Rebel de jour
Her free-reining pages in Italian vogue have been standard reading for the world's top designers for 16 years. But how did a classically educated girl from a quiet, bookish family become one of fashion's most outrageous iconoclasts? Tamsin Blanchard meets Anna Piaggi.
Sunday August 15, 2004
Anna Piaggi is a work in progress. She would hate to be called a work of art, but there is no other way of describing her. 'She is the only authority on frocks left in the world!' proclaims Manolo Blahnik, putting her alongside the other grandes dames of fashion: Diana Vreeland and Grace Coddington.
Karl Lagerfeld's a devotee, too. He has been drawing her since they met in 1974. His Fashion Journal (published by Thames & Hudson in 1986) is a sketchbook of his drawings - hundreds of them - documenting her phenomenal wardrobe over a period of 10 years. And, certainly, when she comes to the front door of her Milanese apartment to greet me, she is a vision to behold. My initial reaction is to say, 'Wow! You look amazing!'
But for a few moments I am tongue-tied, and I try not to stare. There is just so much to take in. First of all, there are her eyes, perfectly ringed (like a panda's) with electric-blue eyeshadow. It matches her silver and blue streaked hair, styled in old-fashioned Marcel waves and ending in a kiss curl that hovers around her right eye like a question mark. There is a blue bandana tied around her head, with a little diamante bow perched on top.
Her lips are shiny and red, painted with two sharp peaks like a star of the silent movies from the Thirties. And there are pink circles of rouge high on her cheeks, as though they have just been pinched. Around her neck is a multicoloured jangle of plastic keyrings. I imagine she made it herself after a trip to get some keys cut, but the Dolce & Gabbana tag is still hanging from it. Underneath is a shirt covered with Roy Lichtenstein-style cartoon characters (more D&G), a pair of trousers printed with big bold letters (Chanel from three or four years ago) and (if you are still with me) elegant little pink sandals with buttons sewn on.
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She is a riot of colour and print and texture. It's a bit like when you step outside from a dark room into a bright sunny day; it takes a few moments to adjust. Forget Technicolor. This is all-singing, all-dancing Piaggicolour. As creative consultant to Italian Vogue since 1988, Anna Piaggi has helped shape the most influential fashion bible of them all.
American Vogue is where you will read the stories, see the celebrities and get the scoops. French Vogue is where you might get a bit of high-brow intellectual stimulation alongside your Dior and Saint Laurent. But Italian Vogue is a guaranteed visual feast. It is pure fashion indulgence. You don't need to read Italian to enjoy it. The pictures say it all. But it is Piaggi's pages in particular - the doppie pagine, or simply DP - that are the heart and the essence of the magazine.
Each month, she is given free rein to make a story out of whatever she feels is in the air. It might be a tiny detail she noticed on the catwalk during the haute couture shows. It might be four pages inspired by brooches, as it is in the August issue. It might be a particular print. It might be a colour, a word, an animal, some graffiti on the Paris Metro.
It can be just about anything that Piaggi's fantastical fashion mind might dream up - clothes, accessories, furniture, hats, graphics, art, cakes, whatever. Right now, she tells me, the face and the hair are the most important fashion accessories. 'Good make-up,' she instructs. 'A certain eyeliner... Swarovski crystal eyebrows.' I make a mental note to stock up. 'Her pages are the reason to read Vogue,' says Blahnik, who has known Piaggi since the early 1970s, when they were neighbours in Kensington. 'Every month is a shock.' In 1998, Thames & Hudson published a book celebrating 10 years of DPs. To date, she tells me, she has produced 6,500 pages of editorial. She is as prolific in her work as she is in her choice of clothes.
In fashion circles, Anna Piaggi is an institution. You don't ask her age, but according to the Italian Dizionario della Moda, 2004, she was born in 1931. She is ageless, timeless and full of energy. During showtime, she can always be relied upon to be more outlandishly dressed than the models on the catwalk. She is her own sideshow, always with her hat, her walking cane (usually too short to actually lean on), her blue rinse and a surprised look on her face. For designers such as Dolce & Gabbana, whose clothes she seems to mix with everything, she is a breath of fresh air in a sea of scowling, black-clad fashion editors. They remember her as 'a character' when they were students, and are happy they now contribute to the Piaggi look. 'We love Anna!' they say. 'She is a true style icon, a woman who has a personal and recognisable style. She is creative, eccentric and unpredictable, with a great knowledge of the history of fashion.'
