Elio Fiorucci obituary

A playful globalism was a fashion attitude before it became a serious economic orthodoxy, and its earliest major adopter was the mercantile genius Elio Fiorucci, who has died aged 80.

Fiorucci had no design training and barely any formal education. His family fled second world war bombs in Milan for rural peace, then returned after the war to the city, where his father owned a shoe shop, manufacturing its merchandise with an eye to popular demand. Fiorucci, the only non-scholar among five brothers and a sister, started work in the business at 14, full-time from 17: he learned everything, he said, in the school that was Milan’s streets, except sociability, which he picked up serving customers.

His first success, in 1962, was to design waterproof overshoes in bright colours, promoted by the magazine Amica. The big-selling novelty gave him enough money and confidence to realise his dream of travel, first to London in 1965 at the maximum oscillation of its swinging phase. He was surprised by the radical retail approaches of Carnaby Street and Barbara Hulanicki’s first, small, Biba, as much a regular meeting place for a style subset as a shop, and by the stalls of Kensington market, where widely travelled youngsters sold cheap, distinctive goods they had imported, vintage clothing, craft and artwork.

He opened a store imitating these models in the Galleria Passarella, Milan, in 1967, its clientele decades younger than that of most Italian shops, and its approach far more customer-friendly: he believed in the store as an event. It stocked outlandish London design, such as Ossie Clark, and Kensington market-style exotica, including the definitive hippie garment, the Afghan embroidered sheepskin coat sourced in a Kabul bazaar and trucked overland. Fiorucci had already grown older than his target demographic of slender teens, and so he supplemented his own travel observations – Mexican flowered shirts, Ibizan girls swimming in wet jeans, looking like indigo sculptures – by dispatching young scouts internationally to discover importable merchandise, and report what their contemporaries were wearing. He recontextualised this research on ethnic, retro and techno cultures in designs that he started to manufacture under the Fiorucci label from 1970, with its logo of two Victorian-print cherubs, flirty behind sinful sunglasses.

The first store evolved into what he called “an amusement park of novelties”, so, financially backed by the Montedison group, he added a second in Milan’s Via Torino. In both, Fiorucci brought off what Hulanicki had failed to do, at least economically, when she moved Biba into a vast former London department store: he created a place that could be a club for the like-minded and the focal point of a sort of passeggiata – somewhere to walk, to see and be seen, and to eat. The Via Torino store had a fast-food restaurant.

His most-admired venture, part-designed by Ettore Sottsass, opened in 1976 on East 59th Street, New York, where it intertwined with the new discotheque culture. The Fiorucci team organised the grand launch party of the ultimate disco, Studio 54 on West 54th Street, in 1977, Fiorucci himself chartering the jumbo jet that flew Italian guests to the event. Studio 54 fans, famous and unknown, met in the store outside clubbing hours for free espresso, tracks from resident DJs and a little light shopping among the leopardskin prints and fluorescent violet hair dye.

Fiorucci gave an office to his new friend Andy Warhol (who described the store as a “fun place. That’s all I ever wanted, all plastic”), to set up Interview magazine, offered wall space to the artist Keith Haring, and rented concessions to new designers Betsey Johnson and Anna Sui, whose wacky clothes matched the house mood. Even younger hopefuls, including a teenage Marc Jacobs, hung out there in pursuit of an exciting education, just as Fiorucci had used Milanese streets.

The company opened outlets across Europe (in London from 1975), the US and Asia, and the brand’s famed publicity images were nakedly if cheerily outrageous: police once seized stickers for a monokini campaign from Fiorucci’s own office. Its graphics were outstanding; even its stout paper carrier bag with Fiorucci logo was a coveted object. Garments themselves were almost the least important aspect of the enterprise, although Fiorucci’s New York art director, Maripol, styled the young Madonna (whose brother worked at East 59th), and in 1979 Sister Sledge sang in The Greatest Dancer, “That man is dressed to kill … He wears the finest clothes, the best designers”, Fiorucci among them.

His greatest clothing success was the result of his Ibizan insight that women should not have to wear jeans shaped for men. Instead, he sold them jeans cut curvy and tight – from 1982 in denim woven with stretchy Lycra. He had them sewn in daunting colours and unlikely materials, including vinyl, but never leather: Fiorucci was a vegetarian, devoted to animal rights. He signed a licensing deal with Wrangler.

Fiorucci never knew why his taste and the public’s coincided through the 1970s, a time when “we were never wrong”, but the congruence passed. The Italian chain Benetton bought Montedison’s stake in 1981, and sold it to the holding company Aknofin in 1987. But Fiorucci was out of his financial depth; mismanagement forced the closure of the New York store in 1986 and other international outlets in 1988. The company went into administration and was bought by the jeans manufacturer Carrera, later sold on to the Japanese firm Edwin. In 1966, Fiorucci pleaded guilty in an Italian court to falsifying reports to increase his company’s value to Carrera, and was given a 22-month suspended sentence.

He retained creative control under Edwin, but it was a fractious relationship, and the revived name no longer defined fashion democracy; when his original Milanese store closed in 2003, it was converted into a branch of H&M. That’s where fashion had moved. Fiorucci continued with his own small brand of comfortable, playful clothing, Love Therapy.

Personally, he was a discreet dresser, unflashy and devoutly private, refusing to speak publicly of the two marriages that ended in divorce. He is survived by three daughters.