Mauro Orietti-Carella: Croc of gold
Last Updated:
12:01am GMT 02/12/2007
Mauro Orietti-Carella has given a tired old handbag brand a facelift by injecting crocodile and snakeskins with 'Botox'. But not everyone's happy about it. Kate Finnigan meets the controversial bag doctor
Mauro Orietti-Carella was once a student dermatologist. If he hadn't left medicine for fashion, he might now be spending his days injecting Botox into the naso-labial lines of the rich and vain. Instead, the owner of the luxury Italian handbag label Zagliani has made his name rejuvenating the skins of snakes and crocodiles. There is a difference.
Mauro Orietti-Carella: ‘Like when you say to another pet owner, Oh, your dog is cute, the bag makes a connection, like a pet’The vivacious Milanese 42-year-old has developed a silicone-based formula, similar to those used in cosmetic anti-ageing procedures, which he injects into scaly old reptile skins giving them a youthful softness beyond the dreams of the most clean-living croc. 'Exotic skins get very dry because they lose water,' he explains in his espresso-grounds voice as we sit in his showroom in Milan. 'So I started treating the skins the way I would have treated a dry, damaged human skin.'
His treatment worked. Five years ago the luxury-bag house founded by Bruna Zagliani in 1947 was as dried-up and stiff as an old croc skin. Now it's a polished, modern brand, sold in 200 shops around the world including Harvey Nichols and the chic London boutique Matches. The Puffy, a glossy pout of a snakeskin shoulder-bag, is its star offering, and is carried by the likes of Kylie Minogue.
Yet when I mention Orietti-Carella to a couple of fashion insiders they screw up their noses. 'The snake man?' says one, grimacing. Some think the shiny, plumped-up reptilian skins are morally repellent; others drool over them. Stefan Lindemann, the shopping editor of Grazia, has been championing the bags to his readers all year. 'It's the nicest leather in the world,' he enthuses. 'Crocodile can be stiff, but this is soft and luxurious. They're worth the money.'
Ah, yes, the money. Zagliani's gold snakeskin Puffy will set you back £1,200 - a snip compared with next season's crocodile New Bag, which is a staggering £8,890. (The price reflects the limited supply of crocodile skin in the world - it costs £21 a centimetre.) Still, they will sell. As Lindemann says, 'People want whatever hasn't been done before. Why have the same boring bag everyone's got when you can say you've got the Botox Bag?'
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But Orietti-Carella claims he didn't spend five years slaving over formula and technique to be a novelty act. He says it was never his intention to be 'the talk of the town'. When he launched the next generation of Zaglianis he thought it more important 'to emphasise the tradition of the bags and craftsmanship' than the new treatment of the skins. There were 40 staff employed in the workshop, some of whom had been there since the 1950s. 'My responsibility wasn't to make a fashionable bag,' he says. 'It was to keep these people in work.'
It was a big responsibility for a guy who until then had flitted around the world somewhat aimlessly. Orietti-Carella spent much of his childhood in Japan, returning to Italy as a teenager to study medicine. Fascinated by the renewal and healing capabilities of skin cells, after three years he began to specialise in dermatology, working in a hospital with burns and accident patients. And then he quit. 'There's a moment when, as a medic, you have to treat real patients and real pain. You have to switch off your personal feelings and move into a different way of behaving,' he says. 'I was too emotionally involved. I couldn't do it.'
His interest in science had always run alongside a love of art and design, so he went to fashion college in Milan for a year before moving back to Japan. He worked in sales and production jobs in the fashion industry, moving to Vancouver, New York and Paris, then began consulting for Zagliani, where his father, Mario, was a manager. After Mrs Zagliani's death he bought the company.
While producing bags for the likes of Giorgio Armani and Louis Vuitton, Orietti-Carella tinkered with a silicone formula he'd been given by a plastic surgeon friend. 'The first time I did the injection some parts of the skin absorbed more solution than others. It was absolutely 'orrible,' he recalls. But eventually he perfected the technique and still administers every injection himself. When you consider that each Puffy bag receives between six and ten injections, and that each season the company produces around 2,000 bags, that's a heck of a lot of needlework.
To say he is passionate about what he does is to do injustice to the level of enthusiasm Orietti-Carella can muster for accessories. 'A bag can be more than a bag, it can be a goal, a dream…' he says at one point. Bags, he claims, give women not just 'energy' but also 'courage'. More than that even, Zagliani owners bond over their bags. 'Like when you go with your pet outside and say [to another pet owner], "Oh, your dog is cute." The bag makes a connection, like a pet.' Or like a silicone-injected dead snake, perhaps?
Zagliani's arrival on the scene may have revived interest in exotic skins but not all the attention has been positive. There are questions over how the animals are both sourced and treated. Clifford Warwick, a biologist, recently described to The Daily Telegraph how hunted snakes have 'hosepipes forced into their mouths and are blown up with water to loosen the skin while alive. Then they're impaled through the head and the skin is ripped off.'
Orietti-Carella says he was 'hurt' by accusations that Zagliani neglects animal welfare. 'It seems silly to say that there's ethical thinking behind this, but it's true,' he says. He insists he would never set up a farm to raise exotic species for their skins, but sees nothing wrong in maintaining what he calls a 'natural balance, a circle' between man and the wild. Zagliani sources its skins through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), a global agreement designed to ensure that trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival. 'Cites is very strict,' he says. 'There's no way to smuggle or be corrupt. Probably there are people who will deal in skins without the documentation, but that's not us.'
On the treatment of snakes he says, 'The way we work is not cruel. Today you have to know where things come from.' Then he tells me he's a Buddhist. Given that Buddhism condemns the killing of animals, I find it difficult to mask my surprise. How can he possibly be a Buddhist? 'Because I have an ethical programme for myself where I maintain the tradition [of craftsmanship], give the chance of work to people and make beautiful things.' So it's his own version of Buddhism? 'No, it's not my own version,' he says showing a hint of annoyance. 'I ask questions and I have respect. This is Buddhism. I'm not a monk.'
Because of the tight controls on exotic-animal trading, Zagliani will never be able to produce many more bags than it does now. 'We can't say, "Now women are crazy for our bags, let's go all over the world for snakes and crocodiles,"' says Orietti-Carella. 'There's a limit.'
While that's good news for reptiles and campaigners, it must be a bit galling for him, surely? 'No, it makes me satisfied that in one year we have made the market talk about us,' he says. 'I'm proud to be recognized for the advances we've made.' Who said you can't teach an old croc new tricks?
Source: The Daily Telegraph
Comment: Okay, is it silicone or Botox? Those are different. I don't know what he using exactly, but he is making a fortune.
