Anna Piaggi


Anna Maria Piaggi was an Italian fashion writer and style icon. She was known for her bright blue hair, excessive make-up, which verged on clown-ish, and her sense of style that mixed vintage and contemporary fashion.

Career

Piaggi was born in Milan on 22 March 1931. She worked as a translator for an Italian publishing company Mondadori, then wrote for fashion magazines such as the Italian edition of Vogue and, in the 1980s, the avant-garde magazine Vanity. From 1988 she designed double page spreads in the Italian Vogue, where her artistic flair was given free expression in a montage of images and text, with layout by Luca Stoppini. These networks of images and ideas built upon Piaggi's awareness of fashion and art history to provide an open-ended attempt at understanding fashion designers' influences.
She used a bright red Olivetti "Valentina" manual typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass in 1969. Piaggi had a large clothes collection, including 2,865 dresses and 265 pairs of shoes, according to a 2006 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She dressed in an exuberant, unique and eclectic way, never appearing in the same outfit more than once in public.
Piaggi appeared in the documentary Bill Cunningham New York about The New York Times fashion and social photographer Bill Cunningham.
Her work and life is celebrated by her nephew Stefano Piaggi, president of the Associazione Culturale Anna Piaggi, who also promotes the film Anna Piaggi: Una Visionaria della Moda, directed by Alina Marazzi.

Personal life

Piaggi married the photographer Alfa Castaldi in 1962 in New York. Castaldi died in 1995. Piaggi died in Milan on 7 August 2012.

Books