Vogue Italia is celebrating 60 years, a milestone birthday, and the “Sixty Years Of Vogue Italia” exhibition at Palazzo Clerici brings its history to life through its 60 most iconic covers. It was Flavio Lucchini who created the Italian edition of Vogue and for a full 17 years, as art director, he animated the magazine, revolutionizing the entire fashion publishing industry. Alongside him was his wife Gisella Borioli. Today, the founders of Superstudio, do not forget those incredible years and continue to search for beauty in each of their projects.

It seems unbelievable how much time has passed since the origin of Vogue Italia (1964), the Italian edition of the American title, which was born right in via Brera on a project by Flavio Lucchini, for 17 years art-director and creative soul, and Franco Sartori, managing director and editor-in-chief. Today, Condè Nast publishing house is celebrating its 60th anniversary with the “Sixty Years of Vogue Italia” exhibition at Palazzo Clerici, nearing the end of its transformation into a museum space connected to Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. An installation that is quickly a journey through time.
Thoughts fly back to when I too, very young, was part of the editorial staff of Vogue and the publishing house's other publications, for a full fourteen years, starting in 1967. Long years in which we saw Italy, society, the economy, ethics, and fashion transform, Flavio Lucchini and I, becoming a couple, creating and directing the most significant titles of the end of the millennium, collaborating with the most famous creatives, often raised at our school, one among them the legendary editor Franca Sozzani who left us too soon.
The lesson of Vogue - beauty, elegance, quality, vision, culture, the best of the best - influenced our choices and directed our lives to the point of suggesting the idea of starting the first Superstudio (the photographic studios with attached services Superstudio 13) and then the other venues to follow over the years all always oriented in preceding the demands of the market and artists for avant-garde places where creativity and innovation would find the ideal habitat.
In a secret room like a bunker, the art-director Ferdinando Verderi has set up a parade of red, self-propelled totems as frames for as many covers, one for each year, in a story-telling of faces, styles, and messages that show the change over time and also underline its consistency in wanting to be and remain the most influential, stainless, and inimitable magazine on the fashion scene.
With a sense of an implied thanks to Vogue came FLA, the FlavioLucchiniArt Museum at Superstudio Più, where fashion becomes art, and Skira's book “The Vogue Lesson-from fashion to art” with Lucchini's six hundred fashion-art works on display.

Sixty Years of Vogue Italia - Palazzo Citterio - via Brera 13 - until Sept. 21 - reservation required