His sofisticated and intellectual upbringing mixed with her fresh attitude represented an astonishing approach to the Italian fashion world. To me these were amazing particles, extraordinary molecules, but I would never allow them to affect my personality.” 6 Piaggi and Castaldi’s creative business partnership took them to Arianna, a monthly fashion magazine edited by Mondadori where they worked until 1968. “With Alfa I breathed in a world of high culture, of passionate research. In the early 60’s Piaggi encouraged Castaldi to shift to fashion photography and his passion for the social landscape informed his “new path”. He also avidly captured the new protagonists of resurrected Milanese cultural life, including photographers Ugo Mulas and Mario Dondero, artists Emilio Tadini and Piero Manzoni, all regulars at Bar Giamaica, a popular hangout in the heart of the bohemian area of Brera. A former architecture student and a devotee of the famous critic Roberto Longhi’s art history classes, he soon dropped out of the university to chronicle post-war social and political changes with his Leicas and Linhofs. A Gauloise chain smoker with a passion for Army & Navy surplus, Castaldi was five years older than Piaggi and already established as a photojournalist. Four years later, they married in New York City. Back home, in1958 he found a job as a translator at the Milanese publishing house Mondadori, where she met the photographer Alfa Castaldi. She was a good student, but soon after graduating from high school, her independance and voracious curiosity led her to discover the “world out there.” Very much ahead of the time - as it was Italy in the early 1950s - Piaggi traveled alone in Europe, worked as an au pair, quickly learned English and French. Her mother firmly believed that a proper education would be the passport for a successful life: therefore Piaggi studied Latin and Greek, history and philosophy. Along with her younger brother Alberto, Piaggi spent her childhood and teenage years in a serene yet strict environment. Her father, a buyer for La Rinascente department store, died when she was only seven years old. 5 ANNA-CHRONICLESĪnna Piaggi was born in Milan on Mato a middle class family. “The -ology suffix which transforms the word fashion in the title is an attempt to capture her world of contradictions, her illogical logic, as she calls it, as well as reveal systems of frivolity, patterns and angles in her works, her algebra of intuition,” Clark specified. 4 In 2006, a selection of Anna’s unorthodox wardrobe along with drawings, photographs, storyboards, magazines and other ephemera became Anna Piaggi Fashion-ology, an exhibition curated by Judith Clark at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Even highbrow The New Yorker portrayed her as one of the members of The Style Council, a portfolio of the most renowned editors and journalists photographed by Richard Avedon in 1994. 3Īcknowledged as the one and only Rara Avis long before the global fashionista conquered the scene, Anna’d become the paparazzi’s favorite subject during the fashion shows from the 70’s on, appeared on Vanity Fair’s Annual International Best-Dressed List and featured in many magazines all over the globe. For sure no one - other than her - washed a salad wearing a gold red and navy blue corset designed by Sonia Delaunay for the Ballets Russes’s 1909 production of Cleopatra. There are no rules.” 2 Anna’s penchant for “unsettling” looks reached the acme of creativity when she was at home in Milan or in France at Lagerferld’s residences, free from business meetings and social gatherings. It is an ephemeral act which has constantly to be started over again. As Karl Lagerfeld pointed out: “Dressing is her means of communication. It also represented a personal way to address a circuit of ideas and feelings using clothes instead of words. For Anna, dressing was neither a necessary routine or a shot at fame: it was a simple, intimate pleasure. Piaggi’s unique theatrical style - an arresting, colorful combination of vintage and contemporary dresses paired with the most whimsical hats - was indeed an everyday surprise, an eye-popping extravaganza. She was simply perceived as a timeless dynamo, a firecracker always ready for stunning mises en scene. During a prolific career that spanned more than 50 years, no one really seemed to pay attention to Anna’s age. 1 The second reason, more banal, is that everyone was astounded to learn that Piaggi was eighty-one years old. The first, and most predictible, was the passing of the “only authority on frocks left in the world” as Manolo Blahnik had once declared. When Anna Piaggi died of an heart attack 10 years ago, the fashion system was in complete shock for two reasons. Proof that intelligent frivolity can be something creative “Fashion does not have to prove that it is serious. “Clothes are never a frivolity: they always mean something”
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