Fiorucci

Fiorucci is the name of a look, a new retail concept, a business and social phenomenon. In the early 1960s Fiorucci was a small shoe shop in Milan owned and run by present Fiorucci tycoon Elio's father: the elegant Milanese with money used to have their clothes and shoes made to order.

In 1962, Elio Fiorucci, then 22, took three pairs of brightly coloured plastic galoshes to a weekly Milan fashion magazine and convinced the editors to publish a photograph them and Ecco! they became an overnight sensation. A new Fiorucci was born. In 1967, when America was alive with Bob Dylan and LSD and The Doors, and the object of dress was outrage, Milan was prim, conservative, and untouched by folly. The Fiorucci Milan store began in 1967 as an alternative for shoppers.

Elio Fiorucci brought the youth culture from London and presented it to young Italians who loved it. They had barely seen T-shirts and jeans and glitter - now they could buy it. Nothing in Fiorucci is really original, except that it all is. Everything comes from something or somewhere else. The Fiorucci trends follow "mass culture facts": the emergence of rock music, the ecology movement, a seductive political cause: in the 70s, Fiorucci designers observed first-hand the advent of terrorism as a political tool, and they invented brightly coloured parachute cloth jumpsuits; they turned workmen's lunchboxes into purses, in both plastic and metal.

At Fiorucci nothing is sacred. Fiorucci's real genius has been to take something ordinary and turn it into fashion. Elio Fiorucci splashed out on the American 50s look and sold it back to the Americans and to the rest of the world. One of the favorite words in the Fiorucci lexicon is "recycle": it means reuse, change, reassemble, reinvent. To list a few of the looks popularised by Fiorucci: gold lame` (shoes, bags, boots, jeans, belts, luggage), fishnet stockings, fake animal skin fabrics, clothes in Lycra and Spandex, military fabric for "silly" clothes. little star prints and little stripes in bright candy colours.

Today jeans are the centerpiece of the Fiorucci empire - they come in fushcia, peach, perinwinkle and jade. It is the details that have made Fiorucci: the multi-coloured buttons running down the front of a man's shirt; the glimmer of metallic thread darting off the surface of an otherwise undistinguished plaid cotton; exatly what made those first Fiorucci galoshes Crayola-coloured unlike the rest of the dull galoshes in the world. There are Fiorucci stores in the world's most exclusive shopping centers.

The Fiorucci empire has been split into shares that have been bought by various multinational corporations, but throughout the years and the changes, the Fiorucci look has remained true to itself: fun and anti-fashion.