ITALIAN
FRANCA SOZZANI Franca Sozzani, the powerhouse behind Italian Vogue, has made a singular mark on the world of fashion over the last 30 years.
After serving as an editor at both Vogue Bambini and the influential Italian fashion magazine Lei, Sozzani took over Italian Vogue in 1987, and since then, has transformed the magazine into a platform for celebrating the power of the image and of photography. In the process, she has helped reimagine the medium of the fashion magazine as a kind of cultural lightning rod, and has consistently used both fashion and fashion imagery as a vehicle for tackling social, political, and even environmental issues. Sozzani herself has served as a bit of a lightning rod, always capturing, recording, and at times preempting the zeitgeist. In the ’90s, she helped create the phenomenon of the supermodel with one of her closest long-term collaborators, Steven Meisel, and she has championed a tight-knit group of photographers such as Bruce Weber, Peter Lindbergh, and Paolo Roversi, working with them to develop a visual language for the magazine that continues to provide a mood board for the moment. Sozzani’s controversial 2008 “Black” issue, which featured only black models, was hotly debated and dissected both within the fashion world and beyond it, reigniting the conversation about racial diversity in fashion. In the aftermath of the BP spill in 2010, she published a story featuring model Kristen McMenamy wearing a fur coat and covered in oil. She has commissioned provocative studies of subjects such as the paparazzi and rehab clinics that have fearlessly taken on the obsessions, addictions, and crises of contemporary culture with a lightness and humor that only serves to magnify the message behind them. Pure Fashion
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