LONGFORM 2
A NEWSLETTER FROM ANDREA BATILLA
IT ALL STARTED IN VIAREGGIO
This is an article published in Il Post on October 23, 2023, part of a series of autobiographical pieces that touch on fashion only tangentially.
Viareggio is a city planted between the sea and the mountains, built on a vast stretch of land, swampy since Roman times, that by the early 20th century had become one of Italy’s most famous seaside resorts, earning the nickname “The Pearl of the Tyrrhenian.”
It’s a place that lives seasonally, rising and falling like the sea that borders it. At times, it becomes a bustling city flooded with tourists; other times, it’s just a small provincial town where everyone knows each other, where everyone talks. This fluctuation reflects an identity never quite reached—a search for balance between luxury yacht shipyards, cramped apartments rented out in August, the working-class crowd who hustle for four months a year, and those who, for those same four months, insist on feeling perpetually on vacation, swimming in a murky sea surrounded by noisy beaches.
And then there’s winter—desolate and rainy—making the city ghostlike, out of place, though never stripped of its dignity as a “pearl,” allowing locals to shine the moment a single sunbeam lights up the liberty-style buildings.
When my family moved to Viareggio, it was 1975 and I was nine years old. Coming from a small village tucked away in the Lunigiana mountains, everything seemed huge, mysterious, fascinating—beautiful. Along with the sense of displacement that stayed with me throughout my ten years living there, I came to understand that life in Viareggio revolved around a central axis, one singular reference point, a boundary and a stage where social judgment, friendships, cruelty, love, betrayal, success, and failure all played out: the Passeggiata.
The Passeggiata is a stretch of pedestrian promenade that runs the length of Viareggio, from Lido di Camaiore to the Darsena. From there, you access the beach clubs, and over time, the area became home to the finest shops, bars, and restaurants in Versilia, with a not-so-hidden ambition of becoming Nice or Monte Carlo—but with the business mindset of Lignano Sabbiadoro. At its peak, during the 1970s and ’80s, the Passeggiata was the favored haunt of the ultra-rich on summer vacation—until the more understated and chic Forte dei Marmi took over, and later, Pietrasanta eclipsed even Forte.
In that privileged place of seeing and being seen, a battalion of modern clothing stores had been lined up like heavy artillery in a war bunker—defensive tools to shield oneself from the outside world, to become all that one wasn’t but wished to be, to gain social acceptance or reject it entirely.
My first encounter with fashion, in the early ’80s, happened on that long stretch of road—still home to a few marvelous liberty buildings that had survived WWII bombings and no fewer than six cinemas in a row, which today have all been replaced by fast fashion stores.
For someone like me, passionately drawn to that alluring world I saw in magazines, discovering stores like Armani, Versace, Ferré, or Coveri meant touching a piece of unreachable fantasy—and maybe even buying a small piece of it, if just barely, because prices were already sky-high.
I remember clearly the extraordinary feeling I had bringing home a laser-cut rubber jacket by Versace. It was a striking, strange, attention-grabbing object—completely out of the ordinary. I remember how wearing it gave me a supernatural power that allowed me not only to forget my frustrations but to feel superior to the bullies at my high school—where I was the “faggot,” a fun little pastime for pushing, teasing, or sometimes hitting.
It was the fabulous ’80s, and as diversity became a battleground, fashion was arming itself in a desperate defense. I wasn’t the only one along that promenade transforming into someone else. In just a few years, clothing had gone from being something anonymous and insignificant to a true weapon of social identity.
After the ’70s, collective battles were replaced by individual identity. The one replaced the many. The chaos Italy endured—black and red terrorism, bombings, failed coups, and Masonic lodges—had pushed Italians into a hyper-personal dimension where the universal (i.e., other people) had no place. Or rather, they were there—but merely as spectators. The attempt to dismantle the bourgeois family and the state had failed, and what my generation was left with was a world with no safety nets, no collective ideal—just the new myth of success, money, visibility, and being through appearance. And all of it was right there. Half was called Viale Margherita, the other half Viale Marconi: the Passeggiata of Viareggio.
At the start of it, toward the Darsena, was the most astonishing place: with radically minimalist design and barely any lighting, the Giorgio Armani boutique looked more like a Taoist temple than a store. My mother was a regular. To me, it was all so perfect, so abstract compared to real life, that it became a sanctuary. Real life was about excess, commercial TV, bottomless sexual cravings, family fights, noise. Inside that boutique, there was everything I desired: rigor as a mark of transcendence, silence, the masculinization of the feminine, the feeling of superiority gifted by expensive clothes still too complex for the masses to grasp. The idea that a piece of clothing could give you real power simply hadn’t existed before.
