SILVER: Giovanna Engelbert Interviewed by Tim Blanks for Perfect Issue 9.
“I didn’t just want to make jewellery. I wanted to create an immersive world.”
Giovanna Battaglia Engelbert is looking her usual exquisite self on Zoom. The hauteur is as precise as Marella Agnelli’s in an Avedon portrait. Everything arches: eyebrows, cheekbones, the amused curve of her lips, even her hair, moulded into her signature chignon. But wait! Around her neck, there are strands of substance, the sort of things you’d expect to accessorise the global creative director of Swarovski – which she is – but their seriousness is punctured by a necklace of brightly coloured fishing lures that have been artfully strung together. ‘I was with my kid buying his first bike in a big sports store, which was also a first for me because it’s not very me to go there,’ she says by way of a typically Gio explanation, ‘and they had a whole fishing department, and I was like, oh my God, I had to get them all.’
Then she laughs, and everything changes. Her dad’s from Sicily, mum’s from Calabria, so there’s heat beneath the hauteur. ‘The fire of Magnani, the ice of Evangelista’ is how I described Giovanna when I first interviewed her two decades ago, which was due to American Vogue acknowledging her scene-making inescapability at the time. She was a fashion editor at L’Uomo Vogue, living La Dolce(&Gabbana) Vita, tootling round Milan on her Vespa in a pelmet skirt and sky-high Alaïa heels. Scott Schuman and Tommy Ton’s obsession with Gio turned her into one of the first stars of street style.
Twenty years later, she’s got other things on her mind. The fortysomething mother of two now lives in Stockholm, and in her position at Swarovski she’s responsible for shepherding the Austrian crystal titan through its 130th anniversary. The chic white shirt she’s wearing harks back to our earliest encounter, when she told me Alberto Torchia, a shirtmaker from Naples, had made dozens of monogrammed men’s shirts for her, all of them labelled confezionato per Giovanna Battaglia. The word means ‘ready-made’ or ‘packaged’, but to me it looks like confection, something sweet, desirable, irresistible. Which is a much more accurate description of Giovanna’s relationship with fashion.
It was clearly written in the stars. She grew up in Via Montenapoleone 1, at the foot of one of the greatest shopping thoroughfares in the world. Her parents were both artists, but the apple fell far from that tree. At eight, she asked for a fur coat. At 12, she bought her first Vogue. At 16, she decided modelling offered an entry into the fashion world, with the added bonus of financial independence. A year later, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana reckoned Gio was their dream girl. ‘I always did what I felt was right in the moment,’ she says. ‘There was never really a long-term strategy.’ Her eureka moment happened when she saw fashion editor Charlotte Stockdale at work. ‘I didn’t even know such a job existed. It wasn’t really credited. And my mum didn’t understand it. What was the difference between a fashion editor and a seamstress? She only gave me respect when I got the business card from L’Uomo Vogue.’
‘There are many Giovannas,’ she says now. ‘From muse to maker to mum to creative director. I don’t shed. I accumulate. Everybody knows me for many, many years, because I started when I was 17.’ That was when Gio first met Pat McGrath. Twenty-five years later, she found herself working on a Swarovski campaign with McGrath and Steven Meisel. ‘I could never forget the moment of the first picture Pat and I did together. We looked at each other, we shared fashion tears, it was a full circle.’ That kind of kismet defines her feelings about her position at Swarovski.
‘I’m a fashion addict to the max, and for me a magazine was the thing that consumed me,’ she clarifies. ‘That was where I wanted to have a voice, from being a muse to being the one who was going to create desire in people through the images that I was making. That was my ultimate goal. And that was my joy for so many years, doing all those editorials. And then I just matured. I started to consult on products and I loved that even more than doing shoots, to the point where I wanted to do the product part and the storytelling. And that no longer meant becoming editor in chief. It meant a change of trajectory, to leave magazines and say that maybe a brand could be my magazine.’
Her mother was a minimalist. Gio, on the other hand, was always obsessed with jewellery. Fashion, costume, fine, antique… it didn’t matter what it was. ‘As early as I can remember, I was making painted pasta necklaces. And now my daughter makes them for me, which is so cute.’ When Dolce&Gabbana launched their Alta Moda collection, Giovanna worked on the jewellery that accompanied it. ‘I had carte blanche on stones, any fantasy I could create.’ She also worked with Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani on the magazine’s jewellery edition. In 2010, she curated an exhibition in Milan celebrating 30 years of alta gioielli. ‘High jewellery on all-white couture.’ Her eyes mist at the memory. ‘We didn’t want anything behind glass so the insurance was crazy. And we had to have so many bodyguards. We had an emerald from Bulgari that was like that.’ My favourite stone, so her descriptive hands make my eyes mist too.
