Franco Moschino Dies in Italy

MILAN — Franco Moschino, a designer who became an international success despite a professed distaste for the traditional dictates of his calling, died Sunday night at his villa on Lake Annone, north of Milan. He was 44.

The cause of death was a massive heart attack due to complications from an abdominal tumor, according to a company spokeswoman. Moschino had been ill for about two years, the spokeswoman said.

A private funeral service limited to family members was conducted Monday morning and Moschino was buried in his family tomb in Abbiategrasso, the suburb of Milan where he was born. Surviving are his mother and a brother.

Moschino’s death came one week before the opening of another round of collections here. No word was immediately available from his company on whether his new line will be shown. In past seasons, it has been shown by appointment rather than in a major runway presentation.

His death deprives the industry of one of its most provocative and charismatic figures.

With gimmicks, gags and a wild sense of whimsy, Moschino captured the imagination of retailers and consumers and was able to turn the laughs into lire.

Jackets, shirts and belts with statements like “Ready to Where?” “Expensive Jacket,” “Waist of Money,” or “Questa Camica Costa Lire 1,000,000” (“This Shirt Costs 1 Million Lire”) became bestsellers.

Under Moschino’s touch, suits were accessorized with knives and forks, jackets metamorphosed into garment bags, shoes looked like miniature taxis, a hat was formed out of teddy bears and fabrics sported phrases like “I am proud of the odor of garlic and tomato in my clothes.”

His trademark signatures — graphics such as happy faces, hearts and peace signs — popped up on everything from purses to shoes to motorcycle jackets, becoming status symbols for fashion hipsters.

“Fashion should be fun,” he once told WWD, “and it should send a message. I like to use clothes as billboards.”

Moschino’s “messages” didn’t end with his clothes. His pizza-print shopping bags and themed store windows attracted their own measure of attention, and his fashion show gags — like putting on guests’ chairs small gadgets that produced the sound of mooing cows — were also part of his approach.

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He loved to poke fun at people, especially fashion editors. He described them once as people who “all still talk like Harper’s Bazaar in the Fifties, saying ‘Oh, that’s so chic!’ or ‘Oh, that’s so divine!”‘

His advertising campaigns were equally irreverent: A drawing of a female vampire with a red X across her face and the words, “Stop the Fashion System”; models sipping perfume instead of wearing it, and Moschino himself posing in women’s fishnet stockings to promote his hosiery.

Perhaps his most outrageous stunt was an ad in which he wore a blond wig and had his then 40-year-old mustachioed face pasted atop the body of a six-year-old girl in a dress to publicize his new children’s wear collection.

Although many of these antics had the fashion establishment giggling, the bottom line is that stores bought — and kept buying.

Ironically, Moschino’s success made him very much a part of the same system he constantly criticized. In essence, his anti-fashion message backfired (at least on the surface) and instead of persuading consumers to reject the seriousness of labels and refuse to be dictated to, as he proclaimed was the point, retailers say customers bought Moschino for just that reason — to be in fashion, rather than out of it.

Moschino himself seemed frustrated by the issue.

“It’s not my business,” he said a few years ago, when asked why he thought people bought his clothes. “In this sense, I really feel powerless. I don’t know what to do if the system around me has created a process that makes people victims, even of what I do. I still feel it’s absurd to make you wear a red jacket if you want to wear a green one. The fact that now people have become victims of my system is not my fault; it’s the fault of the system.”

With two women’s lines, men’s wear, children’s wear, jeans, perfumes, accessories and two Milan shops (with plans for shop-in-shops), Moschino could not deny that he was — if not personally, then professionally — a viable part of the fashion establishment he claimed to dislike so much.

By the late Eighties, no longer was he considered simply a fashion jester dismissed by serious professionals. Moschino’s business became anything but funny. And he became particularly successful in the U.S., which became one of his biggest markets, accounting for 15 to 20 percent of his sales.

For Moonshadow, the designer’s Milan-based holding company, the jokes were no laughing matter. Wholesale volume for the Moschino label under Moonshadow hit $222 million in 1993, with a 15 percent increase expected for 1994.

The firm has a design staff of about a dozen and 23 licenses ranging from swimwear and lingerie to perfume and sunglasses and has been considering a line of textiles for the home.

In addition to the design gags, part of Moschino’s success was a result of the fine quality and careful tailoring of his clothes. His jeans line is produced by Sportswear International and his “couture” collection and popular second line, Cheap & Chic, is manufactured by AEFFE SpA. A new license — the children’s line, which, like the jeans, was once produced by Simint — was to be finalized this fall for the spring-summer ’95 collection.

In the Far East, Moschino terminated its contract with C. Itoh and founded a joint venture in May 1994 with Isetan for the Japanese market. The new company is 51 percent Moonshadow, 34 percent Isetan and 15 percent AEFFE and handles the licensing of all the Moschino lines except couture and the women’s Cheap & Chic line. It also has a contract with Blue Bell to develop the Moschino business in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Guam and Korea.

Moschino was born in the northern industrial town of Abbiategrasso, Italy, on Feb. 27, 1950, to the owner of an iron foundry (who died when Moschino was four) and a housewife.

As a child, he used to draw as an escape from the drudgery of his middle-class surroundings, and at 18 he ran off to Milan where he worked as a waiter and model while studying art at the Accademia Belle Arte.

By the early Seventies, he was doing fashion drawings for various magazines and attracted the attention of Gianni Versace, who hired Moschino to work on his publicity campaign. For the next 11 years, Moschino designed for the Cadette line and in 1983, he started his own label. By 1988, he was firmly on the fashion map.

