Pierluigi Tricò, rise and fall of the designer of the queens

“An unreal world opens up for a sophisticated woman like Jackie, among frescoes and wooden floors that creak underfoot” continues Andrea Scazzola. She will choose three dresses that he has to send to the American embassy in via Veneto. What do seamstresses say when the purchase of such an important client is concluded? “They are most affected when Kirk Douglas accompanies his wife.”

The meeting with the Roman princesses

Tricò’s almost forty-year adventure (but his real name is Pierluigi Scazzola) in fashion begins when the counts Rudy and Consuelo Crespi visit him, who at the beginning of the 1960s dictated the elegance and worldliness of Rome. The atelier has yet to be born, Tricò receives them in the beautiful house in the Flaminio district, where he lives and where he holds his first fashion shows. Rudy writes an article in a magazine: «In Rome there is a young man who knows how to dress ladies“. «My uncle never touched a needle and thread in his life, but he made drawings in the books of the faculty of law. He was 27 years old ». These are mainly hand-painted scarves. He soon he resigns from the public employment he had to start making suits. Within three years, he opens the atelier where twenty-five seamstresses and as many workers are employed.

The debut in Paris

Irene Brin, influential journalist, leads Tricò in Paris by Pierre Cardin. The first applause of a fashion show in France came in 1962. Contrasts of colors dominated by white, black and red, stylized dresses. Always, strictly, knitwear. It is not a noble material… «It’s true – continues his nephew Andrea Scazzola – but he used knitwear with a different creativity, no longer tied to skirts and sweaters; it becomes a fabric that releases a geometric pattern that appears to be printed, combining the softness of the sweater with the fantasy of the fabric ».
Dresses explode with optical effects, geometric order and a mix of harmonious shapes and colors. One of the most popular novelties is the shield, a cover-up that can be a dress for an evening at the beach and that leaves the legs uncovered to the side. These are the creations that frame the shop windows of Fifth Avenue in New York, which represents “modernity, the true wealth incomparable to that of Rome, embodied in the nobles who are not so rich, have real estate properties, lands, residences, castles … It was Italy that brought you to America from nowhere ».

Those bare feet in Los Angeles

In 1967 a fashion show was held in Los Angeles in which for the first time a model on the catwalk walked barefoot (preceding Sandie Show at the Sanremo Festival). At the beginning, in ’62, there was Italian fashion in Moscow with Tricò who shows a model in a red dress on the Kremlin square. Milan at the time still did not exist in fashion. The capitals are Paris, Florence at Palazzo Pitti. And then Rome, where Valentino, Rocco Barocco, Lancetti begin to move. Giorgio Armani, although of the same age, would have exploded shortly after, the same happens for Gianni Versace. Tricò was immediately “adopted” by the Roman nobility, and by the queens: Greece, Belgium, Denmark. The years of lead, those of the Br, are also characterized by liveliness of the Roman Summer created from scratch by the Councilor for Culture Renato Nicolini. The screening of Abel Gance’s blockbuster Napoléon in the Basilica of Maxentius, in 1981, coincides with the parade in Trinità dei Monti which sees Valentino and Tricò as protagonists. Her flagship model is Veruschka, “who is accompanied to the atelier by her companion of the time who is the famous photographer Franco Rubartelli”.

Hollywood stars in her dressing rooms

His clients? Vittoria Leone, wife of the President of the Republic Giovanni Leone, or Allegra Caracciolo, wife of Umberto Agnelli, to which, once in the dressing room, Tricò with her grace continues to tell her: “This dress doesn’t suit you, this one doesn’t suit you.” At that point, her husband Umberto intervenes and with a pragmatic spirit apostrophes the designer as follows: “But do you think you are selling clothes in this way?”. Tricò replies: “But if you see that a Fiat is not performing well, won’t you take it off the market?”.

Another round of customers, Lauren Bacall comes from the world of cinema who had read an article about that innovative knitwear in Women’s Daily; Raquel Welch creates a bombastic impact although not so tall in stature (1 meter and 68 centimeters), will choose the dress for the film by Mauro Bolognini, The fairies. And then Audrey Hepburn, with a slender and suave figure: «You let my uncle choose the items to buy for you. Tricò wants a French-inspired midi dress with large black and white stripes for her, some pastel-colored cocktail dresses and an enveloping three-quarter coat of incredible femininity. My uncle remembers her kind, lovable, he did not make it hard for her to be such a famous actress. In those years she lived in Rome, in via Gramsci, in 1969 she married the psychiatrist Andrea Dotti ». Heiress Barbara Hutton, seven active husbands (Cary Grant, three princes, a count, a baron and the well-known playboy Porfirio Rubirosa), chooses an evening knitwear in black and lurex, “as sumptuous and risky as his life”. The Italians who enter and leave the fitting rooms are Claudia Cardinale, Rossella Falk, Elsa Martinelli, Rosanna Schiaffino, Ira Fürstenberg.

There is no Tricò without Luciano Scazzola, his brother and Andrea’s father who died too early, at 55, in 1983. Luciano is halfway between a creative and a manager. He invents the Miao comic but family circumstances bring him to Livorno alongside his uncle Mario who runs a fuel oil company. It is he who manages the Tricò companywhich is actually the nickname they had given to Luciano as a child. They called him Captain Tricò: it became the trademark. Luciano’s idea to buy spinning machines in East Germany with a modern mechanical loom capable of creating geometric figures with wool.

The decline in the 1990s

Luciano’s wife, Fiorenza (who also died prematurely in 1994), spoke English, she knew how to be in the world; his grandfather had created Zingone, synonymous with children’s fashion in Rome. «My mother – says Andrea – she seemed haughty, she was casual, witty, pungent, she had no awe when she talked with aristocratic women. She collaborated in the organization and managed relations with customers ». The crisis flared up immediately after 1968, with the hot autumn of ’69. Tricò shows the limits of an artisan company. “It is not able to hold up economically and culturally, but from that first difficult moment it recovered”. It is the period of protests, of demands, of strikes.

«My father was on the left, he didn’t know how to clash with the workers. He went among them and asked, oh well, but what exactly do you want? ». And they replied grimly, with the spirit of the time, “you are the master, out of here.” Milan is managed in another way, think about how to make a business out of fashion; instead fashion in Rome (Valentino pays attention to himself) fails to make the leap, it falls into the cauldron of worldliness that mixes up and down, and the vanity of the world of cinema. “When Givenchy, always present in Tricò’s life, brings a lady from the Rothschild branch into the atelier, the company is in full demobilization.” The latest stronghold of customers is Japan. The company closed in 1997.

Today Pierluigi Scazzola is 91 years old, he has shared his life with Pietro for 55. Nostalgia? «She has no regrets. The last dress, short, apricot-colored, was created for the wedding with my wife Francesca ». Once, continues Andrea Scazzola, his uncle dived into the water in Capri from the ship of an owner, like Totò: thus he launched the fashion of the dressed bathroom, a world out of the world, a piece of Italy detached from the normality of the country , where conformism reigned.

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