The Coat Route (10 page)

John had done business with the enigmatic Florentine menswear designer for years. He knew the designer’s agent in Melbourne, so he gave him a call to ask if he thought Stefano might be willing to sell him some silk. Out of the question, the agent had said. Mr. Ricci would never do that—certainly not to be used as a lining. John sensed that the agent was reluctant to even approach the designer, but he kept pressing
.

Tell him it is for a vicuña overcoat, entirely handmade, John said, believing Stefano Ricci would appreciate that kind of commitment to artisanship. Tell him it will be of the highest standard. Mention that the coat is navy blue—he would defer to Mr. Ricci’s good taste as to the specifics of the lining design as long as it complemented the fabric’s hue. Two months went by, and John heard nothing. And then, one day, he got a call. It was the agent. He sounded dumbfounded. Stefano Ricci would sell him enough silk to line one overcoat. But, the designer had insisted, he must tell no one—and he must never ask again
.

I
am sitting in a dark-orange club chair, made from the skin of wild New Guinean crocodiles, waiting for Stefano Ricci to arrive. This is something I may never do again, so I am paying particular attention to the soft window-paned leather and to the perplexing, almost unnameable hue—persimmon, is it, or just a half shade more toward paprika? The chair, and others like it, are placed in pairs on a travertine tiled floor in Stefano Ricci’s eponymous boutique, set theatrically in the former armory of the Palazzo Tornabuoni, on one of Florence’s choicest shopping streets. Art-filled upper floors of the fifteenth-century palace, once the home of a Renaissance-era pope, have recently been converted into a private-residence club managed by the Four Seasons. (Owners are picked up at the airport in the club’s Maserati.) With upstairs neighbors like that, and a retail block that includes Bulgari, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Cartier, it is obvious why Stefano Ricci opened his flagship store here in 2009. The location is ideal for snaring the kinds of customers—think petroleum-rich princelings—who crave the sixty-one-year-old designer’s exquisite handmade menswear.

From my seat, I can see the Stefano Ricci spring 2011 collection, displayed with spare and artful precision on burled-walnut tables and in tall wardrobes. There are lavender-and-lime striped Egyptian-cotton dress shirts, dimpled ostrich bomber jackets, tissue-weight wool suits, slender pointy shoes, and trays of tonally grouped whorled silk ties—all set off by silver elephant-tusk sculptures and large vases filled with exuberant, waxy-looking tropical blooms. A well-groomed salesman stands with his hands clasped behind his back, and a security guard hovers near the door. Both have smiled at me, but I get the distinct feeling they harbor a certain dubiousness about my presence. There are no customers in the store on this unusually warm morning in late March. I shift my position in the squared-off chair and jiggle my foot. Outside, a church bell rings and groups of tourists walk by heading toward the Duomo, a few blocks away.

And then Stefano Ricci arrives. His entrance into the store is operatic—an audible sweeping in. He is short and wide, with a spectacular mane of longish salt-and-pepper hair swept back and curling past his collar, a full white beard, and dark, playful eyes behind rimless glasses. His suit is a wonder of fluid navy wool, cut just so to broaden the shoulders and skim the ample torso: a bear in a man-suit.

“Mrs. Noo-nan,” he says in a little song that trails off into a sigh. I rise to shake his hand and the hand of Filippo Ricci, Stefano’s trim twenty-seven-year-old son and the company’s R&D manager, who is at his side, looking efficient and thoroughly exfoliated. I sit back down. Stefano takes a chair behind a desk, and Filippo takes the chair next to mine, pulls an iPad from a black leather case, and puts it on his lap.

“You don’t mind if I smoke,” Stefano says, pulling a cigarette from a pack. He points one finger skyward toward the stained-glass
panels forty feet overhead. “High ceilings.” An elegant blond woman places coffee in a very small porcelain cup on Stefano’s desk, adjacent to his right hand. He looks at me and takes a long draw on his cigarette.

“So,” he says. It took months of emails to get this meeting arranged. I’m still not sure what he is willing to do. I’m hoping for at least twenty pure minutes of Stefano Ricci time. I clear my throat and ask him how he got started in the menswear business.

