Eternal Ateliers: Because Fashion Never Dies

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There was a time when, upon the death of the founder, the fashion atelier he had founded closed. The master disappeared among large baskets of white flowers, his inimitable cuts were exhausted, for which wealthy ladies fought in the dressing rooms as you see in Cukor's films and it was not fiction, the great door was closed, the premières delivered the last dresses ordered, pressing the lace-edged handkerchief to their very dry eyes, the contract with the competing dressmaker already in their pockets. Two words whispered to the favorite customer were enough and they started again elsewhere the next day, fresh as roses: "And, madam, I'll be waiting for you" . Sometimes it wasn't even necessary for the venerated master to die; it was enough that he had reached the awareness that a certain time, namely his time, was over and that the moment had come to enjoy the comfort achieved on the snows of St. Moritz.

Sometimes he didn't even organize a farewell fashion show, limiting himself to giving the news to his trusted journalist, after reading which in the Journal du Dimanche the inconsolable widows would lock themselves in their rooms for four days, like Mona von Bismarck in 1968 when she heard that Cristobal Balenciaga found long hair hideous and miniskirts unsuitable for dressing the women he liked, that is, rich and overweight, and that he was therefore closing shop. Once the anger of having to find another tailor capable of hiding defects and flaws had cooled down, the rich women who were not necessarily overweight realized that Hubert de Givenchy wasn't bad after all, after all he had been a student of Balenciaga and was also fresher, yes, more youthful, and the cycle began again, fresher indeed .

There was also a third case. When the turnover and notoriety were such that closing down was a crime for the company and for the entire fashion family, the designated heir apparent, or the most skilled seamstress, or the favorite grandchildren, acquired the archive, opened ateliers a few steps away or gave a nice coat of paint to the original one, entrusted curtains and appliques to the famous architect and started again, keeping just the sign that at the time was not called a trademark but it was as if it were. As you will have understood by reading the newspapers of the last few months, this is also because now no one can escape the news and behind the scenes on the seasonal changes of the creatives because they fascinate a certain type of public like the football transfer market, this last model, that is to hold on as long as it holds and beyond, is the one that has won. Christian Dior , the founder of the fashion house where a few days ago Jonathan W. Anderson was appointed creative director of all the couture lines including which means eighteen collections a year, remained at the head of the atelier he had founded for only ten years, that is until the summer of 1957, when he was found dead in a hotel room in Montecatini after a particularly sumptuous dinner, as it was reported, which was followed by a heart attack. The maison, however, was already a multinational that sold models in all the countries of the world to selected tailors so that they could affix their brand alongside that of “modèle déposé Dior”, as well as stockings and tights, gloves, shoes and perfumes, children's clothes and nightgowns for young girls, so the group of weavers and financiers of various kinds who supported it did not have the heart to close the gates of avenue Montaigne and put thousands of people out on the street, in addition to risking their own pockets, so they appointed in his place the very young Yves Saint Laurent, the patron's favorite, who however lasted only a few seasons because he was called up for military service and suffered the nervous breakdown that everyone talked about and which was followed by the meeting with Pierre Bergé and the story that we know.

Then it was the turn of Marc Bohan, to date the longest-serving creative director and who also inaugurated the men's line with Philippe Guibourgé, which was followed by a long crisis that did not end with closure either because the brand was bought by Bernard Arnault with financing from Banque Lazard and who hired Gianfranco Ferré. After a decade it was the turn of John Galliano, that is, the absolute and unparalleled genius of the last half century for women's collections and Hedi Slimane for men's collections that women also liked, fired in 2011 for anti-Semitic insults hurled at a couple in a bar where he was sitting so stoned and tired and stressed that he certainly didn't even realize what he was saying and then Raf Simons (who today works alongside Miuccia Prada) for another short season that no one understood and it was a shame because he was not bad. In 2016, from the creative direction of Valentino, which he then shared with Pierpaolo Piccioli, now called to restore allure to Balenciaga, the maison that kept its doors closed until a skilled French lawyer resurrected it, along with many others, in the Nineties, came Maria Grazia Chiuri, the Italian, pronounced even by taxi drivers with a hint of alarmed contempt because the idea of ​​another Cisalpine at the head of the “maison qui est l’emblème de la France, vous comprenez madame”, and what’s more a woman, a woman who makes women’s clothes, was unheard of, a scandal . Chiuri overturned preconceptions by turning to feminism and support for female artists and, barring the unplanned stumble of the long relationship with Chiara Ferragni “think yourself free” and those millions of memes that don't stop even today, in nine years she has brought astonishing results, quadrupling the turnover and making the brand attractive even for very young women.

