Articles by: Chiara Basso

Celebrities feel at home in his store on 55th Street and Fifth Avenue. Just before our interview, Vacca has assisted Academy Award winner and friend Forest Whitaker to choose the right outfit for The Godfather of Harlem, a tv series where the actor is starring as the gangster Bumpy Johnson. When they are done, Vacca invites us all to have a salad right there, at the wood table close to the shopping windows of his 8,000-square-foot flagship boutique, where customers can find not only Made in Italy clothes but an Italian style café, a barbershop, a salon, a members-only club and an art gallery. “I wanted to create an experience for customers when they come here,” says the Italian designer while offering us buffalo mozzarella that arrives fresh from Naples every Thursday and focaccia pugliese.

Vacca’s call for fashion after a successful career as a lawyer

How can a lawyer become a celebrity stylist? “I come from a family deeply rooted in fashion,” Vacca tells us, “my grandmother, Sabina Orciuolo, had an atelier in Andria in the 1920s where thirty women were working for her.” Nonetheless, Vacca’s family didn’t want him to work in fashion because, according to his grandmother, this business is a lot of work and not so much money. Like many families from the South of Italy that could send their children to university, they wanted him to become a professional such as a lawyer, a judge or a doctor.

“I did become a lawyer and practiced for ten years at the highest level. Thanks to a scholarship I first came to New York for a master’s degree in law and worked here with 90% of the Italian fashion brands in the U.S.” Vacca was “the Italian lawyer” for important names such as Tod’s, Versace, and Zegna until something happened in his family that would have shaken his world.

“In 1995 my father got cancer, and I went back to Italy for 6 months to stay with him. When he passed away, I realized that we are not gonna live forever and thought that it was time to change my life. I believe that our careers should be more transversal than vertical. It’s great to have multiple experiences.”

Vacca decided to start again from fashion: “Everybody thought that I was crazy but I always loved fashion and it is in my family’s roots. So, first I invested in a company from Naples that was producing for other brands. I developed the American market, the collections, I designed... and I had a lot of fun with it.”

His mission: dressing Americans the “authentic Italian way”

Vacca wanted to create a luxury brand with handmade garments for men and women, including the ready-to-wear collections, but he also wanted to dress Americans the authentic Italian way. “There were other Italian luxury brands, of course, but they were selling mainly to departments stores where buyers were looking for collections with the cheapest products and wanted to change the fit and style to meet what they thought was the taste of American market. I thought: this is not how we dress in Italy.”

For Vacca, a jacket has to fit close to the body, Italians love colors and they care about fabrics. He wanted to bring all this to America. No more baggy jackets, no more pants with pleats on each side and wide legs.

In order to avoid buyers and departments stores “who kill fashion instead of promoting it,” in 2002 he launched the Domenico Vacca brand and opened his first store on Fifth Avenue, in front of the Plaza Hotel. “If I have to be judge, I prefer to be judged by people of Fifth Avenue, I thought.”

Vacca was not scared of starting a business just a few months after 9/11. Two months after the store opening, the newspaper La Repubblica called him “the Ferrari of fashion” and since many other publications called him the same. “Like a Ferrari we are classic and we respect tradition, but at the same time, we are modern. My women’s collections are chic and sexy with a mix of masculine and feminine elements. I like to empower a woman with clothes. My men’s collection is classic but with a twist that can be found in the fabric, the cut, or the colors. The Domenico Vacca’s style is the one of an Italian who has travelled the world.” Thus, everything is made in Italy, 40% from Puglia, and 90% is handmade.

Celebrities

Over a decade ago, costume designer Frank Fleming, who was working on the movie American Gangster, came into Vacca’s store to find clothes for Denzel Washington. “He loved my collection and the fact that we can custom make almost everything,” Vacca says. Since then, the designer and his team have created costumes for 50 movies and TV shows.

“My first celebrity client was Daniel Day-Lewis. We started a long professional relationship, to the point that when he was nominated five years ago for Lincoln, he called me and told me that he wanted to be dressed for the academy awards. He won his third Oscar that night, the only actor ever to have this honor. I like to think that we bring luck!”

Vacca dressed Forest Whitaker and Alan Arkin for their academy award nights too. As an expert, we asked him why so many celebrities commit faux pas on the red carpet and what they should do to avoid them.

How to avoid mistakes on the red carpet

Vacca believes that we would see fewer mistakes on the red carpet if celebrities first learned to have their own style, second, they listened less to stylists’ advice, and last they stopped following fashion blindly. “Most celebrities don’t have a great style and they trust improvised stylists who most of the time pay stars to wear what brands want, and dress them with fashion trends that don’t fit the celebrity’s body type. Instead, if you are an actor or an athlete and you live in front of a camera, you must take style seriously.”

Vacca suggests to spend 10 minutes every night preparing our clothes, and he promises that in a couple of weeks we would all be pro of style. “It’s a matter of exercise like in golf or any other sport.”

The Italian designer told us that he doesn’t pay celebrities to wear his clothes. Only after there is an already established relation, he sends them clothes and then they work together to find the best, personalized style. Usually, this relationship starts with costumes for a movie or tv series - “I think we help them to get into their characters” - and then it expands to the celebrity’s private wardrobe and eventually on the red carpet.

