By high school she was a full-fledged slave to fashion. Once, she wore a pair of yellow shoes that her cat had used as a litter box the night before. They were instrumental to her preplanned all-yellow outfit, so she just rinsed them out. “But it got hot in the classroom, and there was this terrible stink of cat pee,” she recalls. “I had to confess because I didn’t want anyone thinking I had peed in my pants. They all screamed, ‘Couldn’t you have changed your shoes?’”
Such fierce dedication to fashion has only intensified with age. Dello Russo—who keeps her figure like a licorice whip with 6 a.m. swims at the Hotel Principe di Savoia—professes that it takes her “six months” to get dressed. For Fashion Week she will consider only pieces that are strong on shock value and that have never been worn. “The preparation,” she says, sighing, “is truly scientific.”
Just as rigorously mathematical is the layout of apartment number one, which has also been carefully mapped out to accommodate her rotating ensembles. New purchases get front-row treatment in the main walk-in closet, next to her leopard-print bedroom. A zoolike collection of exotic fur coats (“It’s been a bloodbath—furs are my weakness,” she admits) is maintained in labeled cloth bags, while a season’s lesser models get relegated to nonslip hangers in the nosebleed back row. Once the season ends, everything is cleared out (except for the furs, which are exempt from expiration dates) to make way for new loot. Depending on the evicted item’s star wattage, it may go next door, to apartment number two, from which it may or may not emerge. Or it may be exiled to a giant closeted basement: the fashion graveyard. For Dello Russo, if you’re not new, you’re about as good as dead. “I hate vintage clothes,” she says, referring even to last year’s Prada. “I love the smell of a new store, not an old dress.”
Dello Russo prefers the aroma of retail to the smell of food, too. She installed her polished steel kitchen, roughly the size of a drinks cabinet, in a dim corner off the apartment’s main hallway: “I had to choose between a kitchen and more closets, so I took the closets.” (A quick survey of the fingerprint-less cupboards reveals a stock of sunflower seeds and San Pellegrino.) She also had to choose between a husband—whom she wed in 1996 in a dress with a 60-foot train designed by his best man, Stefano Gabbana—and more closets. “It barely lasted,” she says of her marriage. “He said, ‘Isn’t there some closet space for me?’ And I said, ‘No.’”
