Introducing Giovanni

“I have nothing to do with this house, this is an AirBnB. The only thing that is mine is a lovely painting by a very good friend of mine and my rack of clothes”, Giovanni tells us as he sits us down in his temporary Milanese home, ten thousand miles away from where he lives and works in Los Angeles. Eighteen years ago, he took his personal eclectic style of mix-and-match and hoping-it-didn’t-come-out-looking-too-schizophrenic and built it up into a couple of small fashion businesses in Los Angeles, selling upcycled jackets in Milan and Paris. When the COVID pandemic kicked in last year he was stranded in Italy, unable to cross the border into France, so he did what any other 63-year-old in his situation would do: he picked up a camera and started filming, then posting it to TikTok. Now he gets paid to post his never ending shenanigans.

Outgoing, extroverted, and animated, Giovanni tells us there are two parts to his story: “before I got sober and after I got sober”. He knows what his next move is going to be, he just doesn’t know when or how he is going to be able to execute it, but he’s traveling with a copy of On The Road - which he always comes back to - and for the moment he’s sitting tight. “I like to be in solitude, and I’m also an observer. I like to sit in the corner and people watch once in a while”, he tells us. So, for the moment, that’s just what he’s doing.

Let’s start with having you explain your style to us, Giovanni...

I absolutely have fun with my clothing, if it’s not fun it’s not worth a f**k. I’m also a (hate the word) tweaker, I love taking the basic and banal, an empty pallet, and making a little modification to it, making that one piece, my piece. I don’t know how to sew, I can’t make a pattern, I just know what I like, I learnt how to use a sewing machine, I’ll see something on someone, think I like that, and then make it my own. You always steal from the great, you can appropriate in a nice way. 

If you could ‘steal’ one person [in the public eye’s] closet, whose closet would you steal and why?

I was at a Brian Ferry concert, I got dressed up very nicely for the show. My friend asked if I wanted to go and wait where they come out. We get to the end of the line, see him come out in his SUV, he stops where we are, and Brian Ferry says, “I like your tie” and I said that’s because I base all my haberdashery decisions on one simple rule: what would Brian Ferry wear?

Jeremy Irons, my biggest fashion influences were people like Ronnie Wood, Rod Stewart when they were young, I listened to a s**t ton of Brit pop like Slade, Martha thingy. For me in the '70s, the pants were so tight you could tell what religion they were.

David Bowie, I realized the world wasn’t black and white, there’s a lot of grey area. Male? Female? Why do I find this person attractive? Don’t get comfortable doing the same thing. When I'm swimming in water I know my feet aren’t touching the ground. Lean into the unknown. You might learn something from it. I put myself in uncomfortable situations where I don’t want to be suspected of contempt before prior investigation.