Massimo Piombo

DOES LUXURY BELONG TO HISTORY? Massimo Piombo is the Creative Director of the Italian clothing company OVS. Born in Liguria, where he still lives, as a boy he preferred the sea, architecture and romantic literature. His first important trip as an adult was to Scotland, and was a revelation: on his return he rented a hangar inside which, with some girls and boys, he started the Piombo “vision”. He frequented intellectuals, journalists, and artists from one end of Europe to the other. Barneys called him to New York to shape the legendary windows of the world’s most famous department store. In 2017 his partnership with OVS finally allows him to dress those who really matter: everyone.

Massimo Piombo, what is OVS?

OVS is the leading Italian clothing group by volume and, in my opinion, a new vision of fashion in the world. I joined OVS almost seven years ago and we put the PIOMBO brand within it. The PIOMBO brand had always been in the most important stores in the world at very high prices: a PIOMBO jacket could cost 1,500 to 5,000 euros, a pair of pants about 700 euros, a shirt 400 euros, and so on. The PIOMBO brand was valuable not so much in terms of turnover, because it did not turnover much, but it was a very selective brand for about 30 years.

In what sense selective?

It had been in the coolest stores in the world, such as Dover Street Market, which were present globally – in London, New York, Paris. It was in a store which no longer exists called Colette, on Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, which was the most important concept store in Europe. As well as the most famous stores in Europe, it has been in the most important Japanese groups and the coolest department stores in New York, like Barneys.

PIOMBO in OVS

Massimo Piombo, PIOMBO then was a luxury brand?

Yes, not only because of the price, but especially because of the attention to the really very special fabrics that we were taking around the world. It was a brand for an elite group of people with sensitivity towards the products. PIOMBO has always been a very cultured brand.

And its characteristics?

A way of interpreting dressing with a lot of charisma and personality. When I started the brand, before I joined OVS, I was very inspired by Anderson & Sheppard, an English tailor in London, from whom I used to buy for myself. With PIOMBO I tried to create a very particular design for the fabrics, for the colours, for the details. I even was inspired by Anderson & Sheppard buttonholes, which were very distinctive and slightly oblique with flat buttons. I tried to give the PIOMBO customer an extremely well-tailored product with an international touch.

Why was elite and expensive PIOMBO sought out by OVS, the largest clothing retailer in Italy?

I always wanted to make the PIOMBO brand project affordable to everyone, but of course it was not possible because it was too elitist. At one point Franca Sozzani, who is no longer with us today and who was head of Vogue and had always been one of the most authoritative people in the fashion world, asked me why I was not doing the PIOMBO brand as I had always wanted, that is, for everyone and not just for an elite group. She recommended a Japanese company. Although I love Japan I said no, and instead I called Stefano Beraldo, the CEO of OVS. I introduced myself and told him I would like to do 1,000 stores with him. Beraldo, who has become a friend and a special person to me,  knew the PIOMBO brand because he bought its jackets for himself. We made a company in which OVS holds 70 percent and I hold 30 percent, creating very identified PIOMBO corners and storefronts with a strong visual impact within OVS stores, for men, women and children. I don’t want to say this presumptuously but this project is the only one in the world where a brand is accessible to everyone by price. The wonderful thing is that OVS with the PIOMBO brand has become a case study in the fashion world. As someone said, it’s “pop-a-porter”, which is about giving the opportunity to dress with particular fabrics, patterns and colours, with charm and glamour at a very affordable price.  Today a PIOMBO jacket no longer costs 2 or 3,000 euros. It costs 80 or 90 euros.

Uniqlo has Ines de la Fressange or Jil Sander collections. Is that the same idea?

No. They take designers with whom they do a collaboration which may last a season or two or more, but it is not a proprietary brand. PIOMBO is a brand owned by the OVS company.

Are you Creative Director of all OVS?

Yes, for about three years I have been the Creative Director of the OVS brand. This means I’m in charge of redoing all the stores from the architectural point of view, from the communication point of view, from the image point of view, from the photo shoots of the whole OVS product range always in close cooperation with Stefano Beraldo, the CEO of OVS, and the internal teams.  So not only PIOMBO, but including all the names that OVS hosts within its stores and e-shop.

How is it possible that something of more or less equal quality can cost so much less?

It is true that when a PIOMBO jacket cost was 2,000 euros, the fabrics used were very expensive cashmere fabrics that I bought in Scotland, not what they are today. Thanks to the extraordinary strength of its supply chain OVS is capable of producing quality items at  surprising prices. It’s just a problem of quantity. If you buy 1,000 pieces the suppliers give you one price. If you buy 500,000 of them the suppliers give you another price. The combination of a distinctive style, a certain flavour and affordable prices forms an identity and allows you to create a brand passport. On a human being’s passport there is a photograph and the person’s biographical data, but you recognize the owner from the photograph. In the case of PIOMBO with OVS you recognize the style, the colours, the glamour that belongs to the brand, but today it is at incredible prices. It seems that everyone is wondering why spend so much money when you can spend a lot less money on product that has the same charm and the same weight. From what I’m hearing and from what, internationally, seems to me now to be a certain fact, the luxury market is in great crisis  because people’s mentality and culture is changing.