After New York, the next step for Vacca could be Hollywood: “I would like to start my next career as a movie or tv series producer. We, a group of friend, my fiancée Eleonora Pieroni, and I, already have a lot of ideas.”

Paola Randi's new movie, Little Tito and the Aliens, shows a very extra-terrestrial approach for Italian standards. Not only for the sci-fi plot but also for its cinematographic style and weird characters, played by Valerio Mastandrea, in the role of a scientist searching for the voice of his latest wife in the universe from a couch in Area 51 in Nevada, and the talented newcomers Chiara Stella Riccio and Luca Esposito playing the scientist’s niece and nephews. After all, nothing in Paola Randi's "universe" is traditional. Little Tito and the Aliens was presented in New York during Italy on Screen Today, an event created by Loredana Commonara to promote the best Italian contemporary cinema.

Why did you choose such an American genre like sci-fi?

I don’t think it is only American. It is rather universal. I was trying to explore how humanity deals with the need of finding an antidote against the fear for death and sorrow. In an essay by Emanuele Severino, “I presocratici” (Pre-socratic philosophers), I discovered that humanity first tried to find an answer in mythology and later in science. I thought that sci-fi was the perfect mixture of the two.

When and why did you decide to become a director?

I have a degree in law because my father, a lawyer, wanted me to follow his path, but then I framed the degree and gave it to him as a present because, really, it was not for me. At the same time, I was working in a nonprofit created by my mother who was providing financial support and training to women in Italy and in developing countries. Only at night, I was living my parallel life as an artist writing, playing, and painting. Then, in my early thirties, I realized that I was living somebody’s else life. So, I left everything, included my fiancé, and went to Rome. In the beginning, I was working in a PR agency, a job I hated. But one day a friend of my boss’s came and said ‘I wrote a short film’ and I told him ‘I will direct it.’ I had no experience, but I was so determined that I convinced him. After I directed the movie, I felt finally comfortable, like I had finally found myself.

Was it difficult to change your professional path at that age in Italy and in a field that is not easy like cinema?

Yes, none of the major schools were accepting me because I was too for them, I was 33. But, although I didn’t like that first short, a client of mine saw it and loved it. He wanted to make a professional short movie to rent a camera and asked me if I had anything for Valerio Mastandrea. Valerio was already a famous actor at that time and I was nobody, but I had written something during a workshop with Silvano Agosti, a great teacher. Indeed, I had a story, Giulietta della spazzatura, about a garbage guy who falls in love with a girl just watching at what she was throwing away. Valerio liked it and we did it. Eventually, I was not satisfied with it, but a friend sent it to the Turin Film Festival and they accepted it.

Do you think it is a very feminine characteristic never to be satisfied?

Probably yes. Sometimes, I am fascinated by my (male) colleagues who are always so sure about what they do. But, in the end, I see it as a positive element. We aim always at something better. One of my biggest dreams is doing exactly what I want to do and see if it works. For example, I would like to have a real chance with the public.

What do you mean?

Distribution is a real issue in Italy because you have very few chances with a movie that does not follow the standards, from a commercial or authorial point of view. Although I had found producers since the beginning, Angelo and Matilde Barbagallo, it was difficult to find people who wanted to invest in the distribution. So it came out with no P&A (publicity and advertising) and was distributed it in the summer when you have no chance especially with a movie for families like this that should have been released in November.

Which were the elements that made this movie so difficult to distribute?

It’s sci-fi. Last time that somebody made a sci-fi in Italy was Nirvana (by Gabriele Salvatores, 1997).

Which directors inspire you?

Hal Ashby is particularly close to my heart, he made masterpieces like Being There and Harold and Maude. I love his elegant touch in depicting a surreal world which is almost like a Magritte painting. One of my favorite directors is also Paul Thomas Anderson and a lot of women like Andrea Arnold, Sally Potter or, in Italy, Alice Rohrwacher and Susanna Nicchiarelli with a movie like Nico. I love women directors and it is a shame that we still have to make a difference.

You even tried to open an association for women in cinema. How was that experience?

Yes, I opened it with Grazia Colombini (costume designer) and Valia Santella (screenwriter) in 2011. We didn’t succeed because we didn’t have data. At that time, women didn’t want to talk about what happened to them, it was a taboo, everybody was scared to talk. Now it is easier because it is possible to talk about it. In fact, in Italy, there is a new association called Women in Film of which I am a member. Moreover, I think that the three leading film festivals in Europe, Cannes, Venice and Berlin, should have also female art directors. That’s what we need. I don’t think there is ever been one so far.

Did you encounter challenges as a woman in your career?

Yes, we are constantly undermined. I am not talking only about sexual abuse, it’s also in the way they look or listen to you, the attitude they have with you. But in Italy often we don’t have the perception of being harassed. It is so deep down in our culture that it doesn’t get recognized and it is taboo talking about it. Even now if you say that you are a feminist, you are looked at as somebody with a disease. Not to talk about women’s roles in cinema: there are a lot of fragile, hysterical, poetic, delicate or wasted women, or you have mothers. But where are real women, the rest of us?

So far your protagonists were men though.

My next project is going to have two female protagonists. But, again, they don’t fit the cinema's standards, so it won’t be easy.

Why they don’t fit?

They are not super cool or super fragile. They are real women.