Eleven years after the brand's first shop opened in Milan, in 1978, Fiorucci arrived in Los Angeles and some 3,000 people turned up to celebrate. Navigating the launch party crowds, Andy Warhol wrote at the time, was ‘just like going to Studio 54 on a big night out’. The artist was already part of Elio Fiorucci’s social circle (Fiorucci's New York branch on East 59th Street had become synonymous with club culture two years earlier), and a photograph of the pair on Rodeo Drive accompanies the diary entry at Triennale Milano, where a comprehensive new retrospective of the fashion brand's Italian founder has just opened.
‘I guess the objective was to disentangle the man from the brand,’ says the show’s curator, Judith Clark. ‘We’re in Milan, most people here knew him, knew of him, or their parents knew him, so it's like dealing with a national treasure.’ Described by Marco Sammicheli, Triennale’s curator of Design, Fashion and Crafts, as like ‘a biopic’, ‘Elio Fiorucci’ opens then with a reel-to-reel machine, immediately followed by a riff on the designer’s schoolboy habit of staring out the window: a single child’s desk, stationed before a portal into his future, or the rest of the show. With Fiorucci having maintained during his career that he was a merchant rather than a fashion figure, nearby we learn about his earliest job at Emporio de Pantofole Fiorucci, his father’s slipper shop.
