Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (12 page)

Only French couturier Hubert de Givenchy saw how Hollywood stars could serve as ambassadors for luxury brands—and even then it took him some time to figure it out. In
1953
, Paramount telephoned Givenchy in Paris to make an appointment for “Miss Hepburn” to pick out a few clothes for her new movie,
Sabrina.
When the waif in a bob, T-shirt, gingham trousers, and no makeup came by for her fitting, Givenchy was aghast. He thought he would be receiving
Katharine
Hepburn, who was not only a huge Hollywood star but a Bryn Mawr girl, the American equivalent to Givenchy’s aristocratic background and clientele. Givenchy politely told the gamine Audrey to paw through the racks of the previous season’s clothes and pick out what she wanted. “I had no time to meet with her,” he said. “I was in the middle of making my second collection, and I didn’t have too many workers then.” It was only over dinner that evening, when Audrey Hepburn flaunted her social charm—she, too, had come from a good European family—did Givenchy see the possibilities of an alliance. He dressed her for several of her movies, including
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
and
Charade,
and convinced her to pose for the advertising campaign for his perfume L’Interdit. It was the first time a movie star allowed her face to be used to promote a scent. Thanks to Hepburn’s unparalleled endorsement on and off screen, Givenchy was able to turn his small couture house into one of luxury’s first globally recognized and genuinely successful brands. Yet it took decades for his confreres in the luxury business to understand and exploit the force of celebrity.

I
N THE 1950S
,
following the advent of television and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as the Hollywood Anti-Trust Case that forced studios to sell off their theater chains, the industry suffered a financial slump and changed the way business was done. Actors and technical staff—including costumers—were gradually released from their studio contracts; many costume departments were shut down. To make matters worse, films began to take on a more realistic tone, with actors in more everyday, normal clothes—no ermine-trimmed peignoirs or sequined siren gowns required. By the mid-
1960
s, movie costumer designers were nearly an extinct breed. “They closed their workrooms down, they got rid of their designers,” the designer Bob Mackie, who started as an assistant in the early
1960
s for Jean Louis and Edith Head, told me. “Paramount got rid of Edith Head; it was all changing at that point. I had always wanted to be the designer at a studio but when I got into the business I realized it was over.”

With no more Edith Head or Helen Rose or Jean Louis to provide glamorous wardrobes gratis, stars were forced to shop themselves for premieres and awards shows, including the Oscars. They’d frequent local designers such as Don Loper or James Galanos, department stores such as Bullock’s and I. Magnin, and a trendy European-style fashion boutique called Giorgio Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive. For most of the twentieth century, Rodeo Drive was an unpretentious street, with pharmacies, bookstores, and a few good restaurants, including the Brown Derby and Romanoff’s. In the
1950
s, there were handful of haberdasheries where actors such as Tyrone Power and Cary Grant shopped, and a divine lingerie boutique called Juel Park, where Beverly Hills’ most soigné ladies, including Joan Crawford and Gene Tierney, would have their silk and lace negligees made to measure. But in general, “Rodeo Drive wasn’t a fashion street,” Fred Hayman told me—at least until he arrived.

The only way to understand Hollywood dressing, or in fact luxury retail in the United States today, is to talk to Fred Hayman, the man who introduced modern luxury shopping to Americans with his fashion boutique Giorgio Beverly Hills. In October
2004
, I rang Hayman’s office in a five-story building with his signature yellow and white striped awnings on Canon Drive, two blocks east of Rodeo. In his early eighties, Hayman is retired now but still goes to the office a couple of days a week to manage his store’s legacy. He immediately proposed we lunch at Spago next door a few days later. When I arrived at the famous Beverly Hills eatery at the appointed time, I was ushered to what was obviously Hayman’s regular table. He had arrived early and was busy receiving good wishes from other patrons. Dressed nattily in a perfectly pressed shirt, trousers, and a jacket—a rarity in Los Angeles, especially at lunch—Hayman stood to greet me. He is a small, elegant man with silver hair parted neatly on the side, a crisp continental accent, and gracious manners, all of which indicate not only his upbringing but also the secret to his success.

