In Praise of the Late Piero Tosi, the “Costume Designer’s Costume Designer”
The revered and influential costume designer Piero Tosi, who died this month at the age of 92, was an alchemical genius whose fetishistic attention to period detail was matched by the perfectionism of the great directors with whom he collaborated—Visconti, Pasolini, Zeffirelli, and De Sica among them.
“A giant has left us,” says Tony Award–winning costume designer William Ivey Long, “and he has left all of us an indelible visual cornucopia of breathtaking, heart-stoppingly beautiful images.”
For Arianne Phillips, he was an “icon” whose work represents “a culture and a time in filmmaking where artistry was king.” “No one ever surpassed him,” adds Sandy Powell, for whom he was “the maestro: the costume designer’s costume designer.” Powell was first made aware of Tosi when, at the age of 14, she went with a friend to see Death in Venice, which had just been released. As she recalls, they “bunked off school to see it seven more times: We were in love with Tadzio! But all those images were ingrained: Silvana Mangano in the hats, Dirk Bogarde with the dyed hair. His stuff is exquisite, and it doesn’t age. I wasn’t aware then that I wanted to do costume design but it just really influenced me. Basically, Death in Venice just absolutely changed my life.”
“He has had an enormous effect on my own sense of taste, style, fit, historical interpretation, and storytelling through costumes,” adds Ivey Long, “There are many designers in the world; Piero Tosi was a very great artist.”
Nominated for five Academy Awards for such masterpieces as Visconti’s 1963 epic The Leopard, his 1971 Death in Venice, and director Édouard Molinaro’s 1978 La Cage aux Folles, Tosi finally received an Honorary Academy Award in 2014. The reclusive Tosi designed for the opera, theater, and ballet in his native Italy but rarely traveled abroad and never once visited America, so Claudia Cardinale accepted the prize on his behalf. Tosi had dressed Cardinale in sumptuous 1860s wasp-waisted costumes for The Leopard, and she recalled that the authentic period corsetry was so excruciatingly tight that she had to lean against a wall during takes and couldn’t sit down.
Tosi was a shy, private man. The actress Marisa Berenson, whom he dressed for Death in Venice, recalls that “he was very fragile, but he was a great artist, and great artists have a lot of fragilities.”
“Working with him was a delight,” Berenson continues. “He was the most wonderful, gentle soul—he was like a little magical being, extremely cultured with incredible sensitivity and refinement in everything he did—in his soul and his way of being, and in his incredible eye for perfection and his knowledge.” Tosi was the first person that Berenson encountered when she went to Rome to begin work on Death in Venice, as he created the costumes that she was to wear for the sepia photographs of her in character as the wife of Dirk Bogarde’s Gustav von Aschenbach. Berenson remembers how exciting it was “creating this persona through his eyes. You get into a great costume, and you are already practically there—you are in the part already—and with Piero, that was really the case.”
When Berenson was invited to the fabled Marie-Hélène de Rothschild costumed Proust Ball in December of 1971 to celebrate the great writer’s centenary, it was Tosi’s idea that she should go in character as the Marchesa Casati, famed eccentric of Belle Epoque society.
“You are not going to the ball dressed as everyone else,” he told her, “you have to go as this personage—a modern woman—and throw away the corset, and you’ll look different from anybody else.” “He came to Paris especially to dress me,” Berenson says, “out of total generosity and friendship and love.” He brought with him “a real Poiret dress and the bright red wig and the aigrettes.... He did everything himself. He knew just how the makeup and the hair should look, and he made me up himself.” Cecil Beaton photographed the best-dressed revelers for a portfolio for British Vogue, and amongst the Edwardian wigs and ruffled dresses, the fabulous Berenson stands out from the crowd and leaves one in no doubt that she was the cynosure of all eyes at the ball.
