Nicola Formichetti and Lady Gaga
It’s comments like these that make it hard to get a handle on Formichetti. Is he a fashion outsider or insider? A naive genius or a shrewd operator? Where does he live? Where did he come from? The simple answers: both, both, all over, and all over. He has apartments in New York and London and spends about five days a month in Paris and Tokyo, where he serves as fashion director of both Vogue Hommes Japan and fast-fashion company Uniqlo. This globe-trotting lifestyle is nothing new: The son of an Italian airline pilot and a Japanese flight attendant, Formichetti was born in Tokyo in 1977 (“Gemini,” he said—“I’m a two-faced bitch!”) and grew up shuttling between homes in Rome and Tokyo. At age 12 he was shipped off to boarding school in Rome, which, he said, alienated him from his parents for the rest of his adolescence. “I just felt like they wanted me out,” he recalled. “I was very lonely there, and I was so naughty. I just wanted to escape.”
At 18 he did just that. Telling his parents he wanted to study architecture, he moved to London—and then quickly abandoned his studies: “I walked out after a few days. Really, I was just dying to move to London. I’d been reading The Face and i-D all through high school.” For the next few years, he said, “I don’t remember anything. I was a party boy. I just had jobs in shops.”
In 1998 Formichetti landed what he considers his first real fashion gig. The London-based retailer Yuko Yabiku hired him to help start her now famous boutique, the Pineal Eye. He pitched in with every aspect of the operation, from displays and sales to sweeping up. The instant success of the shop brought the fashion world into contact with Formichetti. “I met so many people,” he recalled. “Designer Hedi Slimane, photographer David Sims…”
One customer in particular—Katy England, a stylist at British youth-culture magazine Dazed & Confused—was particularly impressed with Formichetti’s personality and eye. In 2000 she hired him to contribute a monthly column of Polaroids and scribblings, and later that year he started working as a stylist for Dazed and other magazines. “It was around then that I remember thinking, Oh, there could actually be a career in this.”
In 2005 Formichetti was named fashion director of Dazed & Confused, and he began consulting for Uniqlo and collaborating with childhood idols like photographer, Benetton creative director, and Colors magazine cofounder Oliviero Toscani. But there were problems. “I hated the whole politics thing,” he said. “I would just tell people the truth, and I’d get fired. It was disaster after disaster.”
