RELAÇÕES PÚBLICAS & MARKETING DIGITAIS

No one has ever dreamed the American dream with quite the passion of the Italians. Even though France is the second-largest market for McDonald's outside the U.S., you never hear the French trumpeting the fact. Italians, on the other hand, have been unabashed in their surrender to America's seductive promise. Marcello Mastroianni may have embodied the quintessential modern Italian male in La Dolce Vita, but Paul Newman was the first choice for the role.

For Riccardo Tisci, seduction bred obsession. He used to collect American flags. Nothing embodied freedom for him like the Stars and Stripes. After his birth in Puglia, in the south of Italy, his family moved north when he was a baby. His father died when he was 4, leaving his mother to raise eight girls and Riccardo, her youngest. They were poor. They were also from Puglia. "I was gay from birth; I was always fine with that," says Tisci. "The bigger problem was where I was from. A family from the south of Italy, living in Milan? There was crazy racism between north and south." So, to Tisci, America represented not just freedom and opportunity but escape, too. Truly the stuff of adolescent fantasy.

The way Tisci remembers that adolescence, it was a bombardment of Americana. "When you're Italian and you come from a family who isn't well-off, you're dreaming a lot. And everything in Italy—magazines, television, mass media—was copying America." One particular television moment stood out, a miniseries based on Mario Puzo's The Fortunate Pilgrim, the story of the Angeluzzi-Corbo family's immigrant experience in New York. Sophia Loren played matriarch Lucia Santa, holding the family together through the Depression and World War II. That particular confluence of Italian icons (Puzo's The Godfather having already laid down guidelines for making it in America) couldn't fail to impact a vulnerable young mind obsessed with escape. And there was more: Marky Mark in the Calvin Klein ads, Stephanie Seymour in the video for Guns N' Roses' "November Rain," the NBA. Snippets cherry-picked from America's promiscuous global dissemination of its pop culture. Meanwhile, the teenage Tisci was at art school, because he couldn't afford to study fashion. In fact, he reached a point where he was qualified to teach art at a junior-school level. That is what the power of his American dream steered him away from—a future teaching art to 6-year-olds.

In the end, it was actually London that saved him from that fate. "I went to England to study," remembers Tisci. "I was fed up with being poor. At that point, I think I was scared to go farther because I didn't speak English. But I wanted to learn it so I could move to America. Then I started my career in London, so I never did." But who could have resisted London, then in the full Dionysian flower of its late-nineties madness? Certainly not a shy Italian boy who spent eighteen months doing every office-cleaning, fly-leafing job he could to get by while he learned the language and made seemingly random connections that eventually added up to a career arc. The magazine he found in the Underground advertising free courses at the London College of Fashion. Catching the eye of Antonio Berardi's business partner. Winning a British Fashion Council scholarship to Central Saint Martins. All the while, he was sampling the after-dark delights of the city. "Can you imagine me, speaking half English, half Italian—I don't know what I was speaking—dropped into the world of people like Leigh Bowery?"

With such distractions, it was another five years before Tisci would land on American soil for the first time. You can't tell this tale without Mariacarla Boscono playing the fairy princess. The model has been a fixture in Tisci's story from his earliest forays into fashion. For that first trip he made to New York, in 1996, she paid for his ticket so he could help her move from Harlem to Soho. "When I got off the plane, I was shocked by the emotion I felt," he recalls. Inevitably, Tisci imagined himself returning one day on his own terms, with his own money. But in the meantime, he shoehorned an orgy of experience into his ten-day stay. Both he and Boscono were Italo-goths at that point—the full Robert Smith-Siouxsie Sioux whack—but it was New York's black culture that sucked him in. He clubbed hard in Brooklyn and the Bronx and spent a Sunday afternoon at Tribeca's legendary Body & Soul. "Dodgy New York, that's what I wanted," Tisci remembers. His guide was DJ Sanchez, who opened his mind to all the experimentation going on in hip-hop and R&B. They'd end up in clubs where he and Boscono might be the only white faces, with her wondering why they couldn't go to Limelight instead. "I was fascinated by the freedom of expression. And, in a strange way, I always looked at home," says Tisci. He was so charged by the music that he even considered dedicating himself to deejaying. "It was an amazing moment, the best moment of New York, for me."


by #Tim Blanks. Photographs by Angelo Pennetta.
Creative direction and styling by Riccardo Tisci.