FLAVIO LUCCHINI

“When I created L’Uomo Vogue, tailors were sti l l presenting men’s fashion at Sanremo and the models paraded with a little walking stick. It was a crazy thing: the Beatles had been around for a while, the whole world was changing.” Flavio Lucchini, who will be 90 in October, remembers those years around 1968 perfectly. Art director and creator in 1966 of the Ital ian edition of Vogue (unti l then a very stylish magazine called Novità), he had guessed that men’s fashion, and more generally the male world, back home in Italy, was stil l unexplored terrain. Thus began a widespread work of rejuvenation and, even more, a d ismantling of canons.

“The readers I was thinking of were the sons chal lenging the fathers of the time”. Some signals had already been thrown their way: supplements and half pages mixed in with those of Vogue. Yet more needed to be done. “The first fashion feature for L’Uomo was a disaster. We chose Porto Rotondo in Sardinia as a location, where there was still nothing, only bulldozers. I entrusted it to Oliviero Toscani, just out of photography school. He went off with Chino Bert, classics editor of Novità. When they came back with the photos, I nearly fainted: they reproduced what had been seen in the fashion show. I threw them away.” Whi le there were no fits l ike in the editorial office, certainly there was a general bewilderment among the public when the first issue of L’Uomo came out. It included a feature dedicated to men in fur; this at a time when in the street you could bump into the eskimo look, hippie fashion and military-style uniforms. And what incredible men starred in that shoot; Ettore Sottsass, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (with a ‘Doctor Zhivago’ fur coat), Lucio Fontana (with his personal fur).

“The magazine had to be the expression of a changing world, so I involved friends, painters, artists. For years, we did not use model l ing agencies. This al lowed us to be spokesmen for the changes we saw. The magazine’s scope was to want and know how to look f arther, to discover, even to create new horizons.” Lucchini’s message of change began with the cover. For the first headline and articles of L’Uomo, he chose the typefaces he had seen in the English magazine Nova.

And to go back the photo shoot that was thrown away? “We set up at the end of the editorial office and called some friends in as models. Inspired by Irving Penn, with Toscani I invented the document fashion photography that was the key to showing, in our pages, that fashion was changing.”

The third way, stepping aside from the bipolar eskimo/regimental approach (of the time). A grammar that continues to speak only to the future.