It’s why she felt Swarovski was a good fit for her. ‘It gave me the opportunity to express my passion for multidisciplinary creative endeavours. It’s a very complex creative ecosystem, to put it mildly. It’s not just fashion, not just jewellery, not just crystals. I do home, and watches… and glasses!’ The strategic alliance with eyewear giant Luxottica yielded instant dividends. She’s just seen Beyoncé in Swarovski sunglasses, which makes everyone at HQ very happy. ‘It is a multifaceted company. I know Swarovski is a crystal, so that sounds like a slogan. You have to forgive me. But that’s the way I feel. And that’s what has given me the opportunity to articulate.’
Swarovski is a curious mix. On the one hand, a very technical scientific aspect; on the other, a longstanding love affair with elevated cultural pursuits like haute couture. Maybe that’s the dichotomous nature of crystal itself: art and science. We could call it schizophrenic. Gio prefers ‘mathemagical’.
‘Swarovski first approached me in 2017 for the B2B part,’ Giovanna says. ‘I was working behind the scenes on colours and shapes for the industry. I was consulting for them on how to propose to designers. And then I started to do these books with Cabana magazine.’ The portfolios, called ‘Book of Dreams’, were issued in very limited editions; they’re highly sought after now. ‘I think this is what got me the other job from the company, to be honest,’ Giovanna says now, ‘because they saw that I could link the commerciality and the creativity and the energy that I wanted to put into this company.’
Her elevation within the company was serendipitous. In 2016, she married Swedish real estate entrepreneur Oscar Engelbert in a wedding-of-the-year scenario on Capri. At the same time, she was offered a dream job in Paris and she found out she was pregnant. One revelation cancelled the other. It was all about Stockholm and motherhood. Then Swarovski offered Giovanna the newly created position of global creative director, with the added incentive that she could stay in Sweden. She started March 2020, a particularly ominous month in the history of human pandemics.
Talk about a baptism of fire. Her relaunch was all Zoom-driven. But crystal lent itself to tech comms. No racks of clothes going back and forth, no need to touch or feel. ‘What it was for me was that it gave me even more focus to create the new visual code for the company,’ Giovanna remembers. ‘The product is light, and we were in darkness. I was sitting in my home office and I asked them to send me some crystals. And I’m thinking, what is the role of jewellery in society, especially when we didn’t know if we were gonna be alive as a species? I was looking at the crystal, and the sun was shining. Do you remember that beautiful weather? And when the light goes into a clear crystal, it’s the Newton tier: you get the rainbow. And I remember the conversation was about picking a brand colour, because they didn’t even have one. And I was like, it’s not one, it’s four plus white. So that was the crazy thing I did. I said, “You are not a brand with one dimension, you’re Swarovski.”’
And then there was the packaging, and the campaign, and the retail environment. ‘All part of the universe, because I didn’t just want to make jewellery. I wanted to create an immersive world.’ Giovanni remembers laughing when she saw Jonathan Anderson’s Covid Show in a Box. ‘That was what I was doing at home as store mock-ups for Swarovski.’ Which was how she latched on to the Octagon as a packaging idea.
If her four-colour idea was unorthodox, so too was the Octagon box. ‘I don’t fit in a box myself, so I’m gonna make my own box for Swarovski.’ A square box is more economically efficient, so the idea came with a price tag. Giovanna’s response? ‘It’s recognisable. It’s branding! It’s not about having the idea, it’s about getting the idea out the door.’ One famous collaborator told her, ‘You’re creating in crystal, but you’re made in iron, in steel.’
‘I needed to learn my corporate language,’ she agrees, ‘but yes, I think I needed to develop my own way of communicating my creativity in a more strategic way in order to make my target valuable.’ The way she’s done that is an object lesson in marrying legend to innovative reality. Swarovski is headquartered in Wattens, in the Austrian Alps, and its Austrianness is fundamental to the essence of the brand. Giovanna has incorporated that into her collections. Founder Daniel Swarovski’s original drawings informed her first collection as creative director. She’s looked to the Wiener Werkstätte for inspiration. And another collection, ‘Metamorphosis’, used animal motifs from the garden rooms created by Empress Maria Theresa in the 18th century for Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace.
