BEFORE - Becoming Anna Piaggi
Anna Piaggi | Luca Bruno, 2009
I never understood why people called Anna Piaggi original. Daring, or startling, or playful, absolutely - but with her highwayman's boots and perched pierrot hats, silk robes and Madame Arcati cloaks she seemed so utterly a period piece; an eccentric shipwreck, adrift on front rows steeped in next-season black. Everything about her seemed to collage freeze-frames from the past; Vita Sackville-West dressed as a primped, aristocratic boy for Woolf's Orlando; Nancy Cunard, swathed in stripes and noisy with clashing bangles; Edith Sitwell masking her ugly-duckling heartache under the guise of a triumphantly haughty peacock; Elsa Schiaparelli daring the world to mock her poised, startling artifice. A century before, Henry James could have been talking about Piaggi when he described the Countess Gemini in The Portrait of A Lady;
'Her attire, voluminous and delicate, bristling with elegance, had the look of shimmering plumage, and her attitudes were as light and sudden as those of a creature who perched upon twigs. She had a great deal of manner . . . her demonstrations suggested the violent waving of some flag of general truce - white silk with fluttering streamers.'
I only saw her once, at a 2006 Versace show in Milan, wincing before a battery of camera flashes. All I remember thinking was that she looked lonely - as though that restless flurry of canes and reticules and capes, that rouged face and blue-waved hair were plates of protective armour, sheltering the tiny, tired old woman inside.
And like most people, I knew her far more for her wardrobe than for the half-century's worth of writing, editing, styling and commissioning she'd produced. Those clothes; a spectacular patchwork explosion of fin-de-siécle and cutting edge, couture and salvage, which (whatever the combination, no matter how outlandish) always contrived to look somehow exactly the same. And whatever that wardrobe represented (disguise, defense, defiance, or simply a love of dressing up), Piaggi remained - start to end - out-of-time.
'Start' is a funny word, though. Anna Maria Piaggi 'started' when she was born in Milan in 1931; the same age as James Dean, Anita Ekberg and Leslie Caron. She was a year older than Rosita Missoni, and two years older than Krizia's Mariuccia Mandelli - two other women who would reshape Italian fashion and femininity in very different ways. But that first incarnation - the intelligent, convent-educated translator who worked at the Mondadori publishing house - got lost somewhere in an unphotographed past. In the late Fifties, she met and married photographer Alfa Castaldi, and stumbled into the bohemian new world of Italian fashion. Together with Castaldi and Anna Riva, she made her first tentative moves into styling, working for magazines like Arianna and Vogue Italia. And at some point during those early years of married life, Piaggi visited London.
And London seemed to definitively reshape her. She visited, when everyone who was anyone visited, at the height of the Sixties. And the people she met then (flamboyant young shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, legendary fashion historian and collector Vern Lambert, provocateur shop-owner Vivienne Westwood, and radical romantic Zandra Rhodes) would form enduring presences in her life. Together with Lambert she scoured the city, raiding early-morning markets and hip boutiques and country house attics with equal appetite. It must have been a release, as it was to anyone who'd grown up in a gray, postwar Europe, to suddenly have everything - treasure or tat - so utterly and immediately available. And Piaggi absorbed and amassed it all, no matter how incongruous or anachronistic.
She was, of course, something of an incongruous anachronism herself. She was in her late thirties when she met Lambert, Blahnik and Lagerfeld, and nearly fifty when she discovered Stephen Jones and the Blitz kids. She whirled between cities and decades and generations, descending from trains with steamer trunks full of vintage gowns and flea-market baubles. Yet, looking across the images of her intensely recorded career, you reach a point where you notice the spectacular outfits less, and the people she's with more. It's difficult to look at Lagerfeld's Chanel without seeing the ghosts of Piaggi's presence and influence (the delicate, wispy froth he's injected has become as much part of the label as Coco's monochrome severity), just as it's impossible to imagine Westwood's increasingly regal anarchy, or Jones' toppling headpieces, or Isabella Blow's brittle, theatrical defiance. And you notice the people who suddenly, silently aren't there; the ones, like Castaldi or Lambert or Antonio Lopez, whose presences made her aesthetic a playful pas-de-deux, not a work of unicorn eccentricity - and whose sudden absences are as final as any tombstone.
On the 14th August the Italian blog Humorchic published a post on Piaggi's death. She died alone, in the night, on the floor of the small Via Capuccio apartment she'd moved to when she'd become a widow. Two days later, less than a hundred people attended her funeral at the local basilica. It seemed a bleak, solitary end to a life that had been so vibrantly engaged; the well-bred Milanese girl who fell in love with Sixties London (and transfixed Seventies Paris); who danced all night with Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent, and nurtured Albini, Blahnik and Ferré; who scooped everything she could grasp into her arms as she went; and who smiled into Bill Cunningham's lens at every fashion week through it all. And whether she was ahead of (or behind) her time, or simply one of its' must vivid incarnations, her magpie-eye, witchball view of fashion - reflecting the world back at itself with chaotic, unerring accuracy - may be the thing that endures long after the things she wrapped herself in have turned to dust.
Appuntamento d'Aprile | styled by Anna Piaggi and Anna Riva for Arianna magazine, photographed by Alfa Castaldi, 1965
http://1972projects.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/before-becoming-anna-piaggi.html
