Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (19 page)

‘Getting it right is just a way to make sure you make the sale and boost the bottom line,’ she says.

I am interested to know what questions the Chinese she has met want answered. ‘Surprising ones,’ says Collinsworth. One subject was gay marriage. ‘To them it’s a complete abstraction but they wanted to know what I thought,’ she says. And how did she answer? ‘Carefully.’

The book is aimed not at chief executives but at the many millions of young graduates who have grown up in the sprawl of China’s new cities – first-generation products of its epic urbanization. Collinsworth has a theory that the rapid transition from rural to urban life has led to what she calls a ‘social disconnect’ among the urban young. While they know all about the latest communication technologies, mobiles, social media and so on, they lack ‘the comfort and confidence to interact, even within their own age group’. They know how to act but not how to be.

Her book, she thinks, will help them deal with each other as well as with westerners. After all, manners are not ultimately an east–west thing, as she points out: ‘It has to do with … I suppose I am sounding ridiculously female, but it has to do with kindness, recognizing, being sensitive to someone else’s background.’

Which is all lovely, of course, but why should the Chinese take lessons in sensitivity to background from a westerner who barely speaks their language? ‘I am not marketing the idea of western culture as in any way superior,’ she insists.

The idea came from her son Gilliam. He spent two years in China while studying Mandarin at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, where he is still finishing a degree. He introduced her to Beijing life and attended every meeting with her Chinese publishers. It was a role reversal. ‘I became utterly dependent on him, which was kind of strange,’ she says.

She admits that it has been unsettling moving from her comfortable New York existence to modern Beijing. When I ask if she could imagine staying there permanently, she shudders. ‘It would drive me mad,’ she says, adding that China’s capital can seem like ‘something out of a Philip K. Dick novel – or from
Blade Runner
. You see the sun come up every morning and
it looks like the moon.’ The dust and pollution has even deprived her of her daily jog. ‘It’s like the air has got shards of something in it,’ she says.

The daughter of a Southern businessman and a Czech-born pianist, Collinsworth always possessed self-belief. After starting as a publisher’s receptionist in 1970s New York, she rose rapidly through the ranks and was by the early 1980s running a publishing house, Arbor House, editing the likes of Elmore Leonard, Anthony Burgess and Richard Nixon.

Then, in 1990, she dropped that life and headed west to set up a magazine in Los Angeles, a Californian version of
Vanity Fair
.
Buzz
almost failed before it got going, when advertising dried up in the recession. ‘I was sitting in an empty office – almost everything had been repossessed by the bailiffs – when I got the call to say that we were going to be rescued,’ she says. Although the magazine survived and attracted a following, it finally closed eight years later.

But a Californian start-up seems as child’s play compared with what she has taken on now. Collinsworth’s strategy has been to write the book to establish herself as an authority on deportment before launching the school. This has the merit of minimizing the ever-present threat of intellectual property infringement. ‘You can copy the programme but you can’t copy me,’ she says, fixing me with her grey-green eyes.

I am on my best behaviour so I nod obediently but those she needs to attract to make her business fly – a convention of spare-parts manufacturers from Hunan, say – might wonder what’s in it for them. Collinsworth is convinced they will flock to her because what she offers – a way to achieve better communication with westerners – is good business. It will help Chinese companies to find a more creative way of doing things, she believes, something that requires a different way of thinking – a sense of empathy. ‘They have to get away from the Confucian method of rote learning if they are going to innovate,’ she says.

Collinsworth is still picking at her fish and the waiter is hovering. It dawns on me that pudding is out of the question. I bet a Chinese tycoon would have gone ahead and ordered a double helping of tiramisu but I am too feebly western to dare.

We have moved on to the political sensitivities of doing business in China. Collinsworth explains how her book has been vetted by ‘the Information Office’. I am surprised the censors could find anything to object to. But no, they had two complaints. One was the word ‘Muslims’,
which set off immediate alarm bells. ‘It’s as though you move into a no-fly zone of irrational anxiety,’ she says. The other concern was an endorsement on the back from a public figure who had in the past supported the idea of democracy. ‘So I spoke to her and she said, “I am surprised that they would be bothered but if there’s a problem of course take me off.” ’

I am struck by her readiness to kowtow. ‘It’s foreign to me but I can’t have it both ways,’ she explains briskly. ‘If I want to work with a Chinese publisher in China, writing a book for mainland Chinese, it would be unworldly of me to do anything else. It’s a deportment book.’

When we talk about the Bo Xilai case and the uncertainties for the foreigner doing business in China, she suspects Neil Heywood, the British businessman who died mysteriously in a Chongqing hotel room, to have been the author of his own misfortune. ‘He was clearly in way over his head,’ she says. But how do you know when you are in over your own head in China? I ask. ‘I think you know it when someone is poisoning you.’

The lunch reaches its conclusion. Collinsworth dabs her lips with a napkin as the waiter brings the bill. She thanks me politely, and takes her leave, anxious not to be late for her next meeting. It is only when the waiter moves to take away her plate that I realize how deftly she has given the impression of lunching, without actually eating or drinking anything at all.

25 FEBRUARY 2012

Over a detox meal at their gilded HQ in Milan, the Italian designers talk about dogs, dessert and destiny

By Vanessa Friedman

During fashion show season, which is any time between January’s men’s wear shows and this weekend, when their women’s wear collection is shown in Milan, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana don’t go out to lunch.

This is not, in case you’re wondering, an initiative reflecting the current austerity programme in Italy – Dolce and Gabbana actually own a restaurant in Milan called, pointedly, Gold. But during super-busy periods, the design duo – famous for turning Sicilian widow’s weeds into objects of high-fashion fetishization, and for persuading celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson and Kylie Minogue to shoehorn themselves into said confections of corsetry and black lace – rarely leave their office once they arrive, at 9am, from their respective apartments in a building across the street (Dolce lives on the fifth floor, Gabbana on the sixth).

