Incroyable
Member
- Joined
- Nov 17, 2003
- Messages
- 595
- Reaction score
- 0
Also perhaps Pat Field, and Carrie Donovan to an extent.
Anna Piaggi
- Thread starter kit
- Start date
Also perhaps Pat Field, and Carrie Donovan to an extent.
Anna Piagi is totally crazy but adorable, also notice uber chic blond Franca S. -queen of style and chief editor of Vogue Italia- sitting next to Anna P.
(excuses to scott, but i cant say the same for Diane P. who looks just the same all the time, she's pretty boring dressed in the same black clothes season in season out... )
(excuses to scott, but i cant say the same for Diane P. who looks just the same all the time, she's pretty boring dressed in the same black clothes season in season out... )
In person she's also quite mystifying... She is always like in a "limbo"...definetely not the real-business-girl to talk to. I remember there was a hardcover book published by Lagerfeld with aquarel drawings in which Anna (head to toe in couture Jean Patou...) was at Lagerfelds kitchen, washing a lettuce while Lagerfelds boyfriend at the time (Mr. Jacques de Bascher) was slicing some potatoes. Glamorous !!!!
MissMagAddict
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2005
- Messages
- 26,630
- Reaction score
- 1,309
Daily Telegraph UK Jan 15th 2006
The not so mad hatter
Anna Piaggi wears binoculars to the office, dead pigeons to parties, and outré headgear absolutely everywhere. Yet the most surprising thing about the kooky-looking fashion maven is her utter sanity, finds Lucy Cavendish
Anna Piaggi, the seventysomething style icon and fashion journalist, comes to the door of her Milan apartment looking like a cross between Gloria Swanson and Miss Havisham. Her face is painted like an ageing marionette's, caked in powder with high circular rouged blobs on her cheeks and lipstick painted on her lips in an inverted V. She's a riot of colour, sporting a rich golden velvet frilly frock coat by John Galliano with a hugemirrored dragonfly brooch pinned on to her waist. On her head she wears a Union Jack bowler hat made by the milliner Stephen Jones. On her feet she has Union Jack ankle socks and on her hands, bright pink fingerless mittens. She appears somehow semi-tragic, like an out-of-work pantomime dame. 'I hate the word icon,' she tells me in her heavily accented Italian-English. 'How can anyone be an icon? But… yes… it is hard to find another word.'
After a fashion: Anna Piaggi in her office last month Icon, pantomime dame, call her what you will - Piaggi takes her work very seriously. She talks about how good fashion, in her eyes,must combine wit and cynicism; how impressed she is by designers who use historical references in their work. And she is also, despite her appearance, perfectly sane. 'Oh, all this,' she says waving her hand at her apparel, 'it's all dressing. I love clothes. I love lots of things but it is just a ruse maybe, a way of avoiding, of confusing people about who I am really.'
Indeed, so great is Piaggi's influence in the ephemeral world of fashion that, nextmonth, the V&A opens an exhibition dedicated to her life and work. 'It is a great honour,' says Piaggi. 'It's a wonderful thing but so exhausting! I have sorted out all my clothes and then written, how do you call it? Ah, yes, testimonials about them. I have no idea what people will think. I hope they enjoy it.'
So what is it about Piaggi thatmerits an exhibition at one of London's top museums? For a start, there is her work for Italian Vogue. She is revered for her agenda-setting monthly 'DP' fashion shoots where she highlights, well, anything she likes, really - a word, a feeling, a thought, something she has spotted in London, Paris, New York, the Tube, the subway, the collections, wherever. However, although her pages seem utterly idiosyncratic and a bit off-the-wall, Piaggi insists that they are highly disciplined. 'I am a very disciplined person,' she says. 'Fashion has to be a discipline or else it does not work.'
So she doesn't just look out of the window of her madly cluttered apartment full of Royal Doulton pottery and glass vases and ostrich feathers and a huge, incredible Murano glass chandelier with sketches of her by her friend Karl Lagerfeld decorating the walls and think, 'Oh, today I'll do something about the winter'? 'Oh no!' she says. 'I spend ages thinking about what I do and researching ideas. That's what I love about fashion, the designers who are intelligent, who give their clothes a bit of a twist. For me, Lagerfeld has always been brilliant at this. John Galliano is also clever.' Piaggi has also championed the careers of Manolo Blahnik, Dolce & Gabbana and Stephen Jones. Blahnik has said of her, 'She is the only authority on frocks left in the world.' Dolce & Gabbana described her as, 'Creative, eccentric and unpredictable.' Jones says, 'With Anna it's about fun, interest, frivolity.'
'I never wear the same thing twice in public''I have always liked to mix my look,' says Piaggi, in reply. 'Every dress tells a story. I am very careful about how I look. I never appear anywhere without make-up on. In fact, I never even go out of my bedroom without make-up. I never wear the same thing twice in public. I love hats and I love little canes and binoculars. It looks like everything is just put together in a haphazard way - but no, it is very carefully thought out. Karl Lagerfeld once held a ball and the theme was Venetian and everyone was dressing as doges but I decided to go as a fishwife. I balanced a wicker basket on my head filled with seaweed and crabs and I hung two pigeons I'd bought from the butcher round my neck but at midnight they started to bleed so I had to leave like Cinderella!'
