EMILIO PUCCI: The Astonishing Odyssey of a Fashion Icon, by Terence Ward and Idanna Pucci
Emilio Pucci, the Italian designer known for his bright, swirling prints, led a glamorous life befitting his clothes. He dressed Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Onassis and even designed the emblem for the Apollo 15 mission. But “Emilio Pucci” is not really about that.
This graceful but sometimes frustrating biography, co-written by his niece Idanna Pucci and her husband, Terence Ward, focuses primarily on Pucci’s life in the Italian military during World War II. The publishers call it “a surprising, unknown portrait of Emilio Pucci as he faced betrayal and death against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Italy.” And while that is, technically, true of this well-researched book, the subject’s own loyalties and motivations during that pivotal time remain opaque.
The authors begin by breezing through the history of Pucci’s native Florence and its lucrative textile trade. Pucci enjoyed a privileged upbringing, in which French was spoken at breakfast and lunch and English at dinner. If Pucci or his brother broke into Italian, they were sent from the table hungry.
The authors argue that Pucci and his family, Florentine nobility for centuries, felt loyalty to the monarchy rather than the Italian state and its dictator, Benito Mussolini. Although largely apolitical, the young Emilio didn’t join the Fascist military youth or militia and objected to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. He left in the fall of 1935 for America, to study agriculture at the University of Georgia, and was surprised to be frequently asked about his country’s politics. As a result, he later said, “I became more and more interested in political matters and the underlying economic and social problems.”
Financial sanctions against Italy derailed his plans — he could not receive his allowance to pay tuition. Rather than return home and take his place on the 1936 Italian Olympic ski team (there is a great deal of skiing in this book, appropriately enough), Pucci went on a kind of bohemian tour of the United States, hitchhiking and train-hopping and sleeping in haystacks. While in Portland, Ore., he answered an ad seeking a stuntman for Tyrone Power in the film “Thin Ice.” After this brief stint in entertainment, he introduced himself to the president of Reed College and offered to form a ski team in exchange for tuition.
When Pucci’s grandmother died in 1937, he returned to Italy and was conscripted into the air force. At this point, the book adopts a rather confusing rhythm, recounting battles and introducing new figures without a great deal of context. While their prose is engaging, at times the authors’ attention to mundane detail comes at the expense of storytelling, as if they can’t decide whether they are writing a blow-by-blow military history or the biography of a man. (That said, as someone who attended Reed, I personally would have liked a lot more about his time there.)
After fighting in Libya, Pucci met Benito Mussolini’s son Bruno and daughter Edda Ciano. Both she and her husband, an Italian count, would become major figures in his life, although the exact nature of their relationship remains murky. “In their isolation, did Emilio and Edda become more than friends?” the authors ask. “They would never say so.” Nor do they settle on whether Ciano was the “Lady of the Axis,” as Time magazine dubbed her, or simply an apolitical socialite who became a prop for her father’s government.
But then, Pucci’s life was filled with dissonance: continuing to fight valiantly for Italy and the Axis powers, but, between battles and stints in hospitals, maintaining his jet-set life. “If they release me and I will be cured,” he wrote to his friend Susanna Agnelli, “I would love to come to Davos, do some skiing and forget all the horrors I have experienced.”
It would have been interesting to at least hypothesize about what Pucci thought of the aesthetics of Fascism, the sheer coarseness and vulgarity of the political moment. This is a portrait of a man before he became a fashion designer — but it’s also about someone of legendary taste, and how he was formed.
When the war ended, Pucci wanted to forget it and had a sort of second adolescence, relaxing in Capri and skiing in the Alps. Similarly, there’s a rather abrupt change to the book’s tone and pace — perhaps intended to evoke the feeling of postwar life, but somewhat jarring.
In St. Moritz, Pucci styled a Swiss socialite on the slopes after she borrowed some of his ski togs. A photographer took a picture, which landed on the desk of Diana Vreeland, then a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, resulting in an article in the December 1948 issue titled “An Italian Skier Designs.” The rest is fashion history.
The authors write that “Emilio’s story serves as a cautionary tale, echoing the refrain: ‘To understand what is coming, we must go back in time.’” In this book, we time-travel, but the meaning remains elusive.
EMILIO PUCCI: The Astonishing Odyssey of a Fashion Icon | By Terence Ward and Idanna Pucci | St. Martin’s | 356 pp. | $35
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