The Marchesa Casati as Fashion Plate and Fashion Muse

Abstract

The Marchesa Luisa Casati has become a perennial muse of fashion designers in recent decades, from haute couture to High Street brands. Collections inspired by the Marchesa link to her background and the history of the spaces that she inhabited. Casati was born in Italy but lived and traveled between France, Italy and Britain, among other countries, where the cachet of her name has been combined with that of the fashion houses citing her as an inspiration. Despite her enduring reputation as an avant-garde style icon and a singular dresser who was just as likely to wear elaborate costumes as nothing at all, her engagement with fashion was not always as visibly eccentric as her posthumous impact suggests. Nor was it strictly within the binary of fashion and “anti-fashion”. Casati was at once a “disruptive” body and a conventionally stylish one. Popular memory has focused on the more “spectacular” and stylized elements of her esthetic. Archival evidence and artistic representation demonstrate how Casati constructed a wardrobe that melded the conventional and shocking, and how fashion played a role in the emergence of her chimerical public persona.