Thing of Beauty (20 page)

It wasn’t uncommon at all for European fashion magazines to print nudes, but rarely were the shots so provocative and so celebratory of the face and figure of one unknown woman. Gia had “the best tits in the business,” Chris von Wangenheim would later say; her figure was “unbeatable.” The pictures were “page-stoppers.”

“For me, a good fashion photograph makes a promise it can never keep,” Von Wangenheim would explain. “By the sheer fact of being printed it appears to be an attainable truth, when, in fact, it is an individual projection of a photographer … Fashion pictures are ephemeral. Some have great timeliness and draw the reader in, but do not hold up as photographs … I can make a page-stopper for a magazine, let’s say, by turning models upside down when all the others are upright. But it’s meaningless. I say ‘wow,’ but when I look closely, I realize it’s nonsense. It’s a page-stopper, but after a moment my mind throws it away.”

On such meaninglessness great modeling careers are borne.

I
taly still had a long way to go before making good on its threat to dethrone France as the epicenter of the fashion industry. Paris had been Paris for a long time. Royalty had gone there to be outfitted for centuries before anybody ever dreamed of the so-called “collections,” during which top competing couture houses (and later leading ready-to-wear manufacturers) scheduled their seasonal fashion shows so they could be conveniently viewed as one week-long event. The twice-yearly fashion horse-race was still etched onto the calendars of rich ladies, fashion editors and retailers as a reason they
had to be
in Paris. “High Fashion” still meant Yves St. Laurent and the design houses of Chanel, Givenchy and Dior.

Still, there was no disputing that the recent successes by Valentino in high fashion, as well as by Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace in designer ready-to-wear, meant
something.
And Valentino’s business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, may have found support for his bold industry assessments before the 1978 collections: “In Paris, the couture is so old, it’s ridiculous,” he told
WWD.
“The French … are so egocentric and so damn pretentious, you can throw up … and New York is so today, it becomes yesterday too fast. Every six months in New York, it’s a new world … the future of fashion does rest with the Italian designers.”

Italy’s role in the beauty-industrial complex was changing,
its lot rapidly improving. Where the country was once looked to only as a source of inspiration and fabric—both of which were used to manufacture goods elsewhere in more businesslike environments—the Italians were getting a little better at combining art and industry. They were successfully courting the rich ladies, the fashion press and the buyers from major department stores, boutiques and catalog houses. And they were using Italy as part of the sales pitch.

Twice a year in Rome, the Italian fashion world threw an extravagant affair to celebrate the resurgence of the
alta moda—their
version of the
haute couture
—and the increasing popularity of all Italian clothing exports. The Italian collections had become the playground of the fashion photographers and models themselves, who had, for some time, considered Italy the place where their talents were truly appreciated. In Italy, fashion photographers were exalted as the new visionary artists they secretly wanted to be. In Italy, fashion models—usually imported from Scandinavia or, now, America (since no self-respecting Italian girl would do such a thing)—were worshiped as goddesses of the “new womanhood.”

Many photographers, models and stylists had begun their careers in Italy, where there were weekly and small monthly magazines that would take chances on new people and new ideas. This aesthetic fashion minor league had started in the late sixties, when the Italian edition of
Vogue
became the most visually imaginative magazine in the world.
Vogue Italia
was driven to new heights by freelance editor and human fashion statement Anna Piaggi, who did her first
Vogue
shots with a young Chris von Wangenheim and went on to become perhaps the most influential figure in Italian fashion with her theatrical entrances, her junk jewelry and her impetuous eye. In a way, she filled the gap left in the fashion magazine world when Diana Vreeland was dismissed by American
Vogue
.

During Gia’s first weeks of immersion into the top end of the business, she had little knowledge of, or real interest in, this kind of fashion minutiae. She went where she was told to go by the agency; she worked for the clients who booked her. She had some idea of photographers she might like working with, because she had noticed their pictures in the
magazines—especially Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, older photographers whose dark, erotic fashion photos represented a visual lineage to Chris von Wangenheim’s work. She had met a few top models and hair and makeup people, who had tried to give her some pointers. And the people at the agency were doing their best to explain what was happening to her professionally.

But Gia had a short attention span. And her quick success had already shown her how far one could get in the business without knowing very much about what was going on. She knew how to get a rise out of the photographer once she got on the set. She knew how to improvise and make people laugh. She struck poses that were innovative because she really didn’t care to know the more standard ones.

And she got a lot of mileage out of her relative-rags-to-relative-riches tale of “it seems like just yesterday I was working in a hoagie shop.” There was a system somewhere out there, a machinery that had been “discovering” girls like Gia for decades. But the job of understanding and oiling that machinery was what she paid her agent twenty percent for. In Rome—or Roma, as the Italians and anyone trying to sound international referred to it—the machinery itself was on display.

Gia had never been out of the country before. And even though her family—when it was still together—had taken some very nice trips, including one to California, she had never traveled first class. The one-hundred-year-old Grand Hotel, off Piazza della Repubblica in the largely baroque section of Rome near the train station, was first class in the manner expected by European royalty—with exquisite ballrooms, crystal chandeliers, marble baths and a split-level bar, where afternoon tea was served daily. The Grand was where most of the imported
fashionistas
stayed: many of the fashion shows were held there and it served as the backdrop to most of the
alta moda
photographs.

On the day Gia arrived, the Grand was experiencing an Italian phenomenon as old as the Bernini sculptures that dotted the area around the hotel: a wildcat hotel worker’s strike. It began only hours before Valentino unveiled his
collection featuring the new “melon shape”—dresses rounded at the padded shoulders and hemline.