People like to have luxury brands to flaunt a certain importance, so is it necessary for PIOMBO to become a status symbol?

We have opened PIOMBO standing alone stores in Italy and abroad, always in partnership with the OVS group: in New York, in Paris, in Madrid, in Cortina d’Ampezzo. Always giving a strong distinctiveness and always at accessible prices for people who want to build their own style  according to their personalities buying something with a brand identity, not something copied from others.

Massimo Piombo, why did you choose fashion, and many years ago, when it was very different from today?

I started doing this work by accident, I could have done anything else. When I finished college, I was lucky enough to have my mom tell me to run away from Varazze, which is a small town. At 25 years old I started doing business with some friends at Ritz Saddler, who were then distributors of Louis Vuitton, Clarks and Timberland for Italy. The owner of this company asked me if I could travel the world looking for more products to import. With no experience I agreed and started traveling to the United States, New Zealand and Australia, and apart from a few brands I wasn’t finding anything particularly interesting. But on a trip to London I found at Jeremy Hackett‘s – a person I respect very much and a friend from work – some particular Scottish fabrics. I came back to Italy telling the gentlemen at Ritz Saddler that I had found very special fabrics, different from everybody else’s. In those years, the late 80s and early 90s, everybody was making very light fabrics with a fairly loose fit on the shoulders, but I proposed to make a brand with stiff and extremely refined fabrics, jackets with tailored shoulders and tailored details. They believed in me and proposed to do it under the Ritz brand. I was 27 or 28 years old and I told them I wanted to do it with my last name, Piombo. After a few days they called me back and proposed to do a 50-50 company, with them financing the project. And so we took off. But it was all in a completely random way. If I had found special oranges, I probably would have jumped on those.

Fashion was not something intrinsic to you?

No. Or rather, it was in the sense that I was fascinated by the logo, by the idea of buying special products, but I didn’t have the background to go into fashion.

You dress only in blue and very simply. Has this always been the case?

Not forever, but almost. I decided to create a blue uniform for myself. I dress exclusively in blue: blue pants, blue jackets, blue shirts, blue socks, black or blue shoes. Blue shoes when they are sporty and black shoes when they are Clarks or Clarks type that we make with PIOMBO. I decided to do this for myself, while the whole PIOMBO world is extremely colourful and has a unique charisma. You may or may not like it, but the PIOMBO product and brand is unique in the world.

Why so?

Because no one I know can match colour, shapes and patterns like PIOMBO. It takes a certain amount of courage. This courage is also declined in aesthetics, because anyone can make a thousand colours, but they can match them badly. We, on the other hand, are lucky enough to make them with a certain charm, and the people who buy PIOMBO are all people who have great character, great personality, and a great sense of aesthetics.

In your line of work are aesthetics the priority?

Yes, but not only aesthetics. When Elisabetta Sgarbi, owner of La Nave di Teseo publishing group, asked me to do a book for them, VVV Vestire, Viaggiare, Vivere (Dress, Travel, Living) I did it because I love to travel. I will tell you some very personal things: since my mom told me to get away from Varazze and working with Ritz they told me to travel, I have traveled the world alone or in company. And in everyone and in everything – in a church, in a waiter, in a building or in a cab driver – I looked for something that could influence me. I always try to pick up distinctive things in every moment of my life. All these things create a cocktail, and this cocktail has created a brand and a project that is PIOMBO, and that has created a strong identity, for better or worse, that is unique in the world, because it really manages to decline all the style of people in the world.

Are you a director and architect of OVS not only of clothes, but also of furniture, of storefronts, of how to propose these things?

Ovs has a great store design team. All together, and with a strong involvement of Stefano Beraldo, we created a new atmosphere inside the stores in terms of interior design. Also fundamental are the storefronts, to which we give great value and for which we work creatively. The storefront is one of the potential ways to communicate, and we do it as if we were haute couture. That’s why they say PIOMBO has become “pop-a-porter”, because it has the same appeal that was created in haute couture stores, where attention to every little detail was fundamental. OVS has done the same in a very authoritative way in terms of aesthetics, whether it’s the OVS brand, the PIOMBO brand or other brands within OVS.

The crisis in the luxury market is also partly due to the fact that the huge market of China, that everyone invested a lot in, is now shrinking. Today people in fashion and big brands often say that it is no longer the product itself that is important, but you have to create a story, an event for people to care about it, to make a spectacle. We saw the investment of Vuitton in the Olympic Games, but is your world, where products cost less and are accessible to everyone while being stylish, another world outside of theirs?    

