A Very Wild Jeans Brand From 40 Years Ago Is Coming Back. Who Is It?

Its denim patches still look incredibly cool today.

London's Selfridges has put up the "two little angels" logo. It's a pop-up shop running for several weeks — denim, T-shirts, flight jackets — but the real draw is the illustrated patches you can stick on your jeans yourself: all the "variants" of the Fiorucci logo, retro and pop enough that you want to collect every one.

The name Fiorucci may mean nothing to you, but this is no new label chasing streetwear. Its founder, Elio Fiorucci, was the son of a Milan shoe-shop owner. He got into fashion by making bright rubber shoes in the three primary colors; the local fashion press wrote them up, and they sold like mad.

In 1967, Elio Fiorucci opened a multi-brand boutique in Milan's Galleria Passerella. His idea was to bring the hippie, punk, daring style of Carnaby Street, London's fashion center, to Milan — and you can guess how popular Fiorucci was with the young in the 1960s, the high point of youth culture. Two years later Fiorucci had its own factory, and had Italo Lupi, a surrealist graphic designer fond of optical tricks, draw the little-angel logo. From then on Fiorucci took shape as a designer brand.

At a Fiorucci store you could buy T-shirts hauled back from India, Brazilian thongs, leopard-print bras, monokinis, Afghan coats. He turned the sacks Asia used for rice into handbags. He turned the wet jeans women wore plastered to their legs on the beaches of Ibiza into skin-tight stretch jeans (Fiorucci is said to have invented Lycra stretch denim). There were Donald Duck jeans with Disney, and collections with Jean-Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood.

Fiorucci became the weathervane of its era, and invented a good deal of what retail now takes for granted. In 1974 it opened a big new store on Via Torino in Milan, stocked with books, furniture and records, with a performance space, a vintage-clothing market and a restaurant. The retail-theater model that stores like Colette use today, Fiorucci was already trying 40 years ago — and doing well at it.

In the late 1970s, Fiorucci spread quickly from Europe into the United States and Asia.

Fiorucci's Golden Age

"Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci, he looks like a still" — the line comes from He's the Greatest Dancer, Sister Sledge's disco classic of 1979.

Back then people talked about Gucci and Fiorucci in one breath, and not only because the names rhymed. These two fast-growing Italian brands stood for two versions of European fashion: one that worshipped Italian classicism, and one that took in everything and set out to break that classic Italian image.

In 1976 Fiorucci carried its retail-theater model to New York and entered its golden age. The store with the red sign sat on Manhattan's Upper East Side and went by a second name, "Daytime Studio 54" (Studio 54 being the famous New York nightclub of the day). Disco on a loop, theatrical fashion shows, the occasional live singer, shows of work by the newest artists — it pulled in the cool hunters of the 1970s and 80s. Fiorucci also kept up with the disco era by sponsoring parties of every kind, and a Madonna nobody had heard of yet turned up at them often.

Even in New York, Fiorucci was a radical thing. "It was also a gallery for artists who could not get shown anywhere else, because the art institutions of the day were still conservative," said Maripol, the New York store's creative director then, who made her name designing jewelry for Madonna.

An ordinary day at Fiorucci was a spectacle. First Lady Jacqueline, Elizabeth Taylor and Calvin Klein shopped there; Andy Warhol was a regular; Betsey Johnson, Anna Sui and Jill Stuart held shows there; the drag queen Joey Arias sang "The King of Spain" there.

"Every day was like a wild party. I'd help Jacqueline for a minute, then run over to flirt with Lauren Bacall (the American actress), and then some German tourist would want a photo of me holding a plastic skirt," recalled Joey Arias, who once worked the floor at Fiorucci.

Fiorucci's other trait was speed. The merchandise changed over once a month, which kept the place feeling new. Elio Fiorucci kept 30 stylists and trend scouts on the payroll at all times, some of them only 16.

Their job was to fly around the world, bring back the samples they liked, and report the newest trends to Elio. These cool kids did what they loved most — went to clubs, went to parties, watched what the sharpest people were doing and wearing. You can still see Fiorucci's shadow in today's fast fashion.

Elio Fiorucci himself was nothing like the brand he stood for. In photographs he is always in a conservative suit, giving off a little mystery — a romantic Italian who ran his business on instinct and mood. Maripol remembers that he rarely spoke English, yet behaved as though he understood everything anyone said.