The strike meant that, for at least a day, Gia would be unable to take advantage of the legendary—and legendarily abused—hospitality of Italian
Bazaar
owner Giuseppe Della Schiava, known to colleagues as Peponi. Della Schiava seemed willing to do anything to get the best new models and photographers to come work for him. He had Brooke Shields signed to the only exclusive editorial contract in the modeling business. And while most American photographers would be expected to cut costs by using local hair and makeup people when shooting in Italy, Della Schiava would pay for Arthur Elgort and Chris von Wangenheim to bring in their favorite crews and run up extravagant restaurant and bar tabs. It was worth it to him. He didn’t mind being an easy touch if the pictures were special and he got to meet the prettiest girls in the world.

Photographers were perpetually searching for the next easy touch: the person who would pay more than anyone else or give more freedom than ever before. Start-up magazines and companies upgrading their images were traditional easy touches. Peponi Della Schiava was a little bit of both.

Della Schiava was not a typical fashion magazine publisher and Italian
Bazaar
was not a typical fashion magazine. Fashion magazines were usually owned by companies that expected to make their money by profitably publishing magazines: profits came from advertising sales, as well as subscription and single-copy newsstand receipts. Della Schiava was a forty-year-old adman who had inherited his wife’s father’s textile manufacturing business, one of the largest in Italy. Before purchasing
Bazaar
in 1974, he had been one of Italian
Vogue’s
single biggest advertisers—Italian textile companies, besides taking out their own ads, often partially underwrote ads for manufacturers and designers using their fabric. In a series of events that was every magazine publisher’s worst nightmare, Della Schiava had become incensed at Italian
Vogue
because he felt its editorial coverage wasn’t sufficiently supportive of his advertisements. He pulled his ads, bought
Bazaar
, and set out to topple Vogue’s upscale hegemony in Italy. Soon after, he negotiated with Hearst International to start an Italian edition of
Cosmopolitan
.

Cosmo
was meant to be profitable. But Della Schiava ran
Bazaar
like a vanity publication. He didn’t really hire a staff: he oversaw much of the work himself, and Lizzette Kattan did the legwork. He didn’t seem to care how much money
Bazaar
lost, as long as it brought greater glory to Italian-made fabrics and offered him an international
dolce vita
that was far more interesting than the life of a Milan-based rag merchant. He had upgraded the magazine by avoiding Italian photographers—the best of whom were already committed to Italian
Vogue
—and flying to America to round up the best young photographers in New York. He set up in a room at the Pierre and sent for all the up-and-comers. It wasn’t long before his magazine was considered one of the most visually exciting in the industry. Nor was it long before he had bent beyond recognition what few rules the business had.

At Italian
Bazaar
, photographers and models often went out and shot the editorial and the ads at the same time. For special collections issues, this meant the production of what was called
groupage
—advertising sections of ten or twenty running pages, produced by the magazine’s photographers and documenting designers’ entire collections. The process was probably no more questionable than
Vogue’s
Must Lists and other paid editorial mentions. But it was a very foreign way of doing business and Della Schiava’s detractors thought it was sleazy.

Gia spent two days getting over jet lag and adjusting to the strange new world of a country where she knew nobody, but a lot of people seemed to know her. Her pictures in
Bazaar
had preceded her, which made her even more interesting than usual to the legendary Italian playboys: a group of several dozen rich young men whose obsessions with American models were so well-established and their connections so impeccable that the Italian agencies actually alerted them when new girls were arriving so they knew which flight to meet or hotel lobby to hound. They didn’t just chase the hot new models either. It wasn’t uncommon for a complete unknown, making an exploratory trip to Milan, to be greeted at her cheap
pensione
by a phone message or dinner invitation by a playboy trolling for his next catch.

“That word
playboy
means a different thing in Italy,” explained Giorgio Repossi, a proud member of the Milan-based fraternity, who was a marketing director for the company that published the magazine
Linnea Italiana
during the seventies.
“Playboy
is like a charming man, not a no-no. In America, playboy just wants to put himself inside something,
ta-ta-ta-ta.
The Italian playboy, we
fall in love
with the girls, not one night only. Sex in America is much more rude and cruel. Is less deep, is just fucking, people use each other. In Italy everything is more romantic. I can also be in bed with ten girls, but
I love these ten girls
.

“The
alta moda
week was the best time for picking up girls, and the Grand Hotel was the best place: it was a continuous party, every night was amusing. And being Peponi’s guest was the best. It was like he was renting the whole hotel.”

The highlight of the
alta moda
was generally the bash thrown by Riccardo Gay, one of the first and still one of the top model agents in Italy. It was his way of thanking the business for allowing him to book most of the
alta moda
models through his agency.

“Every season for
haute couture
we organize a big party,” recalled Gay, “a
dolce vita
party, with different theme. It was really an incredible situation. We make
many
party. I can’t remember which theme was which year though.”

“I think that was the year with the pajama party,” said Kay Mitchell. “You had to wear your pajamas and it was at the Grand Hotel—where, by that point, Eileen Ford would not stay because John Casablancas stayed there. I just remember drinking, and we were in our pajamas, hanging out and giggling—all the photographers, models and agents. Eventually the party got a little rough—rough meaning
playful
, you know. There were these goose down pillows and, anyway, it ended up with feathers from one end of this ballroom to the other, feathers covering the buffet table, everything.”

But not everybody was having marvelous fun at the Grand Hotel. “When you have that amount of people there, ordering foie gras, and the magazine is paying for every penny of that,” recalled Lizzette Kattan, “no, I was not having that kind of good time. I was there to work. You would hear a
lot of stories, but I wasn’t always really aware of what was going on. You have to realize, we’re in Rome with all these people. We had to do five hundred pages in ten days, that’s a lot of work. Sometimes we had ten photographers working every day, in different places, some in studio, some on the street. At that point it wasn’t the money that was involved, the important thing was the result that you got.”