The friendship between Karl Lagerfeld and Anna Piaggi

Before the advent of the digital revolution and before the word storytelling took root in the mental encyclopaedia of every Web 2.0 native, fashion was mainly told on catwalks and in newspapers. From these two universes, separated only by the calendar of a fashion week and an upcoming editorial, come two great creatives of the international scene: Anna Piaggi and Karl Lagerfeld. United by a totalising and highly ambitious vision of fashion, Anna and Karl shared a friendship that went beyond the front row.

She was a fashion journalist for Vogue Italia, Vanity Fair and Il Messaggero who treated fashion like a text from which «she took a word in English and then added a slightly Latin ending or a Frenchisation, which she then bastardised with some Italian to create an atmospheric-sounding word for her pages, for her vision of that month». He is a designer who vacillates between the rigour typical of those who take their talent seriously and the lightness associated with fashion. His motto can be summed up in the phrase: «A sketch is better than needles, threads and lots of words». The connection between the two was almost inevitable: for Karl, fashion was never an art in itself, but rather an illustration of contemporaneity in three hundred and sixty degrees. An illustration that, for Anna Piaggi, followed a precise and recognisable aesthetic canon that completely overlaid the poetics of dandyism. Anna was a fashion curator ante litteram, Karl the creative director par excellence. «Then she met Karl Lagerfeld and it was another great love, very fruitful. At Anna and Alfa's house, everyone came by: that's where I met Karl, Walter Albini, Paloma Picasso, Ken Scott. It was an incredible time! In Alfa's studio, which was completely covered with tin foil like Warhol's factory, there was also Antonio Lopez. That's how I grew up: what I know about fashion, I owe to them!» Carla Sozzani told Vogue Italia. What remains of this friendship are sketches made by Karl himself between 1973 and 1984, in which Anna's body and image are the narrative pretext for talking about nothing but fashion. The first time it happened was almost by accident, when he used a napkin from a Chinese restaurant to depict an Anna Piaggi with a fan and the distinctive wavy forelock, freshly cut in Vidal Sassoon's London salon. From then on, the drawings multiplied and took the form of ink sketches or watercolours, mostly done at home - Brittany, Monte Carlo, Paris, Rome, Florence or London were the reference sites - to immortalise the dress manifesto of a graphically irreverent creative. The result was a kind of talking portfolio, later curated by the Fondazione Sozzani and the Anna Piaggi Cultural Association and turned into an exhibition in 2021.
Anna Piaggi was not simply a muse or a model for Karl Lagerfeld: she was the living embodiment of what fashion meant to the designer on a deep level. Judith Clark, who devoted an extensive exhibition to the person of Anna Piaggi in 2006 (Fashionology), recounts «how the splendour of her clothes was not directly proportional to the 'event': on the contrary, it happened that she reserved her most sensational outfits for an intimate informal lunch at Lagerfeld's house, matching the eighteenth-century furniture, and that she might go to a masquerade ball in a mistress's dress instead». «Anna Piaggi knew and loved fashion. She used it as a place to fantasise and define her own personal dress design. She was not extravagant», adds Maria Luisa Frisa.

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A scenario that, if one wanted to repeat its logic today, would suffer from a marketability or pr strategy that has nothing to do with the spontaneity of a creative impulse in the broadest sense. What also remains of this friendship is the memory of a publishing industry that was able to shape the fashion system in a much more pervasive way by making decisions - is that what luxury is all about? - far from predictability and aiming to provide a sounding board for a brand's values. Anna wanted to be the author of a style that is literally unreproducible, transforming fashion into a temporal spectrum that can be used freely and consciously. Karl was about freeing himself from the burden of everyday life and developing a visually appealing language. Some would say that Anna Piaggi and Karl Lagerfeld were privileged - the process of mythologisation that affected both figures certainly exaggerated some aspects of them - because they shaped the images of an era that was perceived as less unpleasant. Who knows if this was actually the case. One would have to question them, question their views once again. Here, however, we can at best hint at them.