As an American living in Tuscany, a writer, a teacher and, as all ex-pats are at one time or another, eager to find something concrete to sink my teeth into, I was introduced to Bill Mazza at D&A. 

People had told me about Bill. People had told Bill about me. When we met, there was immediately something easy and fun loving about us. We had a dialogue that transcended, for Bill’s good fortune, language. I knew at times more than he did himself what he needed. From proofreading and copy editing I quickly became copywriter, translation 

coordinator, production manager, account executive, Bill’s alter-ego. I was hired as a freelance copy editor, helping Bill to complete the first odd jobs given to him by the director of communication at Salvatore Ferragamo, the soon- to-be-infamous, Maria Cesira Manzini. Cesira, for some mystical and still-mysterious concoction of intuition cum savvy, also realized that behind the businessman façade, behind his Mazzaland lingo, behind all the promises Bill made day in and day out to submit proposal after proposal, mock-up after mock-up, catalogue after catalogue, lay an artist. Plain and simple: a clean, good, hard-working artist with a clean soul and whose personal ethics would not only disallow any mischievous business tactics but would, in essence, allow whatever scheming, deftness, intricate workings of the fashion business web to fly right over his head. By the time Lever Mazza was creating a catalogue every five days,

Bill had managed a staff and provided on-the-ropes training for a group of professionals who, no doubt, took their valuable lessons to whatever endeavor they then went on to pursue. I, for one, employ the infamous Lever Mazza production timing in nearly every project I enter into. Bill, from the experience and magnitude of projects accrued at Salvatore Ferragamo made the leap from local graphic designer to worldwide art director. If only he had had 1% of the craftiness necessary to make one’s own name stick out, he’d have been an overnight wonder. Instead, he stuck to the art. His art. The unique and sleek, deliciously adaptable yet all-together personal stroke of genius art with which Bill won the approval of the likes of the Ferragamo family in many a gilt boardroom. A slower ascent to success but one built on principle and pride, goodness and grassroots morals.

Fashion, we quickly learned is a cutthroat, competitive business. Advertising, we all know, is much the same. Bill is an artist, was an artist, will always be an artist. By virtue of his craft, his honesty and his sheer desire and will, he had gone from a business card to a production table to the address bar of one catalogue to finally the point where, with 18 employees and myself handling all communication with the advertising office at Ferragamo, we were churning out publication after publication, catalogues in five languages each season for a total of 67 catalogues a year, running the production with sometimes as many as five producers at a time. The mounting room was operating at times 24-hours a day. Requests would come in for full color proofs of an advertisement in the morning hours of any given day and the proofs were to be delivered that afternoon. We were meeting with the likes of Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Barneys,

El Corte Ingles, Harrod’s. The NYTimes, the LA Times and comparable Japanese and Hong Kong publications were receiving their films from us for dailies, monthlies, seasonal ads. Bill became a professional at exchanging visual impact to fit an Asian format. A book or magazine, a newspaper spread that is seen, perceived, taken in from right to left. How much does that change what we do? Where do we place the focal was doing at the time and just one of the many business initiatives Bill found himself developing all of this, all the while reflecting on how this was certainly nothing he’d picked up in design school.

We produced a proposal for a block’s worth of window dressing at London’s Harrod’s. Our proposal, completed in the mounting room into the wee hours of the morning, many mornings, traveled to London with the Ferragamo family. There it was presented to the Al Fayed family, who had very different ideas. Insulted by the counter proposals of Harrod’s management, the Ferragamo’s stood up, excused themselves and took our project away with them. Days and nights of toiling and creating to be met with a trite disagreement. That happened at times as well.

Ma Bill, lo fa o lo è?An Italian phrase that roughly translates into: Is he for real? Oh, yes, he is most certainly for real, I answered then and more than ever, I answer now. His genius is mature. His style has found confidence. He can proudly say he never stooped to compromise but worked, true to Italian craftsmanship, as a laborer in his own field. Never cutting corners, never finding the easy way out, always with renewed creativity. A find. Now and then.