Robin Piccone Rides the Next Wave : The Queen of Neoprene just can’t stop creating. She’s designing a Guess? line--and running her own successfulo firm.
A well-meaning, well-placed fashion photographer recently called designer Robin Piccone’s judgment into question.
“Basically he said I was wasting my time in Los Angeles,” says the woman whose sexy rubber bathing suits revolutionized swimwear in 1987.
“I was thinking about it for a couple of days--that maybe it was not a great choice for my career to stay here. But more than I’ve worked to achieve success in my life, I’ve worked to achieve balance.”
Piccone’s decision to remain an L.A.-based designer--despite the lure of New York’s Seventh Avenue--has paid off. Since introducing neoprene to fashion for the Body Glove label, Piccone started her own swim and sportswear company, Piccone Apparel. Then, earlier this year, she signed a licensing agreement to design a junior swimwear collection for jeans giant Guess?
All that would seem to leave little time for family matters--unless the family is as involved in the business as Piccone’s. Her husband, Richard Battaglia, is national sales manager. Piccone’s aunt, Linda Rosetti, tends the books. Her father, Robert, a retired building contractor, handled the renovation of the corporate headquarters in the old Culver City post office building. And her mother, Rita--who negotiated the Guess? deal--is Piccone’s partner and chief financial officer. The whole family gathers for dinner/board meetings several times a week at Piccone’s parents’ Hancock Park house, which is just four blocks from her home.
“I could have lived like Holly Golightly for years in New York,” says Piccone in her tidy lime-and-white office dotted with trophies, family photos, sketches, clothing samples and kitschy ‘50s memorabilia. “It just didn’t appeal to me after my children were born. They’ve become the focus and center of our lives.”
Piccone, a 34-year-old L.A. native, brought son Maximillian, now 5, to the office every day of his first year. Now she takes Fridays off to be with 2-year-old Luca.
Kal Ruttenstein, Bloomingdale’s senior vice president for fashion direction and longtime Piccone fan, remembers the time Piccone and Battaglia drove from L.A. to New York with their firstborn for a personal appearance at the store: “I have a very fond spot in my heart for them. The baby slept in my office.”
Not surprisingly, Piccone’s devotion to her children expresses itself in the clothing she hand-sews for them. That the Queen of Neoprene would spend countless hours making a christening gown or batiste shirt would surprise only those who don’t know that Piccone prefers cooking, sewing and antique collecting to swimming.
Yet Robin Piccone and swimwear are practically synonymous. In a Women’s Wear Daily survey, Piccone’s name ranked among the top 10 swimwear labels that consumers know best--along with such giants as Jantzen, Catalina, Speedo, Cole and Gottex--despite the fact that her company hasn’t spent a dime on advertising. And when asked about his company’s choice of Piccone to create the first swimwear line Guess? has produced in six years, president and advertising guru Paul Marciano says he was “waiting for the right candidate to come along.”
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When she was 5, Piccone lopped off the bottom of her parents’ curtains to make her version of a jumpsuit. Influenced by her paternal grandmother, who had handmade clothes for Piccone and her sister, Piccone says: “From an early age, I always knew I wanted to be a designer.”
After she doodled her way through Beverly Hills High School (as an outsider whose mother worked for the district), she graduated Los Angeles Trade Technical College with honors. Her professional life commenced with “a terrible job” at Cole of California.
“I was cutting spaghetti straps for minimum wage in a warehouse,” she says. “It was so boring I couldn’t concentrate. I would always cut the wrong width, the wrong length. I was just about to be sacked when I was rescued and brought to the design department as an assistant designer.”
She left Cole for New York, where in 1980 she landed a design position with Bobbie Brooks and met her future husband.
Battaglia, then an aspiring actor, describes their chance restaurant encounter. “She gave me this big smile. I was smitten,” he says. “She looked like a young Sophia Loren, a saucy, Neapolitan beauty.”
Two weeks later he moved into her apartment. Six years later, she popped the question. “I think her exact words were: ‘Do you want to get married this year?’ ”
Piccone was equally forthright when her mother questioned the wisdom of making swimsuits from rubber. As Rita Piccone recalls: “I said: ‘Oh, God, Robin, that is rubber. You’re not going to get anybody to buy a one-piece suit of rubber. They’ll die on the beach.’ She looked at me as if to say: ‘You tend to your business and I’ll tend to mine.’ ”
Ruttenstein recognizes the trait. “There’s an intuitive aspect to her designs that makes her special,” he says. “It has to do with a lot of self-confidence, a lot of knowledge and a lot of talent. When I look at her clothes and swimwear, I think only of Robin.”
Apparently, so does the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It recently requested two of Piccone’s original neoprene suits and a miniskirt for its collection. “They coincide with the changing views of women in the last 20 years to present themselves as both strong and athletic, and yet be sexy,” explains Jennifer Loveman, senior research assistant at the museum.
“Recently, other designers--such as Donna Karan--have begun to use industrial materials, and we wanted to represent the origin of that fabric moving from the functional into the fashionable.”
“I think that’s what design is,” Piccone says. “Finding new uses for old ideas.”
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Piccone’s work is guided by a deceptively simple precept: “I like striking silhouettes and minimal ornamentation. There is always detail, but not always where you would expect. Sometimes it’s how an armhole is cut, or how the silhouette will follow from back to front. That’s why it’s hard to knock us off.”
Inspiration for what is eventually reduced to a simple felt-tip drawing on white paper comes from anywhere--mosaic tile patterns, color combinations on the street, antiques she buys (textiles, clothing, jewelry, furniture, sepia prints) and, of course, her children.
She hand-smocks some of their garments, so last year, Piccone says, “I did a group of smocked dresses. And I made some dresses with sashes, with the look of children’s wear. And there was a plaid fabric I used for a swim line that was from a fabric I used for one of their shorts. It’s in the details. It doesn’t take over.”
How many plaids or how much smocking she uses for Guess? swimwear will be entirely her call. “We work closely,” Marciano says, “but Robin is definitely in total control of her line. She has the latitude to be as sexy and sensual as she wants, or she can go totally classic.”
“I think it’s a really interesting hookup,” Piccone says. “What I love about Guess?--and what I’ve incorporated into the line--is a very American-hybrid look. It’s very modern, yet slightly retro.” But nowhere on the $36-to-$72 suits is the name Robin Piccone.
“I prefer it that way,” she says. “I don’t want anyone to be confused in any way with my own label,” a collection that is more expensive, more sophisticated and, happily for aging boomers, more concealing.
“I think the thing that defines me is that I was born with a tremendous need to create and make things,” Piccone says. “I was talking with a friend who also claims that need. She said she can’t sit down at the table without wanting to make the pie and then wanting to make the bowl the pie is in.”
It’s a similar story for Piccone’s design process: “I’m constantly revising, constantly trying to improve until I can’t do any more because I’ve run out of time.”
