom the city was home, wearing ordinary but distinctive tunics, habits and cloaks.

In his book The Church Visible, James-Charles Noonan, Jr., an American expert on the protocol of the Roman Catholic church, described the complexity of priestly dress, from the sizeable wardrobe of clothing items, the materials permitted and adornments to the different colours used in the seasons of the Church’s year. Violet or purple were to be worn in Advent and Lent, for funerals and on All Souls’ Day; gold and silver for the most solemn feasts; red on Pentecost, Good Friday and Palm Sunday; and white, symbolising joy, purity and resurrection, at Christmas and Easter. Green, the symbol of hope and everlasting life, was the Church’s everyday colour. In