And here she is, this fashion icon, making me feel quite at home in her apartment. Her living room is filled with birdsong from the trees outside her balcony and the sweet scent of Chanel No 5 hangs heavily in the air. She has only been living here for a few years after moving out of the home she had shared with her late husband, the photographer, Alfa Castaldi.
They married in New York in 1962 and worked together until his death in 1995. She is still adjusting to life without him. She refers to their old apartment a lot. It was where she would style models for the illustrator Antonio, to draw from life when they were working together on the avant-garde magazine Vanity in the 1980s, and where she and Castaldi lived, loved, worked and entertained. 'We were in the apartment for 40 years - on two floors. Three years ago, I was really pushed out. It was traumatic.
The house was falling apart, but it was full of life.' So she found this one-bedroom apartment in an old 14th century convent, with an office, an archive room, a walk-in wardrobe and a living room with a balcony overlooking nothing but trees. The place is fantastically lived in - a rich jumble of exquisite Arts and Crafts furniture, hat boxes (stacks of them), an incredible Venetian glass chandelier, paintings, photographs, drawings, collections of Art Nouveau glass, invitations, and of course, clothes. Everywhere.
She stops at a wardrobe in the hallway, and opens the door. Hanging inside is a selection of clothes that would make any costume curator from the V&A pass out. But she doesn't treat them like museum pieces, although she is occasionally asked to lend clothes for exhibitions. She wears her rare, 100-year-old Poiret pieces just as she does her new pieces of Pucci, or the funny jersey sweatshirt she bought on her recent trip to Paris for the haute couture shows. She refers to them simply as 'friends'. 'They are all things that have many lives,' she says. 'They have already lived.'
And they will continue to live as long as she continues to wear them as irreverently and eclectically as she does. She is like a child with a dressing-up box. It is what she calls 'professional play.' There is no chronological order. 'They are mixed up. This is how I live. I don't have them in themes. For example, this is a Poiret... no, this is Lanvin. This is 1920s Chanel...' She shows me a skirt made by Sonia Delaunay, made for a production of Fokine's Cleopatra by the Ballets Russes in 1909.
And then she unceremoniously drags a bundle of sequins from the bottom of the cupboard. Her assistant, Moreno, looks alarmed and tries to rescue it from her. 'This is the very first one, and was one of the most important presents my husband made me because this was Karl Lagerfeld, 1968. I remember I was crazy about this dress and we waited until it came back from the fashion shows and it was on sale.' The sequins depict a multi-coloured jukebox. It is very bright, very bold, very Piaggi.
Back in the living room, there is another rail of clothes. She is preparing outfits for the shoot for these pages, and is packing a suitcase for a trip to Massaciuccoli in Tuscany, where her trusted make-up artist Roberto Pagnini lives. There's a 1956 fuchsia pink cape by Simonetta; a newspaper-print blouson by Galliano for autumn/winter 2004/5 (she gets to wear the clothes before they are even in the shops). 'We are so lucky to have a designer who is incredibly genius, like Galliano,' she says. 'He makes the newspaper look like a joy.' There is a dress by Karl Lagerfeld for Chloe in the 1970s. There is a Poiret that belonged to the Marchioness Curzon, the Vicereine of India in the 1920s. 'This lady was very tall, you see when I put it on.'
A portrait of one of Poiret's other famous clients, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, hangs on the wall next to us. She is just one of the 1,001 people and things that inspire Piaggi to dress the way she does. Every dress has a story. The Ossie Clarke with the Celia Birtwell print was the dress Piaggi was wearing when she first met Karl Lagerfeld. 'I went to accompany the art director of Uomo Vogue to meet Karl, and I met him in front of his house on rue de l'Universite, and I was wearing this dress. He said, "Oh, you are wearing Ossie Clarke." So it was Ossie Clarke who introduced us.