Born in
1925
and raised in Saint Gall, a small textile town in Switzerland, Hayman immigrated as a boy to New York with his mother and stepfather. At seventeen, he went to work as an apprentice in the kitchen at Conrad Hilton’s famed Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and over the years rose through the ranks to become banquet manager. In
1955
, Hilton asked Hayman to move to Los Angeles to oversee the dining rooms of the new Beverly Hilton. Hayman brought with him a staff of fifty, primarily from the Waldorf, and demanded of them what would become his signature managerial style: personalized service, impeccable manners, quiet perfection. Soon the Beverly Hilton became the place to be, with stars such as Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, and Irene Dunne dropping in regularly for drinks or dinner.

In the late
1950
s, Hayman invested in a building on Dayton Way just off Rodeo Drive that housed a women’s clothing boutique called Giorgio. Surprised to find out how much he enjoyed retailing, Hayman quit the hotel, bought out his partners, and took over the store. He acquired the shop next door, number
273
Rodeo Drive, connected the two, dressed them up with cheerful yellow and white striped awnings, and put in a pool table and an oak bar “with a few bottles of booze,” he told me. Uniformed barmen served complimentary tea, cappuccino, wine, and cocktails to customers as they shopped. There was a denlike corner with a fireplace, comfortable chairs, and a newspaper rack. Hayman’s third wife, Gale, was the store’s buyer. Hayman chatted up customers such as Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, and Natalie Wood, while Gale and her pretty salesgirls modeled the latest creations by Halston, Diane von Furstenberg, Oscar de la Renta, and Christian Dior. The modus operandi at Giorgio, as at the Beverly Hilton, was personalized service. “We wrote thank-you letters when customers shopped at our store,” Hayman told me. “We had files on all the customers, thick files, and if they hadn’t bought anything in a while, we followed up,” usually with a handwritten note that would be delivered by a Silver Wraith Rolls-Royce with the license plate number
273
. Giorgio “wasn’t a ladies’ store,” Hayman explained. “It was like a home.”

The Haymans’ only true competition was Gucci, the first European luxury brand to open its own boutique on Rodeo Drive, in
1968
. Aldo Gucci, son of the founder and head of the company at the time, sensed that Rodeo Drive was going to evolve into an important luxury shopping street. The Gucci store was impressive: an imposing glass-and-bronze door gave way to a spacious main salon with Gucci green carpeting and eight Renaissance-style Murano glass and Florentine bronze chandeliers. Upstairs there was a couture salon called the Galleria that VIP shoppers accessed via a glass elevator. Gucci had a good celebrity following: Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, and John Wayne were regular customers. Frank Sinatra so loved Gucci loafers that he sent his secretary over to the new Rodeo Drive store buy a pair even before it had opened to the public. By the late
1970
s, celebrities, locals, and tourists were snapping up Gucci handbags—ranging in price from $
100
for basic leather to $
11
,
000
for eighteen-karat-gold-trimmed lizard—so fast that the store manager complained, “Our biggest problem is shortages.” “Gucci was as hot as could be,” remembers Hayman. “There were lines around the block.” Beverly Hills became so “Guccied out” that students at nearby Beverly Hills High School raised a faux Gucci flag on campus.

Within a few years, Giorgio and Gucci had turned Rodeo Drive into a destination address for luxury shopping, attracting not only wealthy customers but also other brands. Ralph Lauren opened his first Polo store there in
1971
. Yves Saint Laurent, Céline, Courrèges, and Fred Joaillier soon followed, replacing local merchants and even a gas station with their expensive, exclusive boutiques. The superrich flocked to the street, and spent voraciously. Hayman was once forced to close Giorgio after an Arab client arrived with his harem and bought every evening gown in the store. In
1977
, Giorgio Beverly Hills grossed $
5
million, which meant that it sold four times more merchandise per square foot than Bloomingdale’s flagship in Manhattan, then the country’s most successful department store, according to Anthony Cook, who charted the rise of Rodeo Drive in
New West
magazine. “The times were good and we were right for the times,” Hayman said with a laugh. In
1985
, Chanel opened its first store on the American mainland on Rodeo Drive. Its decor lived up to the street’s growing reputation of ostentatious luxury: crystal shelves, suede walls, and a skylight inspired by the crystal stopper of the Chanel No.
5
perfume bottle. Writer Judith Krantz, who set her best-selling
1978
novel
Scruples
on Rodeo Drive, called the street “the most staggering display of luxury in the Western world.”

