Italian designer Gai Mattiolo was arrested yesterday by the Italian financial police on a charge of fraudulent bankruptcy. Placed under house arrest in his Rome-based villa, the designer is now investigated for allegedly siphoning funds from his fashion house before declaring bankruptcy. Investigators stated that, though Mattiolo knew about his fashion house’s serious financial crisis, he redirected its earnings, with the help of his advisor, lawyer Giancarlo Tabegna, also arrested on the same charges, towards the Luxembourg-based Gai Mattiolo Holding. Apparently Mattiolo also re-channelled the royalties from his company’s latest advertising campaign into the funds of his holding in Luxembourg.
After I heard this story, I started pondering a bit about the whole situation. Mattiolo has been throughout the ‘90s one of the stars of Italian fashion, well-known for designing flamboyant and over the top creations when minimalism was the trend to follow. Mattiolo started his
career when he was 18, financed by his own father. Success arrived
after he presented his first collection at Milan’s Modit. Considered as the enfant prodige of Italian fashion and compared to Versace, he designed extravagant and extremely expensive garments. His voluptuous creations for stars and divas became popular with television celebrities and with the Rome-based rich ladies in search of glamour and grandeur.
Mattiolo’s catwalks became also very popular: staged in some of the best locations around Rome – from the Campidoglio to Piazza del Popolo – they boasted famous celebrities sitting in the first row and highly paid top-models on the runway. Throughout the ‘90s Mattiolo had the proverbial Midas touch: he designed robes for the Pope, opened a mega-boutique in Paris, a showroom in a Milan-based palace decorated with Tiepolo’s frescoes and huge headquarters in Rome.
His critics often considered him a megalomaniac with dreams of grandeur and highlighted how he always had a soft spot for famous testimonials and expensive events, his site boasts indeed a link dedicated only to those celebrities who favoured at some point in their careers his designs. Yet Mattiolo’s glamorous dreams are the same dreams that feed fashion, those dreams that chewed, digested, regurgitated and repackaged by the fashion industry are then sold to us. As the investigation into the Mattiolo case continues, his story should make us think about what’s hiding behind the golden façade of the fashion industry at the moment, but should also make designers think.
As the economic downturn globally hit the fashion industry, Italy had o deal in the last few months with quite a few fashion crises: La Perla was recently sold to an American group, and, since October, there have been strikes among its Bologna-based staff as cuts of over 300 workers were announced; in the meantime Tonino Perna’s Italian fashion group It Holding is at the moment hoping to struck a deal with a new shareholder. Just a few days ago Italian fashion house Marni announced that there will be no formal catwalk show for its Autumn/Winter 09 menswear collection in Milan, but a presentation, a more cost-effective idea compared to a proper catwalk.
Maybe the time has come for designers and people involved in the fashion industry to start doing things in a different way: if the economic downturn is the great leveller, it’s not only ordinary people who should keep an eye on their spending habits, but also designers. It's undeniable, catwalk shows help getting coverage in the magazines and generate interest about a fashion designer, but expensive models and celebrity attendees shouldn’t really count if a designer’s clothes and accessories really have the quality to survive current market trends.
So, while proving that all that glitter is definitely not gold, Gai Mattiolo’s story is also a warning to the people involved in the fashion industry and a lesson for all those designers who really want to survive the current financial crisis.
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