Andy Warhol autographs Brooke Shields' tee at Fiorucci's NYC store. (Image by Franco Marabelli.)

When skinny jeans were still known as skin-tight, the New York disco scene of the ’70s had a favorite store, and it was Fiorucci’s on East 59th Street. A place to see and be seen, it was full of celebrities of all types, trying to acquire a pair of gold cowboy boots or some green combat clothes. Its creator, Elio Fiorucci, took a different path than most retailers of the era to arrive at his Studio 54–ready ensembles. An excerpt from an article by Priscilla Tucker about Fiorucci’s in the March 28, 1977 New York magazine:

“The secret of his success, says Fiorucci, is ‘to be able to listen to what the public has to say. I am a chronicler, like a journalist. I am a coordinator of situations.’

Toward this end he employs young people–‘They are my antennae’–and sends them all over the world, wherever they want to go, looking at the products of village life in Indonesia, shopping the outdoor markets of Colombia, bringing things back to be reproduced or modified in Fiorucci factories. Anything–clothes, tinware, soap, bicycles, pottery–that attracts his stylists turns up in the stores. Employees are free to innovate, hiring now a girl who makes flowers on the spot, now a couple with fabrics and a sewing machine, to whip up before your eyes made-to-order skirts for less than those on Fiorucci’s racks.

Fiorucci himself often hires on the spur of the moment just because he likes the way someone puts himself or herself together. He found Mariagrazia, who now manages both his Milan stores and his New York store, while she was working at Gucci. ‘The atmosphere at Gucci was not real,’ says Mariagrazia, who finds reality in dressing à la Fiorucci, in army pants with strands of flowers hanging down her T-shirt, her fuzzy hair bobbing as she directs the moving of the pastel jeans to the back of the store, the rosebud challis dresses downstairs, the sexy posters over by the free-espresso bar.”