Ungaro Undone

SPOTLIGHT

hearts shattered in Paris when it was learned that couturier Emanuel Ungaro, at fifty-six, had taken a bride. Here, after all, was the end of the long, legendary bachelorhood of fashion's most flaming heterosexual, a man who claimed to make clothes, and love, with monomaniacal devotion to "the unfathomable" in women. "I design dresses for women I would like to take into my arms," he said. Accordingly, he built his career, and a highly marketable public image, around the idea of seduction. The models he sent down the runway season after season—beribboned, bowed, and wrapped like outlandishly expensive gift packages—melded Belle Epoque coquetry with Amazonian fierceness; the women with whom he shared his life (most publicly, Sonja Knapp, who left her husband and started the business with Ungaro, and odalisque-eyed film siren Anouk Aimee) were almost invariably tall, dark, sphinxlike, and at least slightly intimidating.

Laura Fanfani, the Italian mother of two who has captured the unlikely title of Madame Ungaro, is none of the above. She is small, blonde, and shy-seeming, and represents, says Ungaro, "one of the few times in my life that I seduced the woman, rather than her seducing me." She was separated from her husband, the son of Italy's former prime minister, and working for GFT, the Italian manufacturing giant which produces Ungaro's clothes, when she met the designer at a business lunch in Milan five years ago. "When he sat down next to me, we looked at each other," she says, "and from that look, the storia began." In turn, Ungaro found in his Laura "someone who has a very straightforward, untroubled rapport with life, whereas mine is very troubled, confused." In earlier days, he said of his relationships with women, "I have the feeling it could all break off from one day to the next. It's this sense of fragility that keeps me fascinated." On November 20, in a quiet ceremony in his native Aix-en-Provence, he made his first official bid for permanence.

BEN BRANTLEY