Hail, Cesare

"Fashion u>as born from poetry; then it became a business, " sighs Cesare Fabbri, the thirty-one-year-old Italian designer. "Now people think, only of the business. " Still, as the talent behind Milan's growing Zuccoli label, Fabbri is proving that commerce and lyricism can coexist. Like such contemporaries as Gaultier and Ozbek, Fabbri quotes from the ages of Mod and the Flower Child in his designs, but with more romance than irony. For spring, he resurrected memories of a Voguescouring childhood in provincial Italy in the sixties to create a collection dedicated to the "maximally exotic woman. " A rich hybrid of countercultural ethnicity and movie-star sheen, the Zuccoli clothes are part Greta Garbo, part Penelope Tree.

BEN BRANTLEY