I met Fatman with revenge in my heart. For three years at COLORS magazine, my editorial director Oliviero Toscani - Benetton provocateur and corrupter of minds - had been a screaming demon. He threw insults and anecdotes one after the other and pretended not to notice the difference. He demolished egos and trashed work with impunity. He imposed crony-written rubbish like “the consumer society trains adults to be paedophiles,” making my beloved magazine sound like the ramblings of two cokeheads.A swine, in short. The devil, according to some. But, in the words of another ex-COLORS staffer, “probably a bit of a genius.”
So we are here two years on, two grown adults, talking at Talk magazine in New York, where Toscani has just signed up to be Tina Brown’s creative director. Fatman - also known as Oliviero, Toscani or media whore - is basking in his success to a stunning backdrop of Central Park. An ironic place to be, considering the punchline to one famous diatribe hurled in my direction: He had just been to dinner with Tina. I had just finished another 13 hour day. “Tina Brown is everything you’re not - talented, nice and intelligent.” I remind him of this. “Ah si? You should write it down!”
Oliviero is expecting me to be nasty, and he would revel in it, because he bathes in trouble like a hippo in mud. But what I write doesn’t matter, really, because “talking about Oliviero is just falling into his trap, says Kalle Lasn of Adbusters magazine, “which is to be talked about as much as possible.” Given his two-pronged attack of shocking the planet and being constantly available for interviews, it never fails. So well worn is the path to his door, you can second-guess most articles about him. There’s the tabloid version, which is easy outrage. And the broadsheet version, which goes like this: You trek over to northern Italy, where you are impressed by the sumptuous villa housing COLORS and Toscani’s beloved Fabrica, his ‘centre for research and communications.” You are charmed by Oliviero, despite yourself, and you write a clever piece about “this snarling, hypnotic bear of a man,” which includes the following points:
His father took the famous picture of the dead Mussolini hanging upside down.
He hates TV, though he’s always on it.
Models are prostitutes, though he’s fathered three and is married to one.
Companies are the new churches and advertising is the new journalism.
He is Michelangelo to Luciano Benetton’s Lorenzo de’ Medici or - a new variation - Leonardo da Vinci to Luciano’s the Pope.
He’d like to thank the RAF for bombing Milan so his mother couldn’t abort him.
He makes extravirgin Real Tuscan Oil (Oliovero Toscano, ha ha) and raises Appaloosa horses on his vast Tuscan ranch.
All the while, though, you see “through” Toscani, to the cynical, manipulative ploy that is Benetton advertising, and you are not fooled, not a bit.
For the knives have been out for Toscani ever since the early 1980’s, when he had the audacity to mix advertising with politics. Blame this mad Italian for the last decade of warm fuzziness in corporate circles; it was his picture of a black woman breastfeeding a white baby that first suggested that a social conscience - however fake - could be a corporate asset. And he carried on relentlessly, to howls of objection and piles of art prizes, slapping green Benetton labels on a photo of a newborn baby smeared with blood; a dead Sicilian mafioso; a 58-picture set of genitalia, including his own and his kids. The more successful the campaigns (Benetton is now one of the top five recognised brands worldwide), the more Toscani was indulged by His Royal Benificence Luciano Benetton: COLORS, the magazine “about the rest of the world” that he founded in 1991, was his no-byline, anti-fashion, anti-bullshit response to the magazine industry, quickly becoming de rigeur cribbing material in design agencies and features departments. Fabrica - a “communications academy” for under 25 year olds - was his personal Bauhaus. No teachers, no lessons, a monthly stipend and workshops from Toscani’s mates (including Issey Miyake, William Klein and Fidel Castro), it was a dizzyingly expensive “fuck you!” to the conventional art schools he despised.
Yet here he is 4000 miles from his communications empire, working for a English woman (two of his favourite targets) in a magazine almost universally condemned as fussy, confused and boring. Talk is not a happy place. The masthead changes often enough for “Guess the next Walking Talkie” to be the latest New York parlour game. The photo editor just left in a huff. And the readers, as Toscani cackles, “are all in the menopause.” What on earth is he doing here?
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!” he says. “Magazines are dead. Making this magazine is madness. Fantastic!” But there’s another reason: On West 57th Street, you see, Toscani doesn’t have to deal with the massed ranks of hostile Benetton bureaucrats who actually run United Colors, and who loathe their creative consultant, COLORS and Fabrica in equal measure. “You saw what it was like over there,” he says. “Only Luciano’s on my side. It’s a battle.” At Talk, the man whose idea of sport is reducing French journalists to tears is relaxed, friendlier, alarmingly likeable.
He’s also a mixed blessing. Only a month after Tina gushed about her “celebrated creative director” in one of her famously awful editorials, he managed to piss her off one of her biggest advertisers: Picking up an Estee Lauder ad during an interview with Creativity magazine, he reportedly launched into vintage Toscanisms: “Why is he blond? Why not Chinese? Is that Hitler, a new vision? Everybody’s a pure race in advertising!” On the other hand, he’s changed the cover, ditched the nasty cursive font, cleaned up the mess. His phenomenal energy is like a cool breeze in Talk’s stuffy offices. And he gets good pictures. On the cover of a recent issue, Jennifer Lopez is shooting at the camera. The story in Treviso goes like this: Jennifer the prima donna was refusing to turn her profile to the camera. Toscani finally lost it. “Look, Jennifer, I’m 58, world famous and rich. When you’re 58 no-one’s gonna know who the fuck you are.” She turns, furious, and shoots. Go, Oliviero, go!