Piaggi - who was born into an austere, bookish family in Milan - says there have been three significant men in her life: Karl Lagerfeld, her late husband the fashion photographer Alfa Castaldi, and the fabulous and eccentric fashion historian Vern Lambert who used to have a stall at Chelsea Antiques Market. It was Lambert who introduced Piaggi to vintage clothes. 'I was living in London in the early 1960s,' she says. 'And I loved it. London taught me how to take traditional fashion ideas and turn them around. In Italy we were all matching our handbags with our shoes, but in London you could wear anything! It was amazing. I used to go round all the markets and pick up anything. It shaped my style and my way of thinking and I love London for that.'
Piaggi used to accompany Lambert in his quest to seek out beautiful, rare clothes. 'We would go from country house to country house, and these women would go to their drawers and rustle around and then come out with these amazing dresses - Schiaparelli, Fortuny, Poiret - and they would be perfectly preserved because of the cold. Sometimes they were unworn and Vern would buy them and they were things of great beauty.'
Piaggi, however, doesn’t believe in wrapping her vast collection of clothes in tissue paper and never wearing them. 'Oh, my dear,' she says, 'I love to wear them. I have this poor Fortuny dress that is all tattered and torn but in a way in looks very now, a little bit punky, a little bit rococo. I use clothes as history. I have an Ossie Clark with the Celia Birtwell print and I remember that as the dress I was wearing when I first met Karl. That is how I view clothes. They have been my life.'
The not so mad hatter
Anna Piaggi wears binoculars to the office, dead pigeons to parties, and outré headgear absolutely everywhere. Yet the most surprising thing about the kooky-looking fashion maven is her utter sanity, finds Lucy Cavendish
Anna Piaggi, the seventysomething style icon and fashion journalist, comes to the door of her Milan apartment looking like a cross between Gloria Swanson and Miss Havisham. Her face is painted like an ageing marionette's, caked in powder with high circular rouged blobs on her cheeks and lipstick painted on her lips in an inverted V. She's a riot of colour, sporting a rich golden velvet frilly frock coat by John Galliano with a hugemirrored dragonfly brooch pinned on to her waist. On her head she wears a Union Jack bowler hat made by the milliner Stephen Jones. On her feet she has Union Jack ankle socks and on her hands, bright pink fingerless mittens. She appears somehow semi-tragic, like an out-of-work pantomime dame. 'I hate the word icon,' she tells me in her heavily accented Italian-English. 'How can anyone be an icon? But… yes… it is hard to find another word.'
Indeed, so great is Piaggi's influence in the ephemeral world of fashion that, nextmonth, the V&A opens an exhibition dedicated to her life and work. 'It is a great honour,' says Piaggi. 'It's a wonderful thing but so exhausting! I have sorted out all my clothes and then written, how do you call it? Ah, yes, testimonials about them. I have no idea what people will think. I hope they enjoy it.'
So what is it about Piaggi thatmerits an exhibition at one of London's top museums? For a start, there is her work for Italian Vogue. She is revered for her agenda-setting monthly 'DP' fashion shoots where she highlights, well, anything she likes, really - a word, a feeling, a thought, something she has spotted in London, Paris, New York, the Tube, the subway, the collections, wherever. However, although her pages seem utterly idiosyncratic and a bit off-the-wall, Piaggi insists that they are highly disciplined. 'I am a very disciplined person,' she says. 'Fashion has to be a discipline or else it does not work.'
So she doesn't just look out of the window of her madly cluttered apartment full of Royal Doulton pottery and glass vases and ostrich feathers and a huge, incredible Murano glass chandelier with sketches of her by her friend Karl Lagerfeld decorating the walls and think, 'Oh, today I'll do something about the winter'? 'Oh no!' she says. 'I spend ages thinking about what I do and researching ideas. That's what I love about fashion, the designers who are intelligent, who give their clothes a bit of a twist. For me, Lagerfeld has always been brilliant at this. John Galliano is also clever.' Piaggi has also championed the careers of Manolo Blahnik, Dolce & Gabbana and Stephen Jones. Blahnik has said of her, 'She is the only authority on frocks left in the world.' Dolce & Gabbana described her as, 'Creative, eccentric and unpredictable.' Jones says, 'With Anna it's about fun, interest, frivolity.'
Piaggi - who was born into an austere, bookish family in Milan - says there have been three significant men in her life: Karl Lagerfeld, her late husband the fashion photographer Alfa Castaldi, and the fabulous and eccentric fashion historian Vern Lambert who used to have a stall at Chelsea Antiques Market. It was Lambert who introduced Piaggi to vintage clothes. 'I was living in London in the early 1960s,' she says. 'And I loved it. London taught me how to take traditional fashion ideas and turn them around. In Italy we were all matching our handbags with our shoes, but in London you could wear anything! It was amazing. I used to go round all the markets and pick up anything. It shaped my style and my way of thinking and I love London for that.'
Piaggi used to accompany Lambert in his quest to seek out beautiful, rare clothes. 'We would go from country house to country house, and these women would go to their drawers and rustle around and then come out with these amazing dresses - Schiaparelli, Fortuny, Poiret - and they would be perfectly preserved because of the cold. Sometimes they were unworn and Vern would buy them and they were things of great beauty.'
Piaggi, however, doesn’t believe in wrapping her vast collection of clothes in tissue paper and never wearing them. 'Oh, my dear,' she says, 'I love to wear them. I have this poor Fortuny dress that is all tattered and torn but in a way in looks very now, a little bit punky, a little bit rococo. I use clothes as history. I have an Ossie Clark with the Celia Birtwell print and I remember that as the dress I was wearing when I first met Karl. That is how I view clothes. They have been my life.'