I didn’t yet know that Giorgio Armani had started building his empire after meeting Sergio Galeotti not far from there, in Forte dei Marmi, in 1966. Giorgio was 32, Sergio 21. They both drew inspiration from those coastal landscapes and small-town realities before achieving fame. Armani, born in Piacenza, had long lived in Milan, and for him—as for many Milanese—the Tyrrhenian coast was a chic vacation spot where the rich were learning that dressing well (i.e., seeming) mattered more than being. He had just left his job as a visual merchandiser at Rinascente to work at Nino Cerruti’s Hitman, then already famous for high-quality menswear.
Galeotti, born in Pietrasanta, knew everything about Versilia—from nightlife to glamorous socializing, to the first clothing boutiques paving the way for the new Made in Italy. The two quickly fell in love, both romantically and professionally, and decided to open a consulting studio in Milan, which would eventually lead them to founding Giorgio Armani in 1975.
What I saw as austere and refined, my mother and her generation saw as a uniform—or perhaps a symbol. It held attributes of power, recognizability, invincibility. That’s when many men and women strolling along the Viareggio shore realized they were ticking time bombs—embracing an idea of success that, until then, only existed in the movies. What seemed to me a refuge was, for them, a weapon.
At the opposite end of the aesthetic and cultural spectrum stood Gianni Versace. Sometimes, on cold February mornings, I would skip school, hop on the old Garelli scooter my grandfather left me, and visit Silvano—the manager of Versace’s boutique in Forte dei Marmi. There was one in Viareggio too, but Silvano—perhaps the first person to truly understand who I was and who I wanted to be—welcomed me there as if it were his home.
After a few years, my mother abandoned Armani’s sophisticated simplicity for the more recognizable maximalism of Gianni Versace. Perhaps she understood that discretion didn’t work well in the provinces, and that a true signature style had to be visible, colorful, even sexy. Like many women, she was learning to recognize her body—and, in some way, to use it.
Gianni Versace himself used to spend cheerful weekends in Viareggio after he started collaborating with a Lucca-based company called Florentine Flowers in 1972. Born in Reggio Calabria, he had recently moved to Florence with his sister Donatella and began consulting. Like Armani before him, he launched his own collection in 1978 and chose Viareggio’s Passeggiata as one of the first locations for a mono-brand boutique.
While Armani taught me that discipline could lead to transcendence, Versace—though I didn’t realize it then—showed me that fashion could be a place of acceptance for difference. And even if my personal taste remained aligned with Armani’s gray suits, in the Versace boutique I breathed something I didn’t yet know how to define: freedom. I didn’t imagine that Versace was teaching that lesson to many. Bringing a dose of explosive eroticism from Reggio Calabria to gray Milan, he opened the door to a story that wasn’t considered acceptable at the time. For Versace, the overt display of luxury and eroticism was a positive value—one that traveled from the southern provinces to Italy’s moral capital, stopping in Viareggio along the way.
I rarely go back to Viareggio. The last time was to meet someone. I sat outside at a table at Fappani, the most popular bar on the Passeggiata, across from a beautiful woman who told me how a fundamental piece of the Made in Italy story took place right there. Adriana Bacci had been married for years to Didi Chelotti, her partner in founding the boutique that until recently stood just steps away. In the late ’70s, Chelotti’s store became one of the most important in Italy—discovering Walter Albini, the true father of Made in Italy, who died at 42, forgotten and eclipsed by later stars like Gianfranco Ferré, Giorgio Armani, and Gianni Versace.
That wonderful boutique was a focal point where many young designers built their careers and found essential guidance. A place to reconnect with the people buying their clothes—to observe and understand them.
As I looked into Adriana’s clear eyes and watched the wind gently play with her hair, she spoke nonstop, delighted to recount an old story the world had mostly forgotten. Her words painted a vivid, joyful portrait of that magical time. Suddenly, it all made sense—how, from such a small slice of Italy, along a few kilometers of concrete, so many of the people who helped create what we now call Made in Italy had passed through. What today is a universal concept was, at its heart, born from the smallest of details: the Italian provinces.