In other words, if you want to talk to them, you go to them, which is not as bad as it might sound. As Gabbana explained, when I invited them to lunch, ‘The office is our prison. But it is a nice prison.’ ‘It’s a golden prison,’ added Dolce. He was not speaking entirely metaphorically.

Arriving at the general reception (pretty standard, featuring a woman behind a high desk), I am quickly escorted to a more private reception area. It is an eye-boggling combination of deep-burgundy velvet settees, leopard-print walls and assorted enormous paintings. These include an
oil of the designers and their three Labradors – one chocolate, one blond, one black – and the Italian pop artist Giuseppe Veneziano’s depiction of an enormous classical Madonna with the head of Madonna Ciccone and two putti – with the heads of Dolce and Gabbana – playing at her feet. It is, frankly, a little disconcerting. Still, Dante Ferretti couldn’t have made a better film set if he’d tried. As Dolce and Gabbana design, so do they live.

‘Vanessa!’ Gabbana enters, stage left, smile on his tan face, wearing artfully ripped Dolce & Gabbana blue jeans, an odd assortment of keys jangling from a watch fob on his pinstriped vest. ‘Vanessa!’ Dolce enters next: shorter, bald, with black-rimmed glasses perched on his head, wearing a grey sweater and jeans.

Dolce, 53, and Gabbana, 49, met in 1980 when both were assistants at a fashion atelier in Milan, and became Dolce & Gabbana in 1982. From the start, their inspiration was to tap into the romantic nostalgia people feel for the
Dolce Vita
clichés of Italy – Sophia Loren, pasta, Sicily – and to translate them, without irony but with great enthusiasm, into a modern aesthetic (one 2009 ad campaign featured Madonna in a kitchen cooking pasta). The clothes may have a complicated construction but their appeal is straightforward. Like many other Italian brands, they are, at least superficially, about sex. But where Gucci historically channelled hedonistic sex, and Versace aggressive sex, D&G’s domain is happy sex: the wow-check-out-my-cleavage-I-can’t-believe-it! sort of sex.

The two designers have been together professionally for 30 years and they were also involved personally for 23 of those but broke up in 2005. They know it is tempting to try to make sense of their partnership, to say one is a tailor and one a dressmaker, or one a sketcher and one a draper. Dolce says, ‘I go to Pilates three times a week in the morning and recently I was in the dressing room and a teacher came in – which wasn’t really nice, because I don’t want to talk to the teacher when I am dressing – and he says, “So, how does it work: are you a tailor and he is more VIP? Or – wait, I know – are you like Bertelli and he is Miuccia Prada?” ’

‘Bertelli and Prada? Hah!’ Gabbana snorts. The reference is to the division of business and design responsibilities that exists at another famous Italian fashion house, between the designer Miuccia Prada and her husband, and Prada chairman Patrizio Bertelli.

Instead, the way Dolce explains it: ‘We are in each other’s minds.’ Certainly, by this stage in their lives together, they are a double act to rival Laurel and Hardy, Hope and Crosby, or Oscar and Felix from
The Odd Couple
. Dolce is quieter, more practical; Gabbana, the chattier one. He says Dolce is ‘Sicilian – he came north to find “the new”, and he’s all the time looking forward’; he himself is Milanese, ‘so I love tradition. It’s very hard for me to let go of the past.’ Gabbana talks not just with his hands but with his arms and occasionally also his shoulders. If Dolce uses any props to illustrate or underline his words, it’s his eyeglasses.

Watching them in action, you know you are seeing a performance but to complain seems churlish. For those familiar with their runway shows, it provokes an interesting sense of déjà vu. Though their collections are full of push-up corsetry and crystals, the Dolce & Gabbana business is actually built on tailoring, white shirts and trouser suits. But while very profitable, this stuff is not particularly stimulating to look at. So, instead, the two men provide a show.

As we stroll to the dining room, situated across a wide hall with an enormous Venetian chandelier at one end, the routine continues. I mention that I have just come from the Paris couture shows and was disappointed by them.

‘Today people think style is a handbag,’ says Dolce, mournfully.

‘But you don’t change your style by changing your bag,’ says Gabbana. ‘You change it with your clothes.’

Dolce: ‘In history, in ancient Egypt, did Cleopatra change her bag?’

Gabbana: ‘It’s clothes that change with the times. In 10 years, who is going to remember the bags? They will remember the clothes.’

Dolce: ‘The fashion system has killed fashion.’

The patter pauses as we enter another room, with another enormous chandelier – gilt this time – and equally feral wallpaper, in tiger stripes. Gabbana’s dogs are about to have lunch, too. The designer heads through a door and reappears with three dog bowls that he places in a corner. Gabbana loves Labradors. He has had Labs for 17 years, since Anna Dello Russo, the Italian fashion editor and blogging celebrity, gave him one as a Christmas present. ‘They are the nicest dogs,’ he says. ‘So friendly to people.’

A waiter appears and hands Gabbana a piece of paper. He looks at it and hands it to me with a flourish. ‘This is your menu,’ he announces.
Unfortunately, it is in Italian, which I can only guess at, so he elaborates: ‘I am on a detox, so what I get, you get. Madonna told me about it once when I was in New York, and now I do it twice a year. Ten days, all vegetables and protein.’

‘I don’t detox,’ says Dolce. ‘I like to cook. I cook Sicilian food: over the weekend I made a bolognese and roast for 15 people. I cook and wash, cook and wash. When I am done, the kitchen is like a mirror.’