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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2010
At Vogue Italia, a broadened horizon
franca from E1
Vogue Italia is an insider’s magazine, and where it goes, American magazines will follow —albeit with far less nudity. In July 2008, Sozzani pub-
lished an attention-grabbing all- black issue of her magazine. She followed that with a tribute to Africa in sister publication L’Uomo Vogue. She developed a whimsical special-edition ode to black Barbie. And this spring, she launched Vogue Black, aWeb site devoted to black models, design- ers, stylists and other players in the creative field. To feed the new Internet channel, she dispatched black photographers and writers to cover the recent collections in NewYork and Europe. “One day I saw her and went
over to say hello and she said, ‘If I never see another black person . . . !’ ” recalls her friend Bethann Hardison, who is black, with a laugh. “You can only feel comfort- able saying something like that because you’re invested. You re- late.” Sozzani also started Vogue
Curvy, a site that focuses on plus-size fashion. The Black Issue that launched
her on this path was a way to talk about diversity in fashion, but also about diversity and accep- tance in general. “The issue made, for me, a special point,” Sozzani says. “When you talk about fashion, you are also talk- ing about many things. . . . I wanted to give a message. “Even young people are very
conventional.They are very bour- geois, generally speaking. But they buy Vogue, people who would never buy other things. They discover it’s not bourgeois discourse. It’s art and life.” And, perhaps, through fashion their viewof life will be broadened and changed. Sozzani’s activism, while mod-
MARIA VALENTINO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
NEWTERRITORY: “She’s a crusader. She probably doesn’t think so, but she is,” says friend Bethann Hardison of Franca Sozzani, above, who worked withHardison to launchVogue Black in February.
Image China –
Outstanding Chinese Artists & Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
est in the great history of social upheaval, nonetheless is note- worthy because of the social cli- mate in which this global indus- try is operating and because of the outsize role that fashion occu- pies in the culture at large. Ques-
tions about public and personal identity are at the root of a host of international antagonisms. Italy is wrestling with immigration phobia; France is busy banning the burqa; and the United States is analyzing its “post-racial,” obese self. At issue in each case is how individuals define them- selves in the public space and how they want the world to see them. And within the porous con-
fines of the fashion industry, race has, in the past months, inspired public protests, self-conscious self-analysis and debates about what constitutes racism and sizeism and what should be clas- sified as ignorance. In the midst of this storm of
fretfulness and rebuke stands Sozzani, a diminutive, 60-year- old white editor who grew up in the northern Italian city of Man- tua.
“She’s creative, but she’s also
open,” says Hardison, a former model and model agency owner. “There’s a lot of creative people out there and they don’t do this. “She’s a crusader,” Hardison
says. “She probably doesn’t think so, but she is.”
The Black Issue As the editor of Vogue Italia —
and the head of its Italian siblings that report on menswear and jewelry—Sozzani makes up one- third of fashion’s holy trinity of Vogue czars. The others are French Vogue’s Carine Roitfeld and Anna Wintour, the devil who doth wear Prada. Roitfeld enjoys the smell of cigarette smoke, lurks behind a side-swept curtain of brunette hair and favors pencil skirts, stilettos and tight-fitting jackets — a wardrobe that would best be described as painful. The mythology surrounding
the publicly inscrutable Wintour is such that few bat an eye when she arrives at fashion shows flanked by a rotating detail of beefy bodyguards. One of them favored a black-leather duster like a character out of “The Ma- trix.” Another had a gold tooth. The most recent pair included a fire hydrant with a buzz cut and a
December 2–26, 2010
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Outstanding Chinese Artists & Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
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Superior Donuts
Jean Reno doppelganger. Sozzani travels from show to
show without her own muscle. She is petite and waif-thin, with golden Rapunzel waves that reach well below her shoulders. Her features are strong and her eyes pale blue. She has an unhur- ried manner that calls to mind the phrase “comfortable in one’s skin.” Told that she is photogenic, she
observes that “sometimes I take a beautiful picture that I love. Sometimes, I see a picture of someone who looks like me but” — and she shakes her head in dismay over how a photo can go so wrong — “I think, ‘Who is that?’ ” Her style is unfussy, but by no
means minimal. One particular afternoon in the middle of fash- ion week, she is dressed in an olive silk military-style shirt and a knee-length navy skirt, both by Lanvin. She prefers significant jewelry, low heels — today’s rep- tile versions are byManolo Blah- nik—small clutch handbags and an iPhone. Of her Conde Nast compatri-
ots, Sozzani is closest to Wintour. The two have become friends over the years, and Wintour notes, quite simply, that “Franca is magnificent.” They have worked together on the global orgy of shopping, Fashion’s Night Out, as well as on finding ways to support young designers. In their tete-a-tetes, diversity on the run- way is a topic that regularly comes up. “Right now, it seems as though
we are experiencing a wave of Asian models, and while there is certainly a strong African Ameri- can presence with Joan Smalls, Jourdan Dunn and Chanel Iman, sadly we don’t see as many Afri- can American models as we could,” Wintour says. The prestigious September is-
sue of the American flagship fea- tured actress Halle Berry on the cover and one of the fashion stories depicted a “We Are the World” multicultural mishmash. Still, its efforts at diversity pale compared with Vogue Italia. “Franca’s decision to take a
stance on the issue of racial diver- sity is typical Franca — she does not tackle subjects in a low-key manner,” Wintour says. “She wanted her readers to notice.” The Black Issue began to take
shape during the fall of 2007 when Sozzani was struck by the homogenous aesthetic on the runways. “All the girls looked the
same.The only onewhostood out is Liya Kebede,” who is black, Sozzani recalled. “Everything she
franca continued on E3
JADE PAYETTE BY STEVE VACCARIELLO
STUDIOTHEATRE.ORG 202-332-3300
NOW PLAYING!
Plácido Domingo photo by Karin Cooper for WNO. Iphigénie en Tauride photo courtesy of Opera de Oviedo.
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