About

Journalist and fashion writer, muse to designers and fashion enthusiasts, fashion icon and collector of garments from all eras and styles. Anna Piaggi lived through 50 years of International ​fashion history, influencing and dictating trends, experimenting, searching and drawing inspiration and references for her extraordinary story from a plethora of fields: art and design, cooking and cinema, theatre and botany...  
always with her unique style, characterized by elaborate words games, linguistic divertissement, cryptic synthesis. Her innate aesthetic sensibility, together with a deep culture of the image, allowed her to create visions and descriptions absolutely original and previsional. She began her career as a translator for Mondadori, then she collaborated with Epoca and Panorama magazines. From 1961 to 1968 she has been the fashion editor at Arianna magazine, on whose pages, along with her husband Alfa Castaldi, and her friend Anna Riva, created beautiful and modern fashion editorials showing her great talent and creative genius. From the late 60s she began contributing to Vogue Italia, creating ravishing fashion editorials, from 1974 to 1979 she authored the column ‘Box’ with illustrations by Karl Lagerfeld. A close friendship with the German designer, who portrayed her in many drawings, culminated in the publication of the book “Anna-chronique”, a fashion visual diary dedicated to her unique way of wearing. From 1988 until 2012, when she died, she has been writing  a column entitled “Le Doppie Pagine di Anna Piaggi”  for Vogue Italia, followed every month by her numerous and devoted admirers around the world. In 1999, her second book, an edited collection of a decade of “Doppie Pagine” articles, called “Fashion Algebra”, is published. In 2006 the Victoria & Albert Museum in London dedicated to her the exhibition “Fashion-ology”, in 2013 the Associazione Culturale Anna Piaggi, in collaboration with Municipality of Milan, organized  “Hat-ology, Anna Piaggi and her hats” exhibition.

As Bill Cunningham, New York Times photographer, declared when Anna passed away: “A hundred years from now people will gonna give a damn about the commercial fashion as we know it today, they will wanna know who was this woman!”