Why Franca Sozzani was the Pope of fashion
Franca Sozzani, the revolutionary editor of Vogue Italia who has died aged 66, was consistently unorthodox, irreverent, and radical. Luke Leitch writes in tribute to the woman who changed fashion forever
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When Franca Sozzani - who passed away yesterday - was made Knight of the Légion d’Honneur four years ago, a crowd gathered at the Italian embassy in Paris to toast the moment. Karl Lagerfeld, Domenico Dolce, Stefano Gabbana, Roberto Cavalli and Haider Ackermann were amongst those charging their glasses. Before they could raise them, Jonathan Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast International, made a speech in tribute to the woman who had become editor of Vogue Italia in 1988.
At turns both tender and funny, Newhouse’s speech covered his first impression when, in 1989, he first met “this tiny, fragile looking woman who could not have weighed more than 50 kilos.”
“45!” Sozzani interjected, to laughs.
Newhouse added: “A Hollywood director creating the image of a chic fashion editor could not have invented a more glamorous, arresting personification. Only Franca was the real thing.” He ran through just a few her achievements - noting a time when Giorgio Armani, no less, had waited in the corridor outside her office in the hope of showing her his latest samples - before concluding by describing her as: “the high priestess of Vogue and the Pope of fashion.”
If Franca Sozzani was the Pope of fashion then her rule was anything but Catholic - her 28-year-long editorship was consistently unorthodox, irreverent, and radical. Controversy often swirled around the editorials she commissioned from a close-knit camarilla of photographers to whom she gave total creative freedom and enduring support; these included collaborator-in-chief Steven Meisel, Peter Lindbergh, Paolo Roversi and Bruce Weber. While she never - she insisted - courted controversy for the sake of it, she was entirely undaunted when it arose. As she told WWD in 2011: “we can’t all agree; if we all did, where would controversy be? If there is no controversy, there is no opinion.”
That quote applied to the personal blog she wrote on Vogue.It, her title’s website, but Vogue Italia’s pages were no less opinionated. Fashion photography, however, is far less precise a vehicle for delivering opinion than language: furthermore what it lacks in precision it makes up for in its potential for visceral impact. Thus some of Sozzani’s most powerful Vogue Italia stories were also its most powerfully divisive.
Take Makeover Madness, a Steven Meisel shoot from 2005 that portrayed models including Linda Evangelista, Missy Rider and Jessica Stam wearing the season’s finest red-carpet fare while on the operating table receiving botox, rhinoplasty and liposuction. The following year Meisel’s State of Emergency story showed its models being aggressively body-searched by armoured police personnel and taking part in target practice alongside them. In 2007 Meisel produced Make Love Not War, a portfolio of soldier-surrounded models in some unnamed desert army base that was judged by The Guardian (with a tangible relish marred only by regret at being unable to show a gallery of the images themselves) to be “the most nauseatingly tasteless fashion pictures ever.” In 2010 Meisel’s Water & Oil shoot showed Kristen McMenamy as an oil-slicked seabird in human form, helpless on the seashore, even as 4.9 million barrels of crude was still leaking from BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform. And in 2014 the truly disturbing Meisel editorial Horror Movie was a sincere effort at decrying both domestic violence against women and its cultural normalisation.
All of these, and other Sozzani-conceived shoots, were variously condemned for "glamourising" - or sometimes sexualising - the very subjects that they were envisaged to parody or critique. Partly that was down to the differently set cultural barometers of Sozzani’s Italy compared to the US and UK (both reliably the source the most anguished criticisms). More significantly, it was due to a wider preconception - often shared by those who take their seriousness extremely seriously - that fashion must be inherently trivial: Sozzani consistently challenged that assumption, and provoked howls of outrage from those whose prejudice it offended.
Perhaps the most controversial issue of all Sozzani’s Vogue Italia’s was 2008’s Black. Shot again by Meisel, who also photographed every single one of her cover images - and published as Barack Obama campaigned in his first presidential campaign - it was cast entirely with black models. Critics called it racist, or a tokenistic exercise and a ghettoisation. As Sozzani recalled when I interviewed her in 2014: “But the point was to highlight the lack of diversity. I was looking at the catwalks, and there were no black girls. And I just could not believe that there were not many, many beautiful black models.” Reprinted twice, that issue was Vogue Italia’s best-selling ever.
Sozzani took a roundabout route into fashion. Born in Mantua in 1950 she studied philosophy and German literature at university in Milan before marrying aged 22, then divorcing three months later. She had travelled - visits to London in the late Sixties influenced her profoundly she said - before her elder sister Carla, the founder of 10 Corso Como who previously worked for Vogue, helped her get a junior assistant’s job at Vogue Bambini (an imprint of the title dedicated to childrenswear) in 1976. In 1980 she was named editor of Lei (later folded into Italian Glamour) and two years afterwards added a menswear sibling named Per Lui to her portfolio. At these titles she began formulating a recipe later to be perfected at Vogue, working closely with photographers such as Weber and Lindbergh and models including Brooke Shields and Milla Jovovich.
In 1988 Sozzani was appointed to Vogue Italia, which had been founded in 1964 after being rebranded from from its previous name of Novità. In its early days, Sozzani recalled, the magazine was “more of a trade magazine - focused stories about shoes and bags. But they always used important photographers: Newton, Watson, sometimes even Avedon.” Under her watch, she planned from the off to “change the emphasis, to make it more a magazine of style. The only problem was that we publish in Italian, which is a beautiful language but very niche. So the image had to become Vogue's language. Because when you see a beautiful image, you do not have to read anything to understand it.” As she later observed in the same interview: “'Today, everybody is using Instagram, but 26 years ago we started with the idea of doing the same thing on paper.”
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Initially, her changes sparked consternation amongst the advertisers and - it has been reported - catalysed the occasional frank exchange of views between her and Newhouse. But in time Sozzani’s Vogue became an integral cog in the commercial system of fashion, for which her championed photographers contributed campaign after campaign. She was named Editorial Director of Condé Nast Italy in 1994 and in 2006 became editor of L’Uomo Vogue.
Although an extremely powerful figure in the world of fashion she wore that power extremely lightly. While at the shows, often attired in an air-con defying cardigan plus skirt and kitten heels (she preferred to buy her own clothes, and hoard new season pieces awhile before wearing them), Sozzani was eminently approachable - she would happily consider a reporter’s question, a generosity for which this reporter was regularly grateful. Those who knew her far more profoundly have already penned affecting tributes - such as Anna Wintour, Jonathan Newhouse and Suzy Menkes
- and the completed-only-this-April film entitled Franca: Chaos and Creation, directed by her son Francesco Carrozzini, promises an even deeper insight into the worldview of this unconventionally brilliant editor. My closest connection to Sozzani was, like most people’s with an interest in fashion, through the pages the magazine she dedicated 28 years to: I would always pay my five euros for it while heading home from Linate airport. This week I picked up the December issue, number 796: It’s dedicated to dogs - dogs! - and on the plane it made me laugh and look at the clothes shot in it afresh.
When interviewed this August by Lynn Yaeger of Vogue Runway about her son’s film, Sozzani was as unrepentantly sure of her path as ever. She said: “Why can’t a fashion magazine talk about what’s happening in the world? Market researchers always say, 'Do this, do that.' I did the exact opposite of what they said. I don’t think that today a fashion magazine can only show you the clothes, and that’s it.”