As a boy in Florence, Stefano was an enthusiastic doodler, filling the margins of his school papers with small figures, paisleys, and swirls. He also had an unusual obsession with neckties—Hermès neckties, to be specific—and by the age of twenty he had amassed 150 of them. His mother, who was in the clothing business, connected the odd dots and suggested that young Stefano put some of his drawings on his own neckwear. He started making silk ties and found that he couldn’t stop.

“It was like a fever,” he tells me.

Even after forty years, every design starts with Stefano noodling around on paper with a fountain pen—often late at night, in a miasma of smoke, with opera music blaring. His ties are made entirely by hand, using only the best raw silk and the most labor-intensive printing process. The finished products are vivid wonders that beg to be fondled: luminous, soft, and supple, but substantial enough to produce a beefy Windsor knot and a deep, authoritative dimple. The designer’s neckties, which start at $200 for a basic model and go as high as $35,000 for a limited-edition one studded with diamonds, are considered by many tie aficionados to be the best in the world.

“My passion … is to design ties, for the opportunity to play with color and with warp and weft,” Stefano says. “I am not an artist. I am not talented. I am a technician of cloth. And I must
say that I do everything from start to finish. It is one of the privileges of the profession.”

From neckties, Stefano moved on to shirts of the finest Egyptian cotton—always with his signature octagonal mother-of-pearl buttons and contrast microstitching on the collar and cuffs. He branched out to crocodile belts and platinum cufflinks and silk robes. Every item is made one at a time by a team of two hundred artisans, either in the designer’s small factory just outside Florence or in nearby ateliers.

Like other Florentine fashion designers who preceded him—Salvatore Ferragamo, Guccio Gucci, Emilio Pucci, Roberto Cavalli—Stefano Ricci grew up in a world where the virtuosity of the artistic hand was a daily fact: not just in the city center’s architecture, paintings, and sculptures but in tiny workshops across the green waters of the Arno River. There, in the Oltrarno, shoemakers, carvers, tailors, weavers, and goldsmiths were carrying on the legacies of the medieval craft guilds, formed, in part, to assure the quality of the work. Their predecessors’ skills had helped make Florence the epicenter of fashion and style during the Renaissance, a position the city held until the seventeenth century, when Paris began to overshadow it in all things cultural.

In 1951, Giovanni Battista Giorgini, a savvy local straw-hat exporter who was determined to get Florence back on the sartorial map, staged a small fashion show in his villa and invited American apparel buyers. Eight buyers and one journalist for
Women’s Wear Daily
stopped in on their way home from seeing the Paris collections.
WWD
ran a front-page article about the show and the emergence of Italian style.

The ripple of interest generated there had turned into a tidal wave by the time Giorgini presented a larger show in July 1952, this time in the Sala Bianca of the Palazzo Pitti. Buyers were
dazzled by the refined but relaxed clothing—and by the scenery, the food, and the parties.
It didn’t hurt that the clothes were about half the price of French fashions, or that several of the featured designers and couturiers, including Contessa Simonetta Visconti, Princess Giovanna Caracciolo, and Marchese Emilio Pucci, were bona-fide aristocrats—even if, as the fashion historian Nicola White points out, some were in financial straits following the war. On a hot July evening, under the crystal-and-gold chandeliers in the white ballroom of a palace that had been home to grand dukes and kings, the Americans fell hard for the romance of Giorgini’s ahead-of-its-time marketing message: that craftsmanship mattered, that heritage mattered, that provenance mattered. “Made in Italy” was on its way to becoming what it would remain for the next sixty years—a label that instantly conferred quality, sophistication, and connoisseurship—and stamped your visa for entry into
la dolce vita
.

In 1955, the Pitti show attracted five hundred buyers and two hundred journalists. A menswear-only version of the show debuted in 1972; Stefano Ricci was there with his first homegrown neckwear collection. Neiman Marcus ordered his ties, as did Bergdorf Goodman and Harrods and Holt Renfrew. Over the next thirty-five-plus years, Stefano showed time and again that, besides being a talented designer, he had sharp marketing instincts and a nose for new money. He was one of the first European luxury brands to open in China, starting with Shanghai in 1993, then adding stores in Beijing, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Macau, and Xi’an.

“Everybody thought I was crazy [to go to China],” he says.