Fiorucci also gathered the finest talent and the best-known names of the time: Madonna's brother Christopher Ciccone; Terry Jones of i-D magazine; Oliviero Toscani, who shot many of Benetton's ads; and an in-house designer the New York Times called a "design guru."

The Italian designer Isabella Tonchi (sister of W magazine's current editor-in-chief) spent seven years as a designer at Fiorucci. At a trade fair in Bologna, Elio walked up to Tonchi, who was wearing a T-shirt made out of a linen tablecloth and a ripped leather jacket, and asked who had designed her clothes. Isabella had made both herself, and was hired on the spot. She had been planning to become a writer.

Isabella remembers Elio hearing a female dispatcher's voice on a taxi radio and saying, "Ah, I love that voice." He got the dispatcher's name and address from the driver at once, and a few weeks later she was the receptionist at Fiorucci's factory.

Janie Schaffer, who now owns the brand, put it this way: "Elio was maybe not a born retailer. He was more of a wanderer, and a collector of beautiful things and talented people."

Bankruptcy, and a Failed Revival

The noise stopped in 1988, when every American store closed. People had not tired of Fiorucci — sales were still climbing — but franchise disputes and management chaos pushed it to file for bankruptcy in 1989.

Fiorucci's first attempt to start over came in the mid-1990s, when the Japanese denim brand Edwin bought it and relaunched it, with Elio Fiorucci keeping the rights to creative design.

Edwin pushed expansion in Asia, but ran the brand at a lukewarm simmer for years. Not until 2001 did a 25,000-square-foot Fiorucci reappear, on Houston Street in downtown New York. Elio told the New York Times by phone that he would not try to copy the past, because that "never works." The second half of the sentence proved a prophecy about his own store: the new Fiorucci looked fashionable enough, but the spine of the 1960s and 70s was gone.

Worse, the innovations Fiorucci had pioneered were by then simply what retail looked like. The "fast dazzle" it sold carried no weight against the H&M and The Limited a few doors down. Above all, after a decade away, a whole new generation of young people had no idea who Fiorucci was.

In 2003 Elio Fiorucci announced the closing of the oldest store in Milan, on the grounds that "he no longer had a passion for fashion." Whatever was left of Fiorucci's glorious history ended there.

Fiorucci Is Back, and the Problem Hasn't Changed

Shortly before Elio Fiorucci died in 2015, two Britons, Stephen and Janie Schaffer, bought Fiorucci from Edwin.

Stephen Schaffer, in his fifties, had been a Fiorucci fan; Knickerbox, the British lingerie brand he founded earlier, already had 150 stores in 16 countries. His ex-wife, Janie Schaffer, had been creative director at Victoria's Secret. They wanted to build "the Fiorucci of the future," and no moment suited that better than Fiorucci's 50th anniversary.

But the problem was the one it had always been: young people don't know who Fiorucci is, and they have more to choose from than ever.

Schaffer's strategy is to copy the Fiorucci of the 1970s outright, starting with the jeans that sold best.

In an abandoned warehouse in Milan they found 3,000 pairs of vintage jeans, and at the bottom of one box, a pair hand-painted by Keith Haring, the American street artist and activist. To Schaffer that pair stood for the two things Fiorucci is best known for: jeans and artists' illustrations.

Schaffer brought in the Italian designer Venucia de Russi — who once worked with Elio and has designed concert costumes for Beyoncé — to rework the jeans, and dug the artist-drawn Fiorucci icons out of the archive. The new line also includes T-shirts, hoodies and flight jackets. Underwear, swimwear and ready-to-wear are planned.

And of course the flagship store "like a nightclub," the scene from Fiorucci's golden age all over again. Schaffer wants young people to drop in whether or not they buy anything; he is working with artists, musicians and designers to turn the store into a "cultural playground."

The first one should open in London's Soho around August or September, with a nightclub in the basement, followed by Milan and Los Angeles. (The new line went on sale at Barneys New York this January, to test the American market.)

"It's as if Fiorucci is already a classic film — do we really need to remake it (exactly as it was)? With so many new ideas around, why make money off the past?" said Maripol after seeing the news online — though she still thought it a happy thing that the Schaffers were willing to try.

Terry Jones of i-D magazine takes the other view: today's political climate makes this the best possible moment for Fiorucci to return. The fun and the nerve Fiorucci had in the 1970s came above all from a generation sharing its unease about the social and political weather — which is much like now.

Compared with that era, though, fashion is a far more serious business, and it has far more competitors.

Cover image and images in this article from: nymag, W magazine, Barney NY