This happens to me all the time.' Her clothes are a form of graphic communication. According to Blahnik, Piaggi dresses to entertain other people. If she is meeting somebody, she will think about what to wear that might be relevant to them in some way. And it's true. When she attended the British Fashion Awards some years ago, she turned up in her own version of a Pearly Queen, her tribute to London. For our photo shoot, she chooses a Galliano dress with newspaper print, and she even goes as far as to call her hat maker, Stephen Jones, to make a hat for the occasion out of the front page of The Observer. It arrives the afternoon of our interview, and it is like Christmas as she opens the box and pulls it out from its tissue-paper nest.
She is thrilled that there is a picture of Prince William on it. 'I thought about The Observer, and it makes me think of something really journalistic,' she laughs. 'You know, so I'm not going to dress like Marie Antoinette in the 18th century.'
She puts the hat on over the bandana and the diamante bow and declares it perfect. Jones is used to getting calls from Piaggi asking for hats to be made for special occasions - usually with just a day to do it. He first met her in the early 1980s, when she was editing Vanity, which used illustrations by Antonio Lopez, and became a cult in the three years Piaggi edited it. 'Even then, Anna was an icon,' remembers Jones. 'I was excited to meet her. I knew there was this extraordinary Italian lady who dressed up, but was also in the thick of the European fashion world. She was like Diana Vreeland.'
Since then, Jones has made countless hats for her - in the past few years, about one every six weeks. 'She'll tell me something like she's going to New Zealand to launch a yacht, and she's leaving the day after tomorrow. The thing about making hats for her is it's a frame for her face. There's a lightness of spirit. My hats cheer her up. She's quite petite and the hats are meant to be seen from one metre, not from 20ft away.'
She likes small hats. In her own way, she is quite practical. Jones's favourite was a small trilby in orange metal that looked like polished copper. She wore it with a silver coat. 'It looked amazing,' he says. 'I think the coat was a thermal one for mountain rescue. It doesn't have to be Dior with Anna. She's always worn 1920s shoes with Dolce trousers and a vintage Patou coat and a plastic belt, and a ski pole for a walking stick and crazy blue hair and a funny hat. She's about the possibility of what fashion can be. It's not about chic, or a grand gesture, as it was with Diana Vreeland. With Anna it's about fun and interest and frivolity. It's her crazy jumble of things. But it's actually not at all crazy and not at all a jumble. It's very disciplined.'
She talks me through her vast archive of Polaroids and photographs, pictures of her in various modes of dress, or out and about with her fabulous fashion friends. There she is with Manolo; with Antonio; with Diana Vreeland; with Vern in Venice; with Tai and Rosita Missoni; and walking along the street in Paris, laughing with Karl Lagerfeld.
Over the years, she has become a kind of muse and source of inspiration to him. 'The first drawing was made on a paper napkin in a Chinese restaurant in Paris,' she says. 'In the introduction to the book, he wrote: "Anna is wonderful. She is a graphic person. She is not pretty... she is worse." She laughs her deep, infectious laugh. 'I love it. This was a quotation belonging to a French actress. "She's not pretty, she's worse!"' More deep laughter. 'This is his sense of humour. A good part of the rapport was that I was drawable.
This is true.' We stop at a portrait with big, flicky, Dallas hair. 'This is me for a passport in 1980. I look like I'm wanted!' she laughs. 'Is incredible! Really. Very Eighties.' This is the only picture where you can actually pinpoint the time when it was taken. The others all have a timeless quality about them, partly because she belongs to no time but her own, where the beginning of the 20th century collides with the beginning of the 21st.
And then, in the middle of her 'Florence Nightingale attitude' nurse's outfit ( First World War Red Cross jacket, topped off with a Burberry print trilby), her black and white outfits, her Elton John glasses, her cheap holiday souvenir fans, the outfit she accessorised with a copy of the Gazzetta Dello Sport from her hotel room and a Mickey Mouse bag bought on Canal Street, we come to a portrait of a young woman in a very proper tweed skirt and a twin set. 'This was in England, in Buckinghamshire in the Fifties. I was staying with a cousin, visiting relatives. You can see the twin set and the tweed skirt.' There is a stunned silence.
