Life of the party - London Fashion Week Daily

www.lfwdaily.com Designer Profile 7
The A team
Life’s a dog sometimes for Antonio Berardi – constantly dashing between London and Milan, where he runs his label
with the aid of a crack team. But, however busy he is, Berardi will always find time to make a girl feel special
Words by Tamsin Blanchard
Photography by Jonathan Frantini
temperley
london is
years old and
looking prettier
than ever
y 1pm this afternoon, Antonio
Berardi and his team will be at
the end of the twice-yearly
marathon of fittings that pre-empt
his catwalk shows. For the past
five days, the designer (pictured
immediate right with his team)
has worked from a temporary
makeshift studio in Shoreditch, installing not only
his close-knit team of designers and pattern cutters,
but also the two skilled seamstresses from the atelier
he uses for his thriving business of special orders,
celebrity one-offs and wedding dresses.
Based in Milan, Berardi brings his entire studio to
London to literally unpick jackets and dresses at the
seams and then remake them – he likes every outfit to
look as though it were tailor-made for each model.
“Even a girl who is doing many shows a day, when they
come in and you fit something to them, they feel it’s
for them and it makes them feel special. She gives
100 per cent, simply because you’ve taken the time.
It’s not just, ‘You wear this and you wear that.’”
This is typical of Berardi. It’s late January and
the designer is talking to me by phone from the Milan
studio, where he is working on the embroidery for his
Autumn/Winter 2011 collection. Berardi is brimming
with charm and respect for the people he works with,
and it’s no surprise that people push the gondola out
for him– they get things done, even if those things
appear impossible, which they often do. “Every tailor
or pattern cutter has his methods, but you have to
challenge those methods or you end up never going
forward,” says Berardi. “Sometimes you need a touch
of madness and to try something they say will never
work, but you end up with something more fabulous
than you had imagined in the first place. If you don’t
try, you’re never going to know if it works or not. I do
push people. Everyone’s learning the process – I don’t
know everything. I think people need to be stimulated.”
The son of Sicilian immigrants, Antonio Berardi
was born in Grantham on 21 December 1968,
a birthday he shares with his long-term creative
conspirator, Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou. They
began working together in 1995. Back then, he was
riding high on the cool crest of a London wave, after
his first collection, shown fresh from Central Saint
Martins, saw Kylie Minogue and his bad-girl muse
Michele Hicks modelling for him. Shoes by Manolo
Blahnik (who is working with Berardi again for
A/W 11) added that final flourish.
The day before our conversation, Neophitou-
Apostolou had been “working her magic”, as Berardi
puts it, on the lookbook for the Pre-Fall collection.
Berardi confesses he tends to get blinded by a
collection after working on it for so long, and Sophia
“Sometimes you need
a touch of madness and
to try something they
say will never work”
edits it and picks out pieces that give it a new
direction. “It’s never what I would expect and that’s
what I love about the relationship – I can stop midsentence
and she can carry on. We have this synergy.
At the same time, it’s nice when we can surprise each
other. It’s never staid; it always feels like the first time.
Working with Sophia can only be described as the
story of a marriage. The weird thing is, we are both
Sagittarians, both born on the same day. There’s a
weird yin-and-yang thing about it.”
In 1999, Berardi designed Victoria Beckham’s
wedding-party dress and a matching suit – all in
purple – for David (and another for Brooklyn).
Victoria has been a long-term and loyal client ever
since. When I suggest that Ms Beckham must have
learned a few things from her fittings with him over
the years, he simply says, “She knows what works for
her and she knows what she likes. I don’t think she’s
ever been told what to wear. It shows in what she does,
which is extremely successful, and women relate to
it because she knows what she is talking about.”
Special orders and red-carpet dresses have
become an important part of Berardi’s business over
the years, to the extent that he now produces a
separate – and often totally different – lookbook for
celebrity stylists. “Celebrities can choose anything
they like and if they choose you, it gives you that
wow factor – it means you are on somebody’s radar
somewhere.” And because his is still a relatively small
outfit, Berardi is able to make things on request at
short notice. “They might say, ‘Can you make it for
this event in this colour’”
The A-list laps up his designs – his dresses have
been worn by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate
Beckinsale, Jessica Alba, Ashley Greene, Julianne
Moore and Beyoncé. “When you work with a client,
you want them to go away and say, ‘Oh my God, it’s an
evening dress made for me!’ If you have the possibility
to make it the best it can possibly be, then why not
Hopefully, everything fits perfectly; I scrutinise that
a lot.” So when Dannii Minogue, not long after giving
birth to her son, Ethan, wore a black velvet zip-front
dress on The X Factor in October, she felt totally
pulled in and confident. And recently, at the LA
premiere of Love and Other Drugs, Anne Hathaway’s
white lace-panel dress from Berardi’s Resort
collection looked as if it had been made just for her.
