LAPO ELKANN'S WILD RIDE

marcusjaeger
11. Sept. 2015
3 Min. Lesezeit

The new suit is a peacocky double-breasted chalk stripe and could almost pass as bankerly. But the stripes are set gangster-wide, so it seems more appropriate for the gentleman who might be relieving the banker of his funds. It bears both a retro- and future-time-travel appeal—simultaneously evoking something you might see on Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club in the '30s and on a villain in the next Batman movie.

Under the suit, Elkann has styled a counterpoint to the gangster formality with a white open-necked terry-cloth shirt that has a huge floppy collar, the kind of top that Picasso might have worn on the beach in Antibes with Françoise Gilot. For his part, Elkann has the air of a man fresh off a yacht moored nearby no matter where he is or what time of day you see him. It's an ensemble that should not work—on any man's back—but Elkann has the required dollop of native devilry in him, along with his leathery world-weariness, that makes this outfit work.

In a couple of weeks, he will, in fact, jet out to Shanghai to promote Lapo's Wardrobe—to a perfect market of yacht- , label- and party-hungry swashbucklers. His Asian jaunt can be seen philanthropically, as a kind of men's fashion world emergency relief mission. No matter how rich and experienced the nouveaux masters of the universe in Shanghai purport themselves to be, it's fairly certain they'll need some instruction on how to pull off Lapo's Wardrobe with his level ofsprezzatura. A second, fresh tray of espresso has arrived, and we are madly recaffeinating. The coffee and Marlboros on his 12-foot-long checkerboard carbon-fiber conference table just might be breakfast, it seems. The Marlboros are the pastry.

At 37, Elkann continues his preternaturally colorful dance along the tightropes of several dizzying career trajectories–entrepreneur, marketer, car customizer, global denim- and eyewear-mogul, vodka distiller, film distributor, menswear designer, watch designer and, not least, Fiat heir. He is a founding father to eight companies in all, six public ones under the Italia Independent Group, in whose offices we sit, plus the privately held Good Films, a producer-distributor that he owns with his sister, Ginevra, and which she runs out of Rome. The last of the litter, born just this March and also privately held by Elkann, is Garage Italia Customs, the hip design and fabrication arm for customizing cars, aircraft, and boats, globally. Elkann is nothing if not breezily forthright about why there are so many and such diverse enterprises under his aegis and why he's on the prowl to do more.

"It's great to do things that you love," he says. "But it's also great to do things you love where you understand that you have some space and there are other people that are not yet capable of doing what you want to do. Being creative today is also being an entrepreneur. It's great to take risks. But risks have to be taken after having seen the opportunity arise. If not, danger.

He once hilariously described himself as an "French Turinese Neapolitan Catholic Jew born in New York," and he is all of that. But he bears the aquiline profile and the swift, careless sartorial perfection of his legendary grandfather Gianni. Elkann's visage is the DNA image of his forebears. All of Italy recognizes this nose, these eyes, the silhouette of this face.