Anna Piaggi

I promised a post about an influential woman, and I had a look at some on the recommended list and Anna Piaggi immediately stood out to me. She was born in Milan in 1931 and didn’t initially have an interest in fashion, it wasn’t until she met husband, and photographer, Alfa Castoldi that she begun to consider a career in the fashion industry. She wrote for Italian Vogue, then in the 80’s she started working for avant-garde magazine Vanity.

She loved experimenting with her style claimed never to have worn the same outfit in public twice, but that was because she revisited her wardrobe, adding to and rearranging items to make up fresh stories and keeping Polaroids of what had already been tried. Her wardrobe was colossal. ‘In 2006, when the Victoria & Albert’s exhibition “Anna Piaggi Fashion-ology” showed her collection of vintage couture and designer clothing (including garments by Balenziaga, Fendi, Galliano and Poiret), visitors were informed that she had 265 pairs of shoes, 932 hats, nearly 3,000 dresses and 31 feather boas.’

She was a muse to Karl Lagerfeld (another favourite icon of mine). He said of her in 1978, “It is not so much the details in her clothes that inspire me directly. It is the exquisite blend of sophistication with this healthy peasant mind.” Lagerfeld would draw Anna, with his sketches found in his book… He drew her for more than a decade and in 2009 she said “if he liked how I looked, he took out his pencils, if not, he said nothing.”

Hollie Rose x