But it's one thing to design clothes, another to meet budget targets that were raised every three months, so after nine years, which at that rate are an epic, cyclopean undertaking, here we are again in Rome, with a lot of beauty time to recover and a fantastic project to develop, the Teatro della Cometa founded in 1958 on the slopes of the Campidoglio by Anna Laetitia Pecci Blunt known as Mimì, a life spent supporting artists because everyone passed through her, in Rome as in the royal Villa of Marlia purchased at the beginning of the twentieth century, Moravia, Bontempelli, Cocteau, Malaparte and the other day I got my hands on a magazine from 1929 that gives the account of one of those summers in the Lucca area and the list of participants seems like that of a court ball, in fact it is certainly more qualified because after all, the Savoys have never liked anyone and before Maria José arrived from Belgium perhaps they had never hosted a writer. Now that Chiuri knows how to spend nine years of bonuses plus severance pay and has involved the whole family in the enterprise, here is Anderson, who will produce more collections per year than the months that can be counted and who in fact they say is already rather nervous.

The “fashion and leather goods” division of the LVMH group suffered a 4 percent drop in the first quarter of the year, 10.1 billion euros, best wishes to him as well as to Nicolas Ghesquière who governs the creativity of the women's division of Louis Vuitton without anyone asking him to account for the sales of clothes because what counts are the handbags, and to all the other creatives who at this time have been called upon to revive the fortunes of a sector that continues to define itself as luxury because such are its communication strategies, while the strategies that underlie the much celebrated “experiences” for customers who spend at least one million euros a year are similar to those of the mass market industry but with jeweler's multiples and the contradiction between the two directions occasionally give rise to serious incidents such as the judicial administration for failure to control the subcontracting chain. A few weeks ago, I was talking about the McQueen case with one of the most popular strategic consultants; he said he was convinced that Sean McGirr, the creative prodigy put in charge of the brand's style, still needed a few seasons to get into the founder's spirit. I asked him why, since McGirr was so good, he didn't have the right to open an atelier in his name, without being forced to replicate, obviously without success, the ghosts of a London boy of great genius and terrible anguish who committed suicide fifteen years ago. He replied that the brand's "community" is still quite strong, to which I replied that I should try going out on the street and asking a twenty-year-old who Lee Alexander McQueen was, and the conversation ended with many promises to meet for a coffee in the coming months. You have to understand Giorgio Armani who personally puts the finishing touches to his beautiful exhibition at the Silos in Milan for the twentieth anniversary of the couture collection, the Privé: whoever goes to see it, knows that the founder is there, and not only in spirit.

Speaking of exhibitions, if you had any doubts about who launched the trend of the eternal atelier, impervious to human transience and even common sense, you can take a tour of the exhibition dedicated to Charles Frederick Worth at the Petit Palais in Paris until next autumn: in addition to being inscribed in the volumes of fashion history as the “father of haute couture” , this moustachioed, pot-bellied Englishman with a beret à la Raphael always pulled down on his head because he considered himself an artist and wanted to get it noticed, arranged the enterprise so that his children and grandchildren could develop it in glory, upholsterer-style fabrics and hard cash, which happened until the 1950s, with the exception of a small attempt at recovery in the early 2000s, the brand alone, of course, with clothes and linens made here and there, that is, by façonists. Worth is glorified in fashion books as the founder of haute couture and the modern “atelier concept”, designer label fashion since 1858, which is not so true because the oldest fashion house in Europe was called Ventura, opened in 1815 in Milan, from the early twentieth century it had branches in half of Italy, from Genoa to Rome, and also dressed Maria José on her wedding day in 1930, based on a design by her fiancé Umberto di Savoia who loved designing clothes. Closed in the last years of the war, part of the atelier passed into the employ of the best of the group's dressmakers, Fernanda Gattinoni, the rest relocated with Gabriella di Robilant, aka Gabriellasport; every now and then I still run into the Ventura heirs at the golf course on the lake, the very few remaining dresses are in private hands, I will put one on display soon, one of their most famous models in the thirties was a red evening shirt dress with rose-shaped pockets, a model revived in the early 2000s by Valentino Garavani, at the moment a bit in trouble because the hiring of Alessandro Michele, former architect of the Gucci miracle, is not producing the expected results and the co-founder Giancarlo Giammetti, who has just inaugurated the exhibition space of the Foundation, PM23, responded piquedly on social media to a public joke of his on the value, or disvalue, of beauty.

None of these creatives who continue to swap seats are under fifty, perhaps only Matthieu Blazy, whom Chanel hired a few months ago, snatching him from Bottega Veneta, and McGirr. Their names are waved around, used, dusted off every time a position opens up or the possibility of a new change is glimpsed. It is not laziness on the part of the press; it is the awareness that, in order not to take risks on their own, the management of the big fashion companies, the investors themselves, prefer to pay millions for well-known names instead of betting, as they did only twenty or thirty years ago, on young people full of ideas. The result is substantially identical collections, worked on and developed on archives that are sometimes all too well known, and on a substantial repetitiveness and uniformity that drives new customers away, instead of attracting them. The turnover, as they say, is there to be seen. And it is not just a question of the economic crisis.

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