While the designer’s first collections drew limited attention, he soon went from being considered a harmless practical joker to a serious source of irritation to fashion’s big leaguers, some of whom responded with lawsuits.

“At the beginning it was much easier,” the designer said in an interview in 1991. “We did a takeoff of a Burberry coat, and they sent us a letter saying they knew it was happening, and that was it.”

But once it became clear that Moschino was a serious player in the industry, the lawsuits started. Chanel sued after Moschino designed a T-shirt with a TV screen tuned to “Channel No. 5.”

“They’ve registered all words that sound like Chanel — even channel,” said Moschino, who lost the case.

Louis Vuitton also filed a suit after Moschino used the French company’s trademark gold and brown for one of his designs.

“I said I have the right to use all the brown and gold I want, especially if it’s not LV but M and a cowboy hat, peace symbol, heart and carnation. But we lost that too,” he said.

He may have lost some of the legal battles, but it’s clear he won the war for recognition.

Despite his claims that he cared little about money (he often called it “dirty”) Moschino was named by the Italian tax authorities in late 1991 as being the second richest Italian designer — at least in terms of reported personal taxable income. He was said to have earned $1.97 billion lire (or $1.6 million) in 1989, but more recent figures were not available.

“I’m not doing this job for money,” he said. “Believe me, I’m not. It sounds strange probably, but I’m really making fun of [fashion]. I’m really enjoying it, and this has been transformed into money. Good for me, but it hasn’t been done for money.”

Regardless of his financial situation, he was considered one of the least ostentatious of Italy’s notoriously flamboyant designers.

“I’m too rich,” he admitted. “I’m a very regular, normal person from a very normal, middle-class family. I didn’t go to university. I’m not used to a rich life.”

He drove a Fiat Fiorino, commonly considered in Italy as the blue-collar man’s two-seat van, and rented the same smallish apartment in Milan for the last 15 years, sharing it with his cat.

“I would like to buy a bigger apartment with big windows where I could hang a lot of curtains,” he once said.

A private person who didn’t entertain or socialize much (especially within fashion circles), he admitted an indulgence for first-class air travel when he jetted to the U.S. He also succumbed to a car with a driver when he went to New York, but only, he said, because he didn’t know his way around. He also allowed himself handmade shoes from Lobbs in London and suits from Savile Row.

He was an avid collector, not of serious art, but of such kitsch as stuffed teddy bears, fake Greek columns, a bust of Queen Elizabeth, and a wooden cow. He loved opera, literature and old movies and once said his favorite designer was Levi Strauss.

In fact, he dressed almost exclusively in black Levi’s — often with a navy pinstriped vest and navy blazer but no tie — and he wore his hair in a military-style crew cut.

Moschino seemed torn between being a rebel and being a major player in the fashion game. For someone who claimed his sole purpose was lampooning what he called the “fascist fashion system,” he was faced with the task of justifying his extraordinary success within that system.

When he criticized the fashion establishment, critics labeled him a hypocrite, pointing out that if he hated the business so much — and the money that it produced — why not get out? He didn’t, of course, and seemed ill at ease because of it.

“I really think the system still is powerful, still is very fascist,” he told WWD three years ago. “I don’t stop screaming that it’s wrong. But as to why screaming that it’s wrong gets a good consumer reaction, ask the system. Don’t ask me.”

He explained that his gimmicks were all aimed at making fun of the self-conscious seriousness of high fashion. His goal in satirizing Chanel, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Burberrys and other fashion icons, he said, was to liberate the consumer, to let her — and not some designer — choose what she wants to wear.

“Fashion shouldn’t be taken so seriously,” he said.

The more he railed against the system, the more it seemed to embrace him.

“Anything I do, even if I say ‘Don’t buy my clothes,’ they think it’s ironic, and they do it,” he said. “But I really mean it. I mean stop the fashion system. The thing is that being against the system has helped the system and has created this paradox. The most important thing is not the clothes we’ve done. We haven’t done incredible clothes. We haven’t done creative clothes. We’ve just been sending nonstop messages through the garments. The fashion is not important at all.”

Though his shows got lots of attention (he once staged a “fashion victim ballet” and ended another show by shooing the models off the runway, shouting “Basta!”), Moschino opted for much calmer showroom presentations. His clothes were shown to buyers on video monitors.

“It’s more civilized,” he explained.

In recent seasons Moschino seemed to be getting a bit more serious. There were fewer jokes and he said he wanted to do clothes that couldn’t be distinguished as a “designer label.” In 1994, he said he wanted to develop an “ecological” line that would bear the tag “Nature Friendly Garment,” as a minicollection within the couture collection.

“I want to do anonymous fashion,” he said.

With his characteristic ambivalence, he lamented that this new tack might prove tiresome.

“My fashion has become boring,” he claimed, partly with pride and partly with concern. “There is no fashion anymore. There’s no style.”

Generally reluctant to discuss fashion, Moschino became more adamant about it in recent years, repeatedly telling reporters, “You can interview me, but don’t ask me about fashion.” He would try to steer the conversation from hemlines and fabrics to Nietzsche or Puccini.

Moschino said those who accused him of hypocrisy misunderstood him.

“In a certain sense, this drives me crazy because it’s like, what did I scream for?” he said. “In another sense, I agree. When you think about fashion you never think about something deep, incredible, basic and human and biological and spiritual. So it’s my fault if I thought that fashion was the right way to communicate such difficult and deep concepts. So, in that sense, they’re right.”