Carlos Falchi

By Marcia Sherrill

There is great design. And then there is great design – design that stands apart when a designer creates a cult of personality.  If Tom Ford is our menswear icon, Zaha Hadid our furniture qua art icon, then Carlos Falchi, renowned handbag designer, is the rock star of the fashion accessory industry.

With bags that fetch up to ten thousand dollars in hand-sewn alligator, the venerable Falchi stands out from the crowd of Ferragamo, Prada, and Hermes. It’s all about the bags and the man. Born in Mines Gerais, Brazil, Falchi was the third child of a Brazilian politician father and an Italian entrepreneurial mother. His father was the consummate statesman, modernizing the roles of mayor and sheriff into our equivalent of a senator while heading the family insurance business. But it was Falchi’s mother who had the biggest influence on him.  As a child, he petulantly refused to leave his mother’s wedding dress company workroom until he had mastered sewing and crochet. He even whipped up his first Carlos Falchi bag there.

Falchi rejected his father’s call to continue the family legacy in politics, to instead, set out as a very young man for New York. That’s where his East Village crash pad became home to his musician friends from Brazil who brought with them the new wave of jazz, the Bossa Nova. Working the grave yard shift as a Maitre d’ at the legendary Max’s Kansas City, Falchi and his Brazilian clique of musical hippies landed smack dab at the very center of opportunity. While his buddies hung out hoping to get in on the odd set, Falchi became a favorite of the scene with his larger-than-life personality and his out-of-sight, self designed and hand created leather wardrobe.

Falchi’s  fashion career began when he made a one-of-a-kind, snakeskin patch-work jeans for Miles Davis’s drummer and later for Miles himself. From there on, patch-work became the designer’s rock music and fashion odyssey. Steve Winwood of “Traffic” swapped pants with Falchi directly before going on stage. Falchi flew to Vegas in 1969 to deliver to “the King”, Elvis Presley, with a custom Carlos Falchi belt.  Jackie O, Cher, Mick Jagger, and Herbie Hancock were soon strutting their stuff in Falchi designs created by the master himself.

But it was on tour with Ike and Tina Turner in 1970 where Falchi hit the public’s mind by designing those skimpy numbers for Tina and the Ikettes: Those cave men dresses that tore into our collective consciousness. The dresses, shredded and flayed in goatskin, were worn for the “Proud Mary Keep on Rolling” album cover. Hollywood soon jumped on the Falchi wagon, and his designs appeared in films such as The Way We Were, Convoy, and Honeymoon in Vegas. Originally starting with designing pants, then belts, and then jackets until he finally began crafting bags about which Herbie Hancock’s wife, GiGi, eagerly reported to Falchi were spotlighted by Henri Bendel’s for the store’s “Go-See Day”.

Carlos Falchi’s career began years earlier when he was one among other Parsons and F.I.T. hopefuls. He says of this period, ”I never even knew there existed a New York above 14th Street.” But he boldly made it uptown and introduced himself at Bendel’s where they bought everything in his suitcase. The business of fashion actually reached out and grabbed him!

 Meeting wife, Missy Gunn, who was then in corporate P.R. at Neiman Marcus, Falchi became so smitten with the former debutante who remembers her family’s first impression of the wild man designer wearing his signature four dozen sterling bracelets on his arms, “They loved him, but the one thing my father can’t forget upon first meeting Carlos was his white suit with red shoes.”

Riding the high roller coaster of fashion, Falchi won attention with a series of firsts. In 1969, Falchi introduced a soft, patch-work bag that signaled a new era: hobos shapes – from over-scaled handbags to clutches. In 1975, he introduced his new leather agenda which became another groundbreaker in what was then, the rather staid world of luxury accessories.  It was in 1980 that Falchi introduced his first “Buffalo Bag” which especially wowed the vanguardist Japanese market. Sponsored by couturier, Hanae Mori, a Falchi boutique opened in Tokyo’s hip and chic Ropongi district. The youths of Japan could not get enough of him.  His signature Buffalo Bags were certainly groundbreaking in the U.S. but in Japan, they mirrored a cultural and fashion paradigm shift as his designs were very much in sync with Japan’s minimalist and de-constructivist aesthetic --think Issey Miayke and Comme des Garcon.

In 1981, Women’s Wear Daily reported that the Buffalo Bag was “the most copied bag in the industry.” In 1983, Falchi would win the coveted COTY Award and have several pieces of his work enshrined in the permanent collection of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The international fashion glitterati swooned. Andy Warhol even showed up and gave his “royal” stamp of approval to the Falchi phenom.

Falchi says, “It was in 1984 at the Zenon nightclub where we did an art gallery style installation that Andy came and played ‘the art critic.’ It was a little bit of theater but he was also very supportive. Andy played the part so well -- strutting around making sarcastic comments. It was very funny.” Leave it to Falchi to ignore the swanky fashion show circuits and do instead, as he says, “a happening.” Presaging the performance art that would later become a late ‘80’s trend, he now had the art world talking.

More than two decades later, Falchi continues to flourish. As Home Shopping Network’s favorite handbag designer, he was an early fixture on the show, enjoying over a hundred thousand fans who called in to purchase their own signature bags and leather goods.  While he categorically rejects the notion of an “it” bag – preferring quality and value over disposable chic, his CHI Collection, available on HSN, brought Falchi to mainstream America.

Says wife Missy, “Home Shopping gave us an opportunity to reach the heartland; before that, we had been selling the periphery.” Falchi became the darling of the T.V. honchos who never imagined the huge effect of his charisma. Popular with L.A. stylists who are constantly courted by big European luxury firms, Falchi handbags are the ones seen in such feature films as The Beautician and the Beast, As Good as it Gets, and Sex and The City. From this hip exposure, younger clients have emerged. Think the likes of Eva Longoria, Marisa Tomei, and Mario Bello. But it was an In Touch magazine picture of Jessica Simpson kneeling on the ground after tripping – but still carrying her Carlos Falchi bag – that grabbed the public’s attention.

 Falchi has been twice nominated by the C.F.D.A. for Accessory Designer of the Year. In 2006, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Accessory Council and Handbag Designer 101 (an association of independent handbag designers) that celebrated him in an extravaganza at the Museum of the City, New York.  
 
Missy Gunn Falchi helps run the showroom and factory nestled in New York’s garment industry with a team of students and graduates of the Falchi Studio. For thirty years, sample-makers, cutters, and sewers at the studio have crafted the leather for the bags of Falchi’s growing collection. It’s been so long now, that the children of the first graduates serve as apprentices and continue the hallowed craft. One wonders if there might be an heir afoot.  Rumor has it that daughter Juliet, a Lindsay Lohan look-a-like, might be persuaded. She and her sister Kate, another beauty, certainly have the it factor.
  
Says Falchi: “When I first started, the bags in the industry were dark colors – black and wine – but even from my first designs, I broke all the rules.” But he laments, “The sad truth is, our bags last a long time – and I had children to put through college!”

FASHION    Pointing into my past.  It’s nice to have a treasure chest.
FABRICS  Color, Color, and Color & Texture
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COLOR  You name it, we do it.  If it doesn’t exist, we’ll make it!
TRAVEL   Traveling back in time
GARDENING OR FLORAL   Gerber daisies
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Favorite or Most Recent….

BOOK   History Books
MUSEUM  The MET
RESTAURANT  Basta Pasta
HOTEL  The Plaza Athenee
MSUIC CD   Herbie Hancock
GIFT   My own Ferrari
SHOP  McNulty’s Tea & Coffee Co.