Firefighters are universally loved, right? Of course they are – heroic lifesavers rushing into danger in those big red engines… what’s not to like? Back in the 1980s Andrea Della Valle, a young Italian, was certainly fascinated when he encountered a bunch of ex firefighters who were wearing the garments of their former trade. “I met these guys when I was living in New York and they were all in these amazing jackets,” remembers Della Valle. “They looked so cool, I thought this could really work back in Italy.”
At the time, the Italian casual wardrobe was still pretty formal, he says. What if he could introduce something that was really different. A jacket with hook-and-eye fastenings, for example? The sort of hardware that looked great but was also practical – used by fishermen and firefighters because this type of closure was fast to deploy and secure once engaged.
Della Valle was no novice in matters American. His elder brother Diego had already started Tod’s, the shoe company built on the idea of selling Italians a US-style driving shoe as weekend footwear. Now Andrea enlisted his brother’s help to persuade their father, who still ran the family shoemaking business back in Le Marche, to acquire an American business based in Maine called Fay, that specialized in the sort of jacket he wanted to develop.
As with the Tod’s project, the idea was to clean up the US garment, without losing its spirit. In 1987, the brothers took Fay over and moved production to Italy, seeking a mash-up of functionality and elegance. The look proved popular with young Italians getting into denim and casualwear, and Fay’s 4 Ganci (literally “four hooks”) style became part of a cultural shift towards a new type of off-duty dressing.
The irony is that it took a bunch of American film stars including Michael Douglas, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Bradley Cooper, George Clooney, Kevin Costner, Keanu Reeves, and Ben Affleck to popularize the now-Italian brand. And today, the firefighter style, complete with humble metal hooks, has been adopted by a whole raft of luxury fashion collections. But Fay is still riffing on its theme, 40 years after being imagined as a fashion brand by the Della Valle brothers, producing versions in different fabrics and patterns: from a cotton canvas down jacket to a wool-blend geometric Native American-inspired design, and from a model in bold red or blue plaid to one in soft blue or green corduroy with contrasting orange onion-quilted lining. We’re well and truly hooked.
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