By the summer of 2011, Stefano had boutiques all over the world—some owned, some licensed. Uniform in their décor—always the croc, the dark wood, and the tile—the stores are designed
to feel like international branches of an exclusive men’s club. His jet-setting customers seek the stores. Stefano could map out their travels by looking at where they placed their special orders.

“We already had a store in Beverly Hills, but we are opening a new one, much bigger, in the fall,” Stefano says. “Filippo, show madam.”

Filippo taps the screen of his iPad and turns it toward me.

“It’s the most famous spot in Beverly Hills,” he says. I recognize the wedged-shaped store, at 2 Rodeo Drive, that had been the Gianfranco Ferré boutique.

Stefano doesn’t like to say who his customers are, but it has been reported that Hosni Mubarak, Nelson Mandela, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Sultan of Brunei, and Prince Moosa of Bangladesh all wear Stefano Ricci. Most Ricci devotees are not celebrities, however; they are anonymous, worldly rich men who have developed a craving for the particularly potent sartorial crack that Stefano Ricci pushes.

“I design my clothes for people who don’t need my clothes,” Stefano says. “They are attracted by the idea of having something special. They try once, and they want more, because they feel good in what they are wearing. Thanks to God, they get addicted—they want to possess.”

The Stefano Ricci empire grew even as the recession deepened and the costs of silk, cotton, wool, and leather soared. Second-tier brands scrambled to cut costs by skimping on details and hoping no one would notice. Stefano went the other way, designing his products to be even more labor-intensive, more extravagant in their materials, more niche.

“Even if my loyal clients go through a crisis, they don’t avoid doing things for their own pleasure,” he tells me. “They still want
to feel that energy, that power. You still want to look good. And, honestly, if you have a billion dollars and you lose half a billion, your lifestyle doesn’t change.”

By 2010, worldwide sales of luxury goods were surging again, fueled by double-digit growth in China and signs of recovery in the United States and in some European markets. The number of millionaires in Asia surpassed Europe in 2011 and was expected to surpass those in North America in the near future. By 2012, Chinese consumers would account for more than 20 percent of global luxury sales. Much to Stefano Ricci’s delight, Chinese men were the ones driving the spending spree, shelling out $1.1 billion annually for high-end apparel. And their tastes were changing; once obsessed only with buying instantly identifiable status labels, they were starting to develop a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the craftsmanship and heritage behind a product.

“My business in Asia is unbelievable,” Stefano says, chopping at the air for emphasis.

Still, there are places the Stefano Ricci brand doesn’t play well.

“Florentines come and have a look around and they say, ‘Stefano, your shop is for new money.’ And I say, ‘Yes, because old money doesn’t spend!’ People say Florentines ‘have short arms.’ There are a lot of aristocrats here, but they don’t shop.”

Stefano laughs and lights another cigarette.

I ask him about the silk lining for Keith Lambert’s coat.

“Yes, I remember John Cutler asking me for fabric. I don’t ever do that, give my linings to someone else. But he’s a sweet person, Mr. Cutler, a good man, a real clothing man. There are not so many left.… You know,” he goes on, “I would be very pleased to have you see where my ties and linings are printed in Como. If you would be able to have the time.”

“I’d like that,” I say.

“You can see where we made the lining for the coat. It is the last factory in Como where things are printed only by hand.”

Filippo and Stefano have a conversation in Italian that I can’t understand. They get on their cell phones, hang up, have another animated discussion, and then make more calls.

“So, it is confirmed,” Stefano says when he finally puts the phone down. “You take the train tonight. You will be my guest.”

Just then, Stefano’s eyes light up when he sees a stocky older woman come through the doors.

“Ah,” he says, standing to greet her warmly.

“Signor Ricci,” she says, and they converse in Italian. When she leaves, he tells me that she is one of his seamstresses, recently retired. “She was walking by the store and she saw me in here—I’m never here! And she was so happy to see me, she wanted to stop and say hello. She was with me for twenty-two years—wonderful woman.”

Stefano’s cell phone rings again. While he talks, I look at my small notebook. There are so many questions I have yet to ask. I want to know, for one thing, how he defines “luxury.” Stefano puts down the phone. His eyes narrow as he draws in smoke.