Everything Isn’t Always Black and White
LIFE is very complicated for Lapo Elkann.
For starters, there is the past. The childhood raised in various swellegant locales around the world: London, Rio, Paris, wherever his mother (nee Margherita Agnelli) and his father, Alain Elkann (and later his stepfather, Serge de Pahlen), wanted to be. He spent his 20s working in the shadow of his grandfather, the famed Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli. After Mr. Agnelli’s death in 2003, Mr. Elkann inherited his grandfather’s suits and his flair for publicity.
As the worldwide brand manager for Fiat Auto, he helped breathe new life into the company’s sputtering image. Vanity Fair called him “the rock star of Italian business.” Then, in October 2005, that turn of phrase proved a little too accurate when he overdosed on cocaine and heroin in the apartment of a Turinese transvestite prostitute, news the Italian press had a Roman holiday with.
Then there is the present. Mr. Elkann, 29, sober and as stylish as ever, is New York’s man of the moment, starring in a 20-page fashion story in this month’s Vogue and unveiling a new line of carbon-fiber sunglasses at Barneys New York. The glasses are the first product of his own company, Italia Independent, which, he said, will wed new technology and classic style. (Classic being a relative term, let’s just say that the chicly oversize glasses won’t help celebrities go unnoticed.)
Of course, complications remain. Just over a week ago, his mother filed suit against the administrators of her father’s estate to find out its true value, sending a shock wave through the reserved Agnelli family.
It all goes to remind us that while design teams are pushing carbon fiber to new applications and futuristic forms, we carbon-based life forms have plenty of room for improvement. For his part, Mr. Elkann embraces the highs and the lows, as the many tattoos on his arms (like a water-and-fire yin-yang symbol) attest.
“It’s about the right balance that you’re searching for every day,” he said. Of course, in playboy style, fire and water do not mean a scented candle and some nice Evian. “I’ve always been someone who likes adrenalic activity,” he said over breakfast in the West Village. “I like bikes, I like to race, I like sailing, I like parachuting, I like surfing. Both on the sea and the snow.” He paused, thinking. “I like art, I like beauty.”
No one understands his passions better than his older brother, John, who gave him an inspiring gift after his 2005 ordeal: a Roy Lichtenstein enamel-on-steel print titled “Sunset,” from an edition of 75 the artist made in 1965, the height of the Pop decade.
“It’s the rising sun,” Mr. Elkann said, somewhat optimistically. “I need the sun. Life has to be made of energy. Life has to have love, passion, ideas, exchange. I like to work with sunny people. If I end up with someone, I need her to be sunny. If not” — he made a face — “nothing.”
So the Lichtenstein, he said, was “a beautiful present.”
“I love Pop Art, the energy, the color. I don’t like black and white, except on my soccer team.” (This, a reference to Juventus, the Turin-based, Fiat-owned team, whose colors are black and white.)
What appeals to him about Pop Art, he said, is its purity. An odd choice of words given Pop’s push-pull blend of the beautiful and the banal, but Mr. Elkann defended it, however obliquely. “I love the irony and sarcasm,” he said. “It’s looking at the things with detachment and realism, which is needed. I have to be extremely engaged in what I’m doing, but to be attached, I think, you need to be able to be detached.”
Does that make Warhol the modern Laotzu? Are apothegms like “My mind is like a tape recorder with one button: Erase,” today’s answer to the koan?
Who knew that a Pop ray of sunshine was really Campbell’s Soup for the Soul?
New York Times