We’re developing a girl crush on Italian Vogue editor Franca Sozzani. In this economic climate, many fashion houses and magazines are afraid to take risks. But not Franca. In July, she put out the groundbreaking all-black issue of Italian Vogue. “When I was doing the Black Issue, everybody told me, ‘You will not sell one copy.’ Well, we reprinted the magazine,” she told WWD. “Maybe nobody had tried before, so they didn’t know they were wrong.” Sozzani is not constricted by fears of selling issues. She doesn’t know what her circulation is and said she doesn’t even care. She followed up the black issue with an issue of L’Uomo Vogue dedicated to Africa. For that, she put philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy on the cover. Unencumbered by newsstand sales figures, she doesn’t worry about putting celebrities on her covers, though she does sometimes for L’Uomo Vogue “not just because they represent celebrity” but because they’re “doing something interesting.”
The new issue of L’Uomo Vogue includes a spread of more than 100 pages shot by Bruce Weber depicting life in Miami. Here’s the interesting part: It includes no fashion credits. “L’Uomo Vogue is not exactly what you call a fashion magazine anymore,” Franca said. “Basically, I am more free than anyone else because I don’t think that you sell clothes through a [fashion] credit. I think that you go through an image, that you sell a dream, and [then] the clothes.” We agree. Most people in the world don’t shop from those pages anyway.
Memo Pad: Franca’s Coda [WWD]