It’s hard to get the better of Toscani. Either because he’s smarter than you expect, or because he doesn’t bother with discursive niceties like logic. “It’s a mistake to think everything must add up in Toscani’s world.” (Lewis Blackwell, former editor of Creative Review, now creative director, Getty Images.) But then, the Mad Hatter always was more fun than Alice in Wonderland.
In Benetton’s New York showroom, Toscani faces a sun-tanned quiffed CNN reporter in tasselled loafers. Toscani is always on call to defend Benetton, even at Talk. This time it’s the “We on Death Row” campaign; 28 interviews and in-your-face posters of winsome murderers that are predictably outraging America. “We’ve seen a Benetton cheque for $1000 made out to a Death Row inmate,” says the reporter. “Did you pay them?” But Toscani just unleashes the “I’m only the photographer” defence he uses whenever anyone asks about sweaters. “We paid the lawyers. I don’t know what they did with the money.” In the lift going back to Talk, I ask him “Did you pay them?” “Of course we paid them. You get paid, don’t you?”
The Death Row campaign has drawn lots of flak, some kneejerk and some deserved. It’s a shame, because as gestures go, it’s a valid one, and Toscani is genuinely appalled by the death penalty. “Atavistic! Masculine! Medieval!” It was perfectly timed to coincide with the presidential campaigns - George W. Bush being notorious for his 120 executions in 5 years - but less than perfectly executed. Not only were the inmates paid, but the letters requesting access were ambiguous enough (using the word “Newsweek” rather more often than “Benetton”) for the Missouri Governor General to sue Toscani, loudly, for gaining fraudulent access. The defence so far: Didn’t the Governor notice that the inmates were asked not to wear Gap?
But the biggest disappointment is the interviews. With questions like “When you wake up every morning, do you sometimes believe you’re not here?” the powerful stuff gets lost in the dross. And no matter what your views on the racist, corrupt mechanics of the death penalty, you can’t help reading the cheesy “each day in my cell I paint butterflies” and think “but what about when you shot the convenience store clerk/raped the three year old/knifed your parents? aren’t you sorry?”
On the back inside cover of the interview supplement, a sentence floats unattributed. “Individuals were not permitted to speak about the crime, guilt or innocence or prison conditions unless specifically requested by their attorney.” Is that why you didn’t ask them about the victims, Oliviero? “I’m not interested in the victims. I want to know if these people like chocolate or vanilla ice-cream. I want to know if they’re still human. If a boy burns a cat’s tail, who do you cure, the boy or the cat? You English, because you’re such cold-blooded bastards - and you can write that down - would cure the cat.” He flips. “Cazzo! Everybody round here wants to be an art director! I decided what to put in and what to leave out. ME. I couldn’t care less about the victims, or the victims’ families. I want to know about the murderer.”
Toscani fan mail:
How dare you glorify the lives of these scum sucking little weasels on death row!!!!!! You are in Italy, therefore should stick to spreading your liberal, slanted and one-sided views to your own population. We in the United States of America do not need you or your kind telling us how to run our Country. You people make me sick!
Toscani’s version of damage limitation is of course to publish the hate mail in a book (to add to his autobiography Ciao Mamma, and a subtle work called “Advertisers are carrion that smile at us”). He receives a phone call from his lieutenant in Italy about another book proposal: “They want to make a book about me? Fine! But let’s get someone who hates me to write it. What about that dickhead at Rai Uno?” It’s hard to tell whether this is monstrous egotism or a refreshing lack of vanity. In Treviso, one of his best friends is a dodgy pest-controller with a toupee. He eats in the Benetton canteen. His pictures hang in museums, but he has no archives. “Naah. What for? These photographers who are bothered about their silver gelatin prints and how their pictures are hanging. Ridiculous!” Yet he reads everything that’s ever written about him.
There are three ways of looking Toscani’s work, and at the last 17 years of Benetton advertising. The first sees him as a pioneer in mass communication, no matter what his motives. The second involves the refusal of Benetton - or Toscani - to admit to any charitable giving on the back of its “social commitment” causes, and paints them as cynical and corporate and cowardly. The final way is that of NGO’s and the stars of the campaigns, like the family of David Kirby, whose death from AIDS was a famous photo and campaign in 1992: That a few thousand people saw the picture in Life magazine, but up to a billion saw the Benetton billboards. That any vehicle that gets the message across is good enough. That in a noisy world, you may as well hitch yourself to a juggernaut.
If only the ride weren’t so rocky. In 1994, the “Known Soldier” campaign featured the bloody clothes of the dead Croat Marko Grago, under a moving phrase from his father. Except, rumour has it, the clothes didn’t belong to Marko at all; his had been burnt in hospital and he’d been shot in the head, not in the chest, like the owner of the Benetton clothes. The best Oliviero could do to defend himself was to say that the hole in the t-shirt - surrounded by blood - wasn’t necessarily a bullet hole. Cock-up or exploitation? Hard to tell, as ever.
