Back To Fiorucci

This video segment below has been on and off of YouTube for a while and a friend of mine just put it back into circulation, so I thought I’d address it here.

I think the strangest aspect of Fiorucci’s, for me, was its address. Basically right at the southern border of the posh-but-staid Upper East Side (my home turf, at the time), this weird Italian fashion emporium was essentially a dollop of Downtown atop a bland soup of midtown blahs. It was invariably my older sister who came home, one day, with a garish bag full of inane duds she procured at Fiorucci’s. It was around this same era when I was starting to swear off former faves like Pink Floyd and getting into stuff like Devo, The Ramones and the Sex Pistols, while my sister was bringing home records by The Buggles, The Vapors and Blondie. “It’s all punky stuff!,” Victoria said. I felt compelled to investigate.

Once again, incongruously perched on East 59th between Lexington Avenue and the magisterial sprawl of Park Avenue, Fiorucci’s (or, technically, Fiorucci … non-possessive) was an impossible-to-miss source of brave-new-world spectacle, diametrically across the street from the haven of stodgy-old-world knowledge that was the Argosy Book Store. Ironically, here in 2021, Argosy is still there, but that iteration of Fiorucci’s closed around 1987. The space it occupied became several other ventures, notably a William Sonoma. These days, I believe it’s now a Muji.

But at the dawn of the 80’s, it was in full swing. I remember regularly going down to that neighborhood not to shop at Fiorucci’s, but to hit the drearily seedy Comic Art Gallery one block to its south, along the with Disc-O-Mat on Lex and 58th (lionized most recently here). Intrigued by my sister’s claims, I dutifully went down to check out Fiorucci, but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Suffice to say, it was way more glitzy n' kitschy than sneery and iconoclastic, but who knows what I’d been projecting on the place. Victoria made good several years later when she steered me toward Commander Salamander in Georgetown.

In watching this quaint clip now, though, one can’t help miss the era when New York was indeed a significantly wilder place, and folks could be so easily stopped in their tracks by the sight of downtown freaks dancing in a shop window. Yes, that’s Klaus Nomi, but that’s also Joey Arias, who appeared with Klaus and Bowie on that fabled episode of Saturday Night Live. Joey lives in my neighborhood, these days. I spoke to him once when our local liquor shop was broken into several years ago. He was a very cool gent.

Enjoy the trip back in time.