If you're reading this, you should be extremely happy: you're alive even though you've gone/you're going through a major global financial crisis; you have survived the announced 12-12-12 and 21-12-12 apocalypses and went unscathed through another Christmas dinner with obnoxious relatives and friends. On top of all this, it's the end of the year and there may not be enough time for the fashion industry to churn out decadent and useless news.
Or maybe there is still time to produce bland and vapid features, in fact Vogue Italia managed to do so right before Christmas to announce a vitally important release, Lapo Elkann's first book.
Scion of the Fiat family and grandson of the late Gianni Agnelli, Elkann, unanimously considered by many magazines all over the world as the most elegant/best dressed man on the planet (well, these are terribly bad times financially speaking and you can't really refuse advertising money, can you?), is the physical embodiment of the stereotypical empty-headed and superficial wealthy and rich immature playboy who manages to make you feel happy about being intelligent and clever though poor, in debt and jobless.
Vogue Italia always had a soft spot for Lapo (and his money), even though you wish they curbed their enthusiasm in a more balanced and credible way: in a feature published on the April 2012 issue of L'Uomo Vogue Lapo is described as a “one man hub of creativity”, the sort of definition a subeditor would remove even from an article about Salvador Dali (who was actually a genuine hub of creativity...).
Previous manager of brand promotion at Fiat Automobiles, Elkann reinvented himself in recent years leaving the family group and launching his own companies - lifestyle and clothing brand Italia Independent and communication and advertising agency Independent Ideas. The former produces the sort of clothes - jackets, sweaters and shirts - that you could buy anywhere else from High Street stores to luxury retailers, including overpriced denim trousers in which cotton is casually mixed with carbonium fibre to justify their price (and not to prove where technology can take you...) and assorted garments more or less copied from other brands and fashion houses Elkann himself wears.
Now Lapo has finally published his first book. Researchers, writers, museum curators and other people struggling to find a publisher for your groundbreaking books because you do not look trendy enough (because that's the main reason pulishers give you nowadays...) stop reading this post now as what follows may hurt you too much your sensibility.
Entitled “Le regole del mio stile” (“The rules of my style”) and released by publishing house ADD, co-owned by Lapo's cousin Andrea Agnelli, this vital 192-page tome (featuring more photographs than text as you may have guessed...) arrived on the shelves of Italian bookshops last Sunday, in time to be used to light up your fireplaces – pardon – to be given away as a Christmas present.
The book is not a manual, Lapo warns, but it's a platform for him to share his, erm, knowledge about style and give us pariahs his precious advice not about where and how to find drugs and prostitutes or how to survive an overdose, activities he seemed to be well versed in at least until he managed to make us all believe he cleaned up his act, but about how to dress (or how to pile up in your house hundreds of denim trousers in different shades of blue and an assortment of animal print loafers and sneakers).
Lapo surprises his readers in the book by saying things such as “Style means knowledge”, and throwing them into a profound crisis: does he mean that if you're a cultured and educated person you have style or does he identify “knowledge” with notions about which colours go/do not go well together? Because if he thinks knowledge means having read a book, well, he doesn't have any because he probably hasn't read a single book in his life (mind you, he was too busy “writing” a book).
Lapo's book also allows its readers to download extra features and interactive content fom his own site, lapoelkann.com. The latter is worth visiting for a good laugh: the main screen features a sort of compass device to identify where Lapo is at the moment (the only need for this device for me is to identify where he is, find him and try to put some sense into his empty head by beating him violently, but maybe you, my gentle readers, can find a different purpose for this feature...); the people page only include 25 people (three of them members of his own family such as his father who has been helping him a lot during his conversion to Judaism - don't ask me to comment upon this; plus Franca Sozzani and her photographer son). The real gem on the site is a pie diagram that appears if you click on the word “Life” - “passions” gets the biggest slice, followed by “places” and “creativity”, revealing how this man is more about the quantity of clothes in his wardrobe than about actually creating anything.
Former Fiat chairman and style icon Gianni Agnelli is often remembered on fashion magazines as an example of sprezzatura, the art of natural elegance; Lapo grew up thinking he inherited it all - elegance, style, marketing skills and creativity - or maybe thinking that what he didn't inherit he could still buy. Yet while the majority of people gravitating around the fake fashion industry idolises this clown, the majority of ordinary people out there would probably pay to shout at him what French paper Libération told LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault when the latter requested Belgian citizenship to escape President Hollande’s new tax increases on France’s high-income sector - “Get lost you rich idiot!”
Unfortunately for us, this unsufferable character is currently looking for a publisher outside Italy: Wwd.com recently announced “Elkann is negotiating an English version of the book” almost to warn us that, just like the fashion industry, the publishing industry can go lower and lower and almost to remind us that 2013 will see a barrage of books by other obnoxious characters, from high profile bloggers to celebrities such as Alexa Chung. Damn it, right when we thought that having survived armageddon in 2012 was enough...
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