It only could have happened in Los Angeles. L.A. was a young, liberal city, settled by people who fled their conservative roots to start anew. Its primary business—cinema—was new. Its money was new. There was no pretension, no snobbism, no traditional class rules—yet. To shop in luxury boutiques, you didn’t have to come from a good family or dress well, as was the case in America’s old, traditional cities. If you had the dough, you could go.

Oscar time was the busiest, with stars crisscrossing Rodeo Drive from boutique to jeweler to beauty salon. “Stars would spend months deciding what they were going to wear to the Oscars,” remembers Gale Hayman. “Nobody sent them clothes.” The problem was, most stars didn’t have cultivated taste and they didn’t have the studio costumers to guide them anymore. L.A.’s reputation as a laid-back city accentuated the problem. Folks knew how to dress down, but no one knew how to dress up anymore. The society ladies such as Betsey Bloomingdale and Nancy Reagan still had James Galanos to dress them in southern California couture, and Bob Mackie designed spangly getups for Cher and comedian Carol Burnett. But most other celebrities were on their own, sometimes with disastrous results. Who could forget when Demi Moore walked the Oscars’ red carpet in
1989
in a black cape and spandex bicycle pants?

They needed guidance, someone with good taste to dress them as elegantly as their predecessors. And Giorgio Armani was happy to oblige.

B
ACK IN THE MID-1970S
,
a new generation of Italian ready-to-wear designers emerged, turning the industrial city of Milan into an important fashion capital almost overnight. Among them were Gianni Versace, who came from the southern town of Reggio di Calabria, and made his name with sexy sequin and leather clothes that were inspired by hookers; Gianfranco Ferré, an architect by training who made highly structured clothes; and Giorgio Armani, a handsome, quiet man who invented what has become known as the soft suit.

To understand Giorgio Armani, and the austerity of his clothes, you have to go back to his childhood. He was born in
1934
, the middle child of three, in Piacenza, an industrial town forty miles outside of Milan that was bombed relentlessly by the Allies. “Sometimes I would find myself with my little sister, who was three years old, hiding in a hole while a plane tried to gun us down,” he remembers. Often, when he was out playing with his friends, the bomb alerts would sound and they’d scurry into shelters. But one day, he wasn’t with them—he had something else to do, he doesn’t remember what—and “they died and I lived,” he told me during an interview in his office in Milan. “It was just good luck.” Another day, he wasn’t so lucky. The neighborhood boys were playing with gunpowder from an Allied cartridge they had found, and it exploded as Giorgio bent over to look. He was covered in flames. He spent forty days in the hospital, where he was submerged in vats of pure alcohol. He still carries a scar on his foot where the buckle of his sandal burned into his skin. “Those were disagreeable times,” he says in his understated way, “and their memory remains.”

But even as a child, with the world coming down on his head, Armani’s talent for visual aesthetics emerged. One Christmas shortly after the war ended, his mother set the table for the holiday feast of roast chicken. Little Giorgio looked on with displeasure—he did not approve of her arrangement. “There were too many things—the centerpiece, with flowers, and then small flowers everywhere. I remember telling my mother, ‘Do one of these things, not both.’” His mother reeled at first, but after her son left the room, she removed the centerpiece. “She understood that there was something different about me, that I had a sensitivity for certain things, for aesthetics, for exteriors,” he says. “She realized that I could tell if something was beautiful or ugly.” From then on, she asked his opinion on decor. Looking back, Armani says that she was the only woman “who really influenced the direction of my work and my life…with her way of being, so simple but rigorous and severe at the same time. She spoke very little but with words that counted.”

In
1955
, Armani enrolled in medical school in Milan, but he soon realized he was not suited to be a doctor and returned to Milan, where he got a job at a local department store called La Rinascente. During his eight years there, Armani worked as a photographer, a window dresser, an assistant men’s wear buyer, and the fashion coordinator. It was a good job, but a lousy fashion job. Men with money and taste had their own tailors in Italy back then. Those who didn’t had to buy off the rack from the sorry selection of baggy, saggy suits churned out by manufacturers in few sizes. Armani was appalled by this and decided to do something about it. He went to work for Cerruti as an assistant men’s wear designer for a collection drolly named Hitman, and learned the essentials of suit construction and manufacturing. He came up with several new approaches to men’s suits, including dabbling in deconstruction. After a few years, Armani left Cerruti to launch a freelance career. “I was ready to pursue my own path,” he told me. “I wanted to discover my own aesthetic.”