Meet Antonio Berardi, the Go-to Designer for Tina Fey, Victoria Beckham and Lady Gaga

These days, if you want to look at a stream of pretty clothes, you can check your Instagram, watch a live feed of a red carpet, or more often than not, tune into a Fashion Week going on somewhere in the world. Lovely things are whizzing by constantly, and in most cases, we never remember most of what we saw.

It’s rare then for a designer to create something that makes us stop and pause (especially when it’s not for a much-hyped event like a presidential inauguration or Kim and Kanye’s wedding).

It’s even more unusual for a designer who’s had a nice number of these moments in his career to still be relatively unknown.

Meet Antonio Berardi, the British-Sicilian designer who’s been designing for the past 20 years—and showed his spring collection today in London—but remains largely underexposed. He’s a go-to celebrity designer, and many of the women who wear his clothes are so famous that they don’t need last names —Nicole, Cate, Beyoncé—even if the designer himself still needs to be identified by his first and last names, plus a bit of explanation.

In 2008, he lent one of his billowing dresses to Lady Gaga for her “Poker Face” video and designed the logic-defying heel-less thigh-high boots Victoria Beckham strutted in at her perfume launch (Also for Beckham, who’s a friend of his, he created the matching purple flower-wrapped outfits she and David changed into for their 1999 royalty-themed wedding reception). In 2013, he made the dress with the sheer-side panels Gwyneth Paltrow wore to the Iron Man 3 premiere (Paltrow later said on “Ellen,” of fact she couldn’t wear underwear with the dress, that “everyone went scrambling for a razor”). “She humanized a dress that lots of women can be afraid of,” Berardi says. “I have my vision of women and how I’d like to see them wearing the dress, but she made them relate to it.” And this year, he designed the tuxedo Golden Globes co-host Tina Fey closed the show in. “It was the last outfit to be picked,” Berardi says. “I was really chuffed. I wanted the tuxedo more than anything.” (In fact, Fey wore another Berardi concoction to present John Hamm with his Emmy award last night.)

At this point, Berardi’s staying in the shadows is, at least in part, on purpose. The less he’s fawned over by the press—and the fewer times his ultra-ladylike dresses and gossamer skirts are flung through the fashion blogosphere—the better. “We’re lucky in that respect,“ he says. “With my clothes, it’s not something that you see absolutely everywhere. If a celebrity decides to wear something, it’s likely the first time you’ve seen it. The bigger a brand the more kind of airplay a dress has and that’s before it’s ever been worn.”

He rarely even meets his celebrity clients in person, with the exception of Fey. "I’m a huge fan of ‘30 Rock, ’ ” he says. “There’s this one line Alec Baldwin says, like, ‘What’s going on out there? People are just standing around like Italians.’ I repeated that so many times."

Two decades ago, when Berardi started designing in London, “Alex McQueen was making things from bin liners and Hussein [Chalayan] was making dresses buried with iron filings,” he says. “That’s what London was about. I wanted to play on the female form. I wanted to be doing things that were super fitted. It was kind of like going against the grain.” In those early days, now-Givenchy designer Ricardo Tisci was one of his assistants (and today Tisci has all of the adulation that Berardi doesn’t—The New York Times just called him “the most socially connected fashion designer of his generation.”) “He’s incredibly kind, which is such a nice thing considering he’s gone on to achieve so much,” Berardi says of Tisci, denying that he had anything to with his success. “He would have always made his own start.’ ”

In general, Berardi’s designs blend traditional Savile Row tailoring with an ornate, sometimes quirky Sicilian vibe. He’s best known for his elegant dresses, but he doesn’t happen to like dresses all that much. “My heart lies in tailoring,” he says. “A dress is, well, a one-hit wonder. It’s a moment. The dresses aren’t my point of reference. I start with the jacket and we build the dress from there. They are second fiddle.”

Still, days before his London show he was in the hallway of his design studio scrutinizing a model walking in one of his chiffon-heavy dresses. It was the same kind of floating gown Gaga wore in the "Poker Face” video and at his 2008 show, model Magdalena Frackowiak ran down the runway in — while wearing those heel-less boots. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, something terrible could happen,’ ” Berardi says of her sprint, “but the moment was amazing. She was running with these heels and the dress was billowing behind her.”

With the current dress, he was trying to decide if it should have one layer of chiffon or two. In a pinch, his beloved decade-old bull terrier Bruno—a fixture at his studio—might be called on to help. “We tend to ask Bruno, ‘What do you think of this?’ ” he says. “Once it was a dress that was put together as if it had been hand-sewn, and he just got up and walked out. We did pull it. He was right.” (Berardi eventually went with a single layer.)

The spring collection is influenced by the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, who was known for his clean, geometrical art, but the clothes aren’t overly hard or unfeminine. The tulle is embroidered with macramé and scarves are stamped with Brâncuși-like prints. “There’s lots and lots of tailoring but the dresses are superfine chiffon,” Berardi says. “They feel like vapor thin, kind of like smoke. If it was left up to me everything would be super tailored but not all women want to wear their clothes that way.”

And with Berardi, how women want to wear his clothes is always going to be what matters most. “It’s their statement,” he says. “I’m lucky it has my name sewn into the back, but they make it their own.”

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