Piaggi power

Sticking by her style: Anna Piaggi by David Bailey, AnOther Magazine, 2003

Crone is saddened by the news that Anna Piaggi died yesterday in Milan aged 81.  An influential fashion journalist, contributor to Vogue Italia  and sometime muse to Karl Lagerfeld no less, Piaggi was a rare thing indeed. Crone will never forget her first sighting, 30 years ago at the Paris collections (don’t ask me which benighted runway I was queuing for!) when Piaggi - a mere 50-something but already a legend aura’d by an army flashbulbs  - minced daintily past on the arm of her husband.  A diminutive figure, she nevertheless loomed large - a marvellously exotic burst of colour against the monotonously black, self-conscious fash pack.  What a relief, Crone thought, to see a flagrantly free spirit with the balls to suit herself.

Did she ever ask herself if her bum looked big or her thighs too chunky?  Did she ever torture herself with the notion that at her age, she might look a tad daft got up like that? Clearly not. Piaggi’s style was not contrived to make her look younger, sexier, taller or thinner, yet she evidently relished its sensuality. Her  liberated clash of colour and texture was strangely, thrillingly ageless.

Crone is reminded at this juncture of the much-quoted lines ‘When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple with a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me ….’   by poet Jenny Joseph (a disappointingly tetchy, tweedy creature who reputedly resents that her most famous poem, ‘Warning’ has eclipsed her more worthy oeuvres). As one of the nation’s best-loved odes, it strikes a chord for suggesting that one of the privileges of age is the license to behave battily. But what made Piaggi so unique was that she lived her whole life in colour and made discord a performance art. ‘I think it’s best not to be too co-ordinated,’ she once said. ‘Simplicity and excess live very well together.’

Piaggi’s passion for anti-fashion certainly burned bright. There’s this story about her involving fire extinguishers, when a fantastically feathered Stephen Jones hat she wore to Paloma Picasso’s wedding caught fire as she made her entrance, lit by candelabras. Did she literally belong to a dying breed?  Crone’s thinking of that other fabulous eccentric this time in Philip Treacey hats - British Vogue contributor Isabella Blow, who died in 2007.  Good thing we still have Zandra Rhodes and Vivienne Westwood - now 71 and 70 respectively - to remind us that individuality and spontaneity are the best looks in the style book.  Who, Crone wonders, will succeed them?

Mad hatter: 'It's best not to be too co-ordinated....'