‘It was my dream, to make Swarovski more fashionable and to be in the dialogue of fashion,’ Giovanna says. ‘And that’s what I must have done if you’re here interviewing me. I wanted to inject that fashion energy. When I came in, I knew that was the job that had to be done. But it’s a very different nature from a fashion brand.’
It’s that ‘mathemagic’ thing. And yet, she’s been able to create some memorable fashion moments: Ariana Grande launching her Swarovski collab with the dynamic ‘Party of Dreams’ trailer; Dua Lipa opening her Wembley Stadium concert in head-to-toe Swarovski; Anok Yai at the 2024 Met Ball in a catsuit studded with 98,000 Swarovski gems and a neckpiece made from 1,050 Created (ie, lab-grown) Diamonds. There is also Masters of Light, a touring exhibition (next stop LA, next year Paris) conceived by Giovanna and curated by Alexander Fury to celebrate not just the 130 years of Swarovski but also the brand’s deep fashion roots. Her favourite looks from the show run a gamut from the outfit she made for Kim Kardashian to wear at the opening of Swarovski’s Fifth Avenue flagship, to a dress in the ground-breaking crystal mesh that Gianni Versace created with the Versace team, to an extravaganza John Galliano designed for Dior. The arrival of this last piece occasioned more of those fashion tears.
“My dream was to make Swarovski more fashionable and to be in the dialogue of fashion. But it’s very different from a fashion brand.”
‘God bless that I was lucky enough to see John Galliano in my life, to be at those shows, or to cry at Alber Elbaz’s first show at Lanvin. I was too young for crying at Romeo Gigli, I missed that part. But now I’m really asking myself, who’s gonna have this space now? Who’s gonna give me that nonsense? I mean nonsense in the sense of that complete freedom of fashion, like a John. Yes, Jonathan Anderson is incredibly smart, and I buy a lot of his things because he does product that fits the life that we live in. And I, in my own way, want to do jewellery and special pieces and home pieces that are for now and for what we do. I care a lot about having the product come out perfect, even if I have to debate with product development.’
She has an implicit faith in the democracy of what she does. ‘I’m on the neck of a teacher, and then I’m at a ball and a couture client tells me she buys pieces of Swarovski. That comes with the size of the brand, and size is a big thing to deal with, because then creativity is something that I have to safeguard every day, and that’s my job. So it’s normal that I have this constant work in progress.’
As an incentive, Giovanna can look back to 2017, when Rizzoli published Gio_graphy: Fun in the Wild World of Fashion. It distilled the wisdom she had acquired up till that point into 224 pages of droll advice, plus a recipe or two. How Not to Miss Your Flight and Dancing on Tables collided with zucchine con pasta and Dr Giovanna Battaglia MD’s prescriptions for common fashion conditions such as exhaustion (quick fix: apply red lipstick and administer flat shoes). Her six-year-old daughter just discovered it. ‘She’s reading it almost like a children’s book and I’m so happy,’ Gio says. ‘The book framed that time, and those days will never come back. My fashion enthusiasm was very visible then, because of the fact that I was going to fashion shows, and it was pre-kids. Of course, it was a very serious job, but it was a very different responsibility.’
‘I’m still a fashion enthusiast,’ she adds quickly, ‘but that was Giovanna then doing that job. I want to do another one with the title Forget Everything I Said in the Previous Book.’ She’s not rewriting history, she’s making it.
Giovanna Engelbert for Perfect Issue 9.
Interview: Tim Blanks
Photographer: Phil Poynter
Fashion Editor: Katie Grand
Hair: Lachlan Mackie
Make-up: Miranda Joyce
Manicure: Alex Feller Production Serlin
Casting: Anita Bitton and Calvin Wilson for Establishment Casting
Talent: Agel Akol, Ava Shipp, Eduarda Muehlmann, Giovanna Engelbert, Micklate Macobola, Nanne Groenewegen, Olivia Petronella Palermo
Retouching: Hudsn-Smth
Production Coordinator: Enya Cirillo
Digital tech: Sebastien Niespialowski
Photographic assistance: Brian Bunting, Lena Mezlef
Fashion co-ordinator: Jordan Kelsey
Fashion assistance: Diana Sträng, Maszia Oettgen, Lea Elgui, Emma Queille
Hair assistance: Itoua Sarah
Make-up assistance: Faye Bluff
All models wear FW26 Couture; Jewellery by Swarovski.