“I do seriously question Oliviero’s failure to take his work to a more resolved moral statement.” (Lewis Blackwell)
In 1994, he stood as a Radical Party candidate in the Communist heartland of Bologna, against the incumbent Prime Minister and leader of the Communist Party. “Radicals and Communists hate each other - it was like being the only black to stand for election to the South African Yacht Club in the 1950’s. I just wanted to show you could go up against the monster.” He gained an extra 2% of the vote, and considered he’d made a resolved moral statement.
“Oliviero is a humanist,” says Blackwell. “He’s a free-thinker with some rock-solid concerns such as his questioning of global monoculture - while at the same time helping to propagate it -and a real feeling for family and roots.” In fact, behind the mad bad performer, there are other rock-solid concerns for old-fashioned things like loyalty, respect and turning up on time. They’re best illustrated in the “electronic Bauhaus” (Toscani’s words) of Fabrica.
Dear Ms/Mr 25th January 2000
You are invited to Fabrica in order to attend, from
now on therefore, those who arrive late will be told
to leave.
Respect to other imposes punctuality.
sincerely,
Oliviero Toscani
Often in Treviso, rumblings and distant “cazzo!s” would penetrate the massive wooden doors of the Fabrica auditorium, and you’d know another ego was crashing and burning, probably for being late again. It seemed like a Teutonic obsession with discipline, from his days studying in Switzerland. “It’s respect, not discipline. Otherwise everything is an egotistical mess. I respect students by considering their work. They should respect me.” Even though you are so savage? “It’s the only way to make them grow.”
“After Fabrica you are nothing more than you were before it. Only a little bit more misfit.” (ex-Fabrica student) “If your work fits Oliviero’s style, you’ll get on fine. Otherwise, he can make your life a bit difficult.” (current Fabrica student)
Fabrica was grandly set up to be “a laboratory for the future.” As at COLORS, the largesse and editorial freedom was astonishing in the beginning. As at COLORS, the screws have tightened as the years have gone on, though Fabrica students are still paid to attend and COLORS is still freer than most other magazines. “Behind the rhetoric,” says Jonathan Mantle in a new book on Benetton, “there is a hard-nosed component in Fabrica’s potential to take on from where Toscani and his team would one day have to leave off.” Maybe that explains why the students in this noble laboratory spend so much of their 70 hour working weeks on fairly standard commercial projects. A big Sony internet deal that earned Fabrica - but not the students - thousands of dollars; a Porsche redesign (that reportedly coincided with Toscani’s new yellow Porsche). “Ma no!” he says. “Fabrica isn’t commercial. It’s as far from commercial as you can get. You’re talking rubbish.”
He is a fabulous liar, with utmost sincerity. Talk is selling more than Vanity Fair, he proclaims, which later makes another Talkie splutter over lunch. COLORS is looking tired, I say, and he explodes. “Tired? TIRED??? They’ve been saying that since the beginning! New York Times is tired. Newsweek is tired. Arena is tired! COLORS is the best it’s ever been!” A week later, in a COLORS editorial meeting, he tells staff that there’s no creativity in the magazine, and unless they improve, there’s no point carrying on.
Contradictions, lies and truth - it all comes out in an almighty vivid babble. We start talking about his friend Doug Tompkins, founder of Esprit, who sold the company and set up a nature sanctuary in Chile. I ask Oliviero whether he’s never considered doing something similar, and the man who made his fortune from feelgood goes off a rant. “Nature doesn’t need saving - it could destroy us in five minutes. You’re asking whether I want to fight for humanity, not nature. And I couldn’t care less about humanity. Humans are the biggest mistake in creation.”
And yet:
“Technology is destroying humanity. I really think we lack the courage to explore the human project.”
“What’s that?”
“Exactly!”
“But you don’t seem to know what it is.”
“At least I’m talking about it.”
Tibor Kalman was Oliviero’s first, and most brilliant, editor at COLORS. They were, says a loyal friend, “like Hitler and Goebbels, only I could never tell which was which.” Two big, greedy personalities who parted in acrimony. Before Tibor died last year, someone looking for funding went to him for advice. Tibor gave the man some names, then said, “Well, you could ask Oliviero. He’s the devil, but he’ll help you if you present it properly.”
And this is the way with Oliviero. That even when you have suffered from his tongue, when you have understood his faults, experienced his sexism, and hated his guts, you can’t kick the habit of admiring him. He’s awful, but he makes the world a less dull place. He’s flawed, but a noisy antidote to what Nabokov calls “the masonic bond of triteness.” And he’s probably invincible, anyway. A week before the Estée Lauder gaffe, Sears department store cancelled $41 million dollars of Benetton business. The sound of disapproval from Benetton is deafening, but Toscani isn’t bothered. What if you lose Luciano’s support? I ask. What will happen when he retires? “There’ll be some other company!” He roars with laughter. “There’s always be something else!”
Published in Arena magazine