Emanuel Ungaro
Exquisitely talented fashion designer who lived to be the last of the great Parisian couturiers
EMANUEL UNGARO, who has died aged 86, was the last of the grand Paris couturiers, dressing many of the world’s most celebrated women in the era before the great fashion brands were swallowed up by a handful of conglomerates.
Ungaro trained in Paris under Cristóbal Balenciaga, then worked briefly alongside the futurist designer André Courrèges before launching his own label in the mid-1960s. He became known for his flamboyant use of pattern and elegant draping, and was once described as “arguably unique among his peers as a heterosexual man creating dresses for the bodies that he worshipped”.
On his desk at his salon Ungaro kept a portrait of Sigmund Freud, and on the wall a poster displaying the psychoanalyst’s words: “The great question … which I have not been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”
Fashion, Ungaro insisted, “is not a superficial thing, but a way of being, a way of facing life”. He dismissed minimalism as “intellectual fascism”, and towards the end of his career declared gloomily: “Marketing is horrible. It is taking over completely and killing the creativity. If you don’t have your own aesthetic, fashion is dead. They don’t want to sell clothing, just accessories.”
Emanuel Mattéotti Ungaro was born in Aix-en-provence on February 13 1933. His parents were Italian immigrants who had fled Fascism, and his father, Cosimo, a tailor, ensured that one of his son’s first toys was a sewing machine. On leaving the lycée in Aix, Emanuel joined the family business. He later said: “My father taught me to recognise line and quality, and to respect every stitch.”
Aged 22 he went to Paris, where he met Courrèges, then working for Balenciaga. “I had no money,” Ungaro recalled. “I was renting a room from this old aristocratic man on a small street on the Left Bank. But I remember once, late at night, standing on the street, eating at a hot dog stall. In my head, I was building my couture house, believing that some day I would have one.”
It was through Courrèges, in 1958, that Ungaro met Balenciaga, who took him on as an apprentice. Ungaro told The Guardian in 2001: “Balenciaga never talked. You had to learn and take from it the sense of quality. He was a very alone, very silent man. I never met her, but I heard that Chanel was a genius and a monster. Balenciaga was a genius, but not a monster. He was fantastic to be with.” In 1960, when Courrèges left to set up his own salon, Ungaro took over his role as a designer, remaining with Balenciaga for the next four years.
In 1964 Courrèges invited Ungaro to join him at his atelier on the Avenue Kléber. Courrèges had recently launched his space-age collection of angular, geometric above-the-knee dresses, tailored trousers and anklehigh white boots, regarded as the first significant revolution in haute couture since Dior’s New Look, and he needed help to cope with the flood of new orders.
In the summer of 1965 Ungaro opened his own salon, with the assistance of the Swiss artist and fabric designer Sonja Knapp and Elena Bruna Fassio. At first they lived hand to mouth. Sonja Knapp sold her Porsche to pay the first few months’ rent for his couture house, while Ungaro “worked 18 hours a day, every day of the year, no vacation. I lived for years in a small studio. I had no luxury habits, and I bought my first car, a Mini Morris, when I was 40. But I didn’t mind. I love to work. I was born into a very modest family, it was not a complication for me.”
His debut show was unusual in that there was no evening wear. “They are not my style,” he declared. “I am a man of this age and I will design for women of this age.”
His second collection, in January 1966, featured Bermuda shorts worn beneath a miniskirt, but by 1968 he was producing a softer look, with thin wool A-line dresses in delicate checks, floral prints and plaids, many with matching pastel wool coats, for day wear; for the evenings he offered a short threetiered cocktail dress made from white fabric flowers and a cinnamonembroidered white organza gown. His models wore brass Aztec masks with the evening wear. In the same year Ungaro showed his first ready-towear collection, under the name Parallèles. He is said to have come up with all the designs in five days. Items included a long flared leather jacket with calfskin trousers and a battle jacket with matching skirt in ginger and white lambskin. He aimed to express “gaiety, freedom of life, and youth”, and the fashion press loved it.
The 1969 couture collection offered sweaters in rabbit fur and suede as well as wool; a silver lamé trouser suit; and a vinyl evening gown with matching coat decorated with 3D butterfly motifs. There were also trousers festooned with chicken feathers, and an ankle-length cape trimmed with styrofoam balls designed to be worn over an aluminium bra and lace hot pants. The
New York Post observed: “The clothes look as fresh and exciting as the first fig leaf must have looked to Eve.”
Ungaro moved to larger premises on the Avenue Montaigne. His clientele now comprised some of the world’s most fêted women, among them the Duchess of Windsor, Catherine Deneuve, Jacqueline Onassis, Lauren Bacall and Marella Agnelli.
His designs of the 1970s were, he said, all about “tenderness and seduction” as he aimed for a balance between classic and contemporary styles. He wanted his models on the catwalk to radiate femininity, declaring: “I don’t want them to walk like soldiers.” At the end of the decade he added a menswear line and his own brand of scent.
Ungaro’s vigorous use of colour, pattern and texture continued to win him plaudits, but the advent of grunge and a more minimalist look in the 1990s made him seem to be behind the times. In 1996 he sold a majority stake of his business to the Italian fashion and accessories brand Salvatore Ferragamo; the plan was for Ferragamo to develop a shoe and handbag business to support the loss-leading couture. “Try to stay alone? Impossible,” Ungaro said. “I could have stayed alone, of course, but with limited ambitions, and the day I’m not here, what happens with the house?”
By now in his sixties, Ungaro turned his thoughts to a successor, and in 1998 he brought in Giambattista Valli from the Italian design company Krizia to create the ready-to-wear lines, leaving Ungaro free to concentrate on the couture.
Although he had attracted a new generation of devotees, among them Sarah Jessica Parker, Penelope Cruz, Britney Spears and Kylie Minogue, Ungaro was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the direction which fashion was taking. “It has been led astray by the big groups,” he complained. “It has become mediocre – personally, I believe that fashion is more than marketing.” Valli left Ungaro in 2004, and the following year Ungaro retired. Ferragamo sold the label to the venture capitalist Asim Abdullah for a rumoured $84 million, although it kept the fragrance division.
The label subsequently appointed a series of short-lived creative directors, while a disconsolate Ungaro could only look on from afar. He was particularly distressed by the hiring in 2009 of the controversial American actress and singer Lindsay Lohan as artistic adviser, describing the collection on which she worked (it included sequinned nipple tassels) as “a disaster”.
A small, handsome man who liked to work to the strains of Beethoven, Ungaro had a refreshing lack of interest in the trappings of celebrity. Away from the fashion house, he enjoyed skiing, playing chess and reading Proust.
He married, in 1988, Laura Bernabei, who served as his fashion house’s director of communications. They had a daughter, Cosima.
Emanuel Ungaro, born February 13 1933, died December 22 2019
Fashion, Ungaro insisted, ‘is not a superficial thing, but a way of being, a way of facing life’