Can this really be the same woman? 'So you like to see how I was before?' Well yes, of course! It's fascinating. What happened, I wonder, between the Fifties and the early Seventies when Karl Lagerfeld deemed her so 'drawable'? How did she undergo such a drastic transformation? What happened, it seems, was London and the Swinging Sixties.
Anna Piaggi was born in Milan to a very academic family. Her grandfather was a teacher and a translator of Latin and Greek and her father, who was a manager and buyer for La Rinascente department store, died when she was just seven. 'My mother was very, very clever, a great sense of humour, great dignity. She was naturally elegant, quite handsome.' She sent the young Anna to a boarding school outside Milan. She had a strict, classical education. 'It was a little bit restricting. I wanted to have experiences of my own. It was rather academic ... severe.' The perfect place to plant the seeds of nonconformity in a young girl's mind. 'I was very good at school, but finally I started to travel on my own and to be an au pair and look after children.' She travelled to learn languages and assert her independence. 'Before, I was a little bit conventional, bourgeois. But it didn't last very long.'
She met her husband, Alfa Castaldi, in the corridors of the press agency in Milan where she was working as a translator. She shows me a photograph of him in the Fifties, drinking on the pavement outside a cafe. 'He was always dressed up, and always in Army and Navy. It was 1955/56. This cafe was wonderful. It was called Bar Giamaica. This was a meeting place for artists, painters and photographers, and my husband was hanging out there a lot. He was a bohemian, but so clever. One of the most cultivated persons I ever met.'
In the early Sixties she began to work as a fashion editor on the monthly magazine, Arianna. It was then that she began working with her husband, and then that she began travelling regularly to London. 'I used to go and look around at the shops in London in the Sixties. I saw 87 boutiques in one weekend.' She found the people very welcoming (this probably says more about her than about them) and got invited to parties, and gradually became part of a circle of friends. She worked with David Bailey, who even took a snap of her for her press card for Biba, which, of course, she still has.
She also met the fabulous eccentric Vern Lambert, who had a stall at Chelsea Antique Market, selling Art Nouveau clothing. The two soon became inseparable. 'I learnt a lot in that period.' Together, they visited the auction rooms and the shops, buying up many of the pieces of antique and vintage clothing that now hang in storage (her assistant Moreno says she has over a thousand items), waiting for the moment when Piaggi will decide to revisit them. And, of course, as she bought the clothes, she wore them.
She attributes her success and enjoyment in life to three men: her beloved husband Alfa Castaldi in Milan; Vern Lambert in London; and Karl Lagerfeld in Paris. It was, she says, 'a triangle of extraordinary people' all linked by a passion for clothes, history and culture. Unbelievable as it may seem, she is - in her own way - very down to earth. When she needs some quiet time to switch off, she settles down into the well-worn hollow of her ancient, gnarled and scuffed old chesterfield, which has been casually covered with a camouflage blanket, and simply turns on the TV. She enjoys life.
She obviously enjoys dressing up. But she insists that her clothes - despite the fact that they should probably be listed as part of Italy's national heritage - are 'just frivolities'. Lightness and air, and the joy of living, are what she is all about. And of course, her pages for Vogue. They are simply an expression of how she is feeling and what she is thinking at any given time. 'She knows exactly what is going to happen,' says Blahnik. 'She is modern beyond belief.'
And as we set out to lunch, she shrugs on her new Pucci jacket by Christian Lacroix, perches a tiny little straw trilby on the top of her head, pulls on her bright-blue fishnet fingerless gloves, takes hold of her funny, child's walking cane, and she's complete. And I think Blahnik is right. She is modern. Looking at her is like surfing 40 TV channels at once. She's electric. And off she trips, down the stairs, in a world all her own.
) so i am not really familiar with Ms. Piaggi. She does seem very cool though.
But I will say,somehow you only see this at big titles where they can afford to have an incredible amount of staff members. But I don't know.
