Biki
Biki was an italian dressmaker (1906-1999). She wore a bright green turban when, in 1996, I saw her for the last time. Elvira Leonardi Bouyeure, known as Biki in the world of fashion, was working in her atelier on the ground floor of her house in via Sant’Andrea in Milan, where she lived and worked. I, the reporter, was almost falling asleep; she, the subject of the interview, and 90 years old, was bursting with energy: “Today I’m starting the Japan Collection. Together with my daughter Roberta, I’ve finished the children’s line and I’m sketching the dresses for my very faithful, special, very rich women, who are allergic to today’s bric-a-brac, just like my adored Maria would have been.” Maria was Maria Callas. Biki taught her how to dress, she was her Pygmalion of manners and the wardrobe. The soprano was, as one would say in the fashion language of today, her testimonial, imposing the designer on the world with that strange nickname, Biki, which was an exotic variation of Bicchi, as she was called by Giacomo Puccini, her grandfather in affection if not of blood. “I met Maria in 1951 in the house of Wally Toscanini,” she would say. “She was a real mess, a fat ‘rich and vain’ madam who loved accessories that matched, the shoes with the bag, and so much the better if they were in bright patent leather. She came to my atelier, where I was with my son-in-law, Alain Reynaud, who had been the assistant of Jacques Fath, and made designs for me. She was on a diet, barely under 220 lbs. pounds, but she already moved like a thin person and she had the allure of a thin person. In order that she not make a mistake, Alain numbered every item in her wardrobe, including the dresses, shoes, and accessories, and had written down exactly what to wear with what: evening dress no. 8 with shoes no. 14 and shawl no. 6. Maria was a sponge. Her talent was a great gift. What she learned seemed to have belonged to her always, as something innate. For example, her grace in wrapping herself in a shawl. I remember only one person who could keep up with her, Cardinal Montini, who later became pope. I saw him in the archbishopric of Milan. He would protect himself from the cold with a big scarf. A person of natural chic.” Biki became a dressmaker, which was the term she preferred, as she hated to be called a designer, thanks to her initiative, generous intelligence, and what she would call “natural chic,” the elegance and style of that world that she, by birth and not by income, she entered as a girl, the daughter of Fosca, the baby girl born from Elvira Puccini’s first marriage. For Biki, Puccini was “grandfather Tato,” and the composer, who called her “the little fashion snob,” almost guessing her future work, told her, “I need silence, Turandot is sleeping.” Shortly thereafter, he died in Brussels. Biki was not yet 18. She was out in the big world, at La Scala, with the Viscounts of Modrone, and with the Toscanini family. She witnessed the conductor’s great anger when his 17 year-old daughter Wally fell in love and eloped with Emanuele Castelbarco, who was 35, married, and unforgivably “blond and aristocratic.” She also got to know Franco Florio, the tailor Lelong, the photographer Horst, and Isadora Duncan. But it wasn’t just for fun, or to fulfil herself, that she decided to “look after herself.” She really had to roll up her sleeves and she did it through fashion and her “natural chic.” On the occasion of a lunch organized by Virginia Agnelli, she met Vera Borea, who had a small atelier in Paris, and proposed that she and Gina Cicogna to take care of her beachwear and sportswear Collections in Italy. It was the end of 1933. The partnership didn’t go well. But Bicchi (she changed it to “Biki” when she began to work in the fashion world) and Gina Cicogna decided to work together and design underwear. Gabriele D’Annunzio invented the brand name for their lingerie, Domina. In Spring 1934, in the atelier at via Senato 8, they presented their designs, which were inspired by Paris fashions. D’Annunzio, who was known variously as the Poet and as the Commander, and also had huge debts, took some of their clothes for his latest lover, the pianist Luisa Baccara, but paid for them only with this letter of praise: “Biki, the folds, the gaps, the full fabric, and the airy lace, the stitching, and the trimming, are all elements of a precise rhythm and an indistinct unknown, and thus, of poetry.” These were the years in which the Fascist regime, during the drive for self-sufficency in the economy, ordered that fashion houses produce on their own, without purchasing fabric from France, which usually amounted to 50% of every Collection. Biki was a pioneer of the Made in Italy movement when she continued on her own after the partnership with Gina Cicogna ended. She no longer made underwear, but suits, dresses, and evening gowns. Her début was on May 5th 1936, the same day that Mussolini announced the return of the empire “on the fatal hills of Rome.” Then came World War II and the post-war economic boom. In the Milan of that time, which was going through its first season of prosperity, with mink coats, very elegant dresses for premieres at La Scala, and the imitation of the styles that Enrichetta Pedrini imported from Paris, Biki was, together with Germana Marucelli and Jole Veneziani, the queen of dressmakers and the dressmaker of a new Italian style, supported in her creativity by Alain Raynaud, her son-in-law. She had meanwhile married Robert Bouyeure, but she kept her name, that nickname, in her work. Following her mother’s marriage to Mario Crespi, the eldest of three brothers who were the sole owners of Corriere della Sera, she became heiress to a large part of that newspaper empire located on via Solferino. She was rich, but continued to work in her atelier in Sant’Andrea (it had been near via Montenapoleone, and later would be almost at the corner of via della Spiga), as a Stakhanovist but with the coquetry of not admitting that she was tired, of continuing to be Biki, and possibly to teach Maria that “no, in the evening, at home, one cannot wear a velvet broad-brimmed hat.”. She was one the first high fashion dressmakers to work with manufacturers: from 1960 to ’66 she designed the Cori-Biki line for the Textile Financial Group. She continued to be a “little fashion snob” even when she became old (“You decide whether or not to write how old I am. I know, after a long life, that age can be a reason for pride. But it’s still old age anyway.”) and new designers came on the scene. She was, like her mother Fosca, a woman of character and full of energy. Hélène Blignaut wrote a biography of Biki: La scala di vetro, published by Rusconi in 1995.