With his celebrity clients, special orders and two
pre-collections a year, Berardi rarely stops. “Because
the delivery is so early, the pre-collection is the thing
right now, as people have constant stuff to change over
in the stores,” he says. In fact, the Pre-Fall and Resort
collections now provide between 50 and 70 per cent of
the company’s overall revenue. Holli Rogers, Buying
Director at net-a-porter.com, started buying Berardi
for Pre-Fall 10. “His collection quickly gained a loyal
“A jacket is the REAL test
of a designer. If it looks
amazing on-hanger, it
can only look better on”
following,” she says. “There is a particular glamour,
polish and sophistication to his clothes. The woman
who buys Berardi looks to him for beautifully finished,
elegant pieces, which create the most stunning and
flattering lines when worn. Once on, they become a
shortcut to sleek, modern style.” For Rogers, Berardi’s
stand-out S/S 11 piece is “a fabulous maxi-dress – a
confection of ballet-slipper-pink chiffon covered in
fabric flowers. I can’t wait for it to arrive.”
Berardi is a rare beast in the fashion world, in that
his company is self-financed. This is liberating in
terms of not having anyone to answer to, but it also
means the designer can never switch off. “It is kind
of amazing,” he says of his situation. “There is a pride
in that and a love for it because it’s yours, but it would
also be nice for someone else one day to have that
headache and not just me!”
Owning his company has allowed Berardi to keep
a careful eye on his production needs – the collection
is rigorously considered in terms of what is needed for
the catwalk, what is needed for the buyers, what the
customer herself needs and wants, and also how the
fabrics are used. “I’ve worked for companies where
they’ve bought 150 fabrics in endless colours and not
used three-quarters of it,” he says. “There is no need.
We are frugal but in a good way. If you have to make
do, you can still do amazing things with nothing. If
someone else is throwing money at you, it’s very easy
to waste their money. When you account for every
penny, it’s a more interesting way of working it out.
There is no need to be wasteful. It’s about how you can
achieve the best without spending money willy-nilly.”
For A/W 11, the collection is an evolution of
a honed-down aesthetic that Berardi started in
the pre-collection – and the focus is on the jacket.
“A jacket is the real test of a designer,” he says.
“If it looks amazing on-hanger, if it looks like it has
a body in it, it can only look better once it’s on.
A jacket is a staple.” The jacket in question is
“extremely” body-con and tailored – qualities
Berardi excels at, using traditional horsehair tailoring
techniques that are also applied to dresses and coats.
“Some jackets caress the body but they don’t close,”
he says of this season’s collection. Colours are in
every shade of grey, milk and navy, with sharp accents
of orange and lime. And there are some interesting
embellishments of masculine suiting and Shetland
knits, which have been given a feminine Berardi
twist using punching, embroidery and studding.
“It’s not necessarily anything you’ve ever seen
before,” he says. “I don’t use embroidery just for
the sake of it – it has to be new.”
Chances are, as you read this, the catwalk will be
empty, all the hard work over: the pulling apart at the
seams, the re-sewing, the finishing and steaming, the
model dramas, the immaculate shoes. The clothes will
be bagged up and on their way back to Milan. But there
won’t be much time for Berardi to catch his breath.
“It’s a full-time job now,” he says. “It didn’t used to be.”
In the future, he hopes to move to London, but right
now work pulls him to Milan. “Living in London is a
dream. I was spending five days a week in Italy – that’s
why I moved here. But as things get into place, I hope
to move back. It’s where I started. It’s home.”
Antonio Berardi is showing his A/W 11 collection
today at 1pm in EC2. Stockists: Harrods,
Harvey Nichols, Selfridges, brownsfashion.com,
matchesfashion.com, net-a-porter.com
Tamsin Blanchard is Style Director of the
Telegraph Magazine
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