To coincide with Milan Fashion Week, Insiders turns its attention to one of the key, yet less celebrated figures during show season: the driver...
To coincide with Milan Fashion Week, Insiders turns its attention to one of the key, yet less celebrated figures during show season: the driver. With shows taking place at locations across the city and a tight schedule to adhere to, drivers play a key role in transoprting around editors and their team between venues. Here, in a special report, Alice Pfeiffer caught up with Milan-based driver Fabio Bellini...
Fabio Bellini has been a fashion week chauffeur for the past 15 years, artfully piloting pretty much any key editor you can think of, including the AnOther Magazine team. Fashion came as an accident to Bellini – his chauffeur service company simply put him onto a show-hopping job for an editorial team. He remembers his first fashion week with excitement and a hint of angst: “It was for Cosmopolitan – I had just moved to Milan and didn’t know the city very well. They were stressed, and I was, well, terrified.”
Yet Bellini rapidly developed his own 'fashion-week-special' driving style. Previous customers having included both politicians and transplant organs, and has resultantly perfected two driving techniques. “I know both ‘safe’ and ‘fast’ driving, which are two different schools,” he explains, “but for fashion week, I do a mix of the two: you have to anticipate anything anyone might do, but at the same time, you just go for it."
Speed is key in fashion, and Bellini is used to dealing with impatient customers, “shows are always late, and so are many clients. One editor was such a nightmare once and kept asking me to drive through red lights – I simply refused to go on driving and called another car.” But in other cases, customers have also become dear friends of Bellini, after years of spending most of the week together, season after season. “Some editors have even met my sons,” he says with a smile.
After a decade and a half of observing editors’ and journalists’ outfits, Bellini has also become a fine anthropologist, “I can immediately tell where someone is from. American men always dress in the same colours – beige and blue. But when I saw Mr. Jefferson, I immediately knew he was British – the English just have more style.”
Text by Alice Pfeiffer