Yes. We are trying to create an alternative. The term “luxury” is a word that I dislike because to me it is vulgar. It means that people who have a lot of money – or have little money but want to make out that they have a lot of money – must necessarily put it into cars or clothing or other things in order to belong to a category of people who have financial means and are called “living in luxury”. For me, the word “luxury” is a word that belongs to history, if not to prehistory. I believe that the “luxury” market, especially the clothing market, will become more and more an event of history. It will no longer be there. Those who have financial means will always be able to live an extremely expensive life, but even they, in terms of clothing, will increasingly define themselves as people who have a simplicity of dress. They will be able to identify themselves in certain details in dressing, but no longer by being a sandwich man with printed T-shirts or extremely expensive things to show that they, too, belong to the world of “luxury”.

PIOMBO IN OVS

OVS MILANO VIA DANTE – PIOMBO WOMAN

OVS VENEZIA RIALTO – PIOMBO KIDS

Massimo Piombo, in the old days there was an attitude of saving and conserving clothing, whereas in today’s world there is disposability. Is there not a contradiction between this simpler world and the large-scale retail of which you are a part?

I think it’s a very individual and intimate concept based on a person’s culture. I don’t think it’s related to price or luxury or the pop market, it’s more related to education, to valuing things and money. My grandfather taught me that if money is spent, it is thrown away. The concept of valuing things is related to the education one has: if one makes a shirt, it has to be a shirt that can last. And as a matter of values, people keep it with them; it is the clothing that has accompanied them in their life experience: i.e. with that thing I have traveled, met people, gone to more or less interesting places… Resoling a shoe today is difficult because in those days master shoe makers could make shoes to measure. Maybe for some people that world is still there, but I would say it has disappeared.

After the student revolutions of ’68 the way of being changed a lot and there was really a revolution in taste?

Yes, an aesthetic revolution. Today there is also a content revolution. Today young people, but also adults, no longer have any desire to put on a shirt. They have to in some areas like banking and finance, almost as a professional, aesthetic duty. And a part of those who used to pay attention to these things, sorry to say, still today go and buy the PIOMBO world because it always maintains values. A shirt, T-shirt or pants always have features, small details that belonged to tailoring: the cut of a pocket on the inside, the button, the buttonholes, give a culture that belonged to a certain aesthetic world and has been translated into the current PIOMBO.

You have been inspired by English tailoring, but is the era of tailoring over?

I don’t think it’s finished. Tailoring is expensive, but not expensive. I hope that culture will never collapse. There are fewer tailors, but they exist with authority. I have always thought that it is much better to buy a jacket that costs 3, 4 or 5,000 euros from a tailor than to buy it from a fashion brand. The jacket made by a tailor is made with you and for you, and therefore it belongs to you. There is the shared culture with the tailor who made it for you, the label on the inside with your name and the date he made it for you. It’s part of your life. To me that is money invested in an investment that can last a lifetime.

Do you like mixing a PIOMBO shirt with a jacket made by a tailor?

Personally, I spend very little on clothing. I used to spend more, but only in tailoring. I never, but really never, not even as a boy, bought products from that world defined as “luxury”. Now that we have made the PIOMBO brand with OVS, I sometimes match a 30 euro OVS Piombo shirt with a 4,000 euro Anderson & Sheppard jacket.

Is there a global good taste?

I don’t think it exists yet. I think we are in a phase of transformation at the cultural level, but this is a transversal concept that applies to everything,  to cuisine, to hotels, to travel… But going back to clothing, this new formula was born in Italy, which has a heritage of aesthetics, in this case with PIOMBO in OVS.  It is a formula that will slowly take more and more space internationally. We can get closer and closer by giving value to things, value to money, value to oneself and not being succubi.

Do you produce new things every month, always coming up with different items?

Some products are always present, others we change every three months to give the end consumer an opportunity to find novelty, but always with a common denominator. The sense of colour, the sense of matching, the sense of aesthetics is the common denominator that has always accompanied the PIOMBO brand.

Can a person now be elegant in every circumstance of life while spending much less than they used to?

In my opinion, yes. The same applies to restaurants. A lot of times, if you go into trattorias you eat much better. Just as there can be excellence in a tailor’s shop, there can be excellence in a 3-star restaurant.

Millions of tourists come to Italy for its culture, beauty, art, landscape and elegance, not to mention cuisine?

Italy is one of the few places in the world where you can encounter different kinds of culture and all with a very good background. Whether it’s cuisine rather than aesthetics, whether it’s housing rather than monuments, Italy is a country that can help humanity in a form of intellectual and cultural development. I am happy that the PIOMBO brand with OVS is a uniquely Italian project, because it is the only project in the world – based also on what journalists around the world are saying – that has created a real brand and not a made-up name. As a real brand it has created a strong personality, a strong charisma at an incredible price .

In summary, if I understand you correctly, you are trying in a mass world, accessible to anyone and affordable to almost everyone, to give a form of elegance?

I am trying to make aesthetic sense for any life occasion. For example, just to help me explain, we also do things for tennis and they are white. When we propose the coat, it is blue, dark blue; the tie, for certain occasions of rigor, is dark blue. As I said before, for different life occasions we propose a different way of dressing, but always with a distinctive personality and an unmistakably Italian touch, with the  brand PIOMBO and not with a made-up name.

Also because there is a Mr. Massimo Piombo who works there and follows every little detail. Thank you and I wish you success.

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