The Magic of Piero Tosi

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.”

“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.

Tosi’s contemporary costume was as laser-sharp as his period work. For Visconti’s 1974 movie Conversation Piece, he collaborated with the Fendi sisters to dress Silvana Mangano, who played a spoiled and ruthless woman of fashion. In the movie, Mangano’s character’s throwaway, careless chic is exemplified in an ankle-length beige silk dressing gown coat, lined and collared in the finest Russian sables.

At the end of his life, Tosi’s friend Carla Fendi paid special attention to his well-being, and it was she who invited me to tea in the spring of 2015 with the retiring Tosi and her great-niece Delfina Delettrez in her Rome apartment, chicly appointed with paintings by 1930s Scuola Romana artists and furniture of the period by Gio Ponti et al.

Tosi and Visconti first collaborated on the director’s 1951 movie Bellissima, a triumph of Italian Neorealism, in which Anna Magnani pins all her hopes on her daughter winning a beauty pageant. In postwar Italy, there was no budget for the young filmmaker, and Tosi was desperate until, as he told me, he spotted a woman on the street wearing a well-worn, too tight suit that he felt would be perfect for Magnani’s character. He stalked her and finally cornered her in a grocery store, where the shy man plucked up the courage to explain his mission. Although initially indignant, when she discovered that the costume was for Magnani, already considered a national treasure, she agreed to surrender it for the movie.

Visconti’s 1954 movie Senso, set during the tumultuous years of Italian unification, was his and Tosi’s first exercise in period costuming. As an example of Visconti’s mania for detail, Alida Valli, who plays a woman in love with a dashing but unworthy younger man, had to have a historically correct handkerchief in her reticule even though she would never open her purse and use it. “Luchino insisted on having every detail so perfect,” confirms Berenson, “what you had in your handbag, your underwear, what you had in your closet—everything had to be authentic and was geared to making you become that person.” Visconti’s obsessiveness was matched by Tosi’s: Tosi taught Silvana Mangano, playing the patrician mother of Tadzio, for instance, how to manipulate her chiffon or net veils exactly as Visconti remembered his own fabulously well-dressed and beautiful mother Carla, the Duchess of Grazzano Visconti, adjusting hers.

More historicist triumphs were to follow Senso, and Visconti proved a demanding taskmaster. When he began preparations for The Leopard, his adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s epic novel about the changing of the social guard in 19th-century Sicily, he essentially locked Tosi in a room with firm instructions to produce several design options for each character by the end of every day. The results are astonishing studies in verisimilitude.

Tosi told me that there were two elderly aristocratic ladies whose sprawling apartment in a Roman palazzo was crowded with a vast collection of historic costume that they had assembled through the years. He came to use this as a reference—and also thought nothing of cannibalizing period clothes for trims and fabrics to bolster the veracity.

Many of Tosi’s later costumes—including those for The Leopard, Death in Venice, Ludwig, The Damned, and L’Innocente—were the result of a collaboration with Umberto Tirelli, the flamboyant owner of a Rome costume house, whose superb workmanship suited Tosi’s own, and who drew on his own extensive personal fashion collection to ensure the correct period detail of cut, fabric, and detailing. It was at Tirelli, while Sandy Powell was working on fittings for Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, that she was introduced to Tosi. “I was struck dumb to meet him,” she recalls, “but he was absolutely charming. He told me he was a huge fan of my work, and he’d used my work in [Sally Potter’s 1990 movie] Orlando to teach his class of students. I couldn’t have been more flattered.”

For Visconti’s projects, as Powell notes, Tosi had “luxurious amounts of time to do it all; they had months and months to get things made.” Today’s designers, in stark contrast, often have to work on hair-raising deadlines.

“He used to say to me, ‘they don’t make films like that anymore, I can’t work in the new way,’” says Berenson, “and he became more and more reclusive. He was so completely passionate and had such integrity that he just didn’t feel comfortable working in that way; his was another kind of époque. Teaching young people how to design and make costumes became his raison d’etre after he stopped making movies.”

Tosi could be ferocious in the pursuit and perfection of his craft, as his long-suffering students would discover. A recent exhibition on Tosi’s work between 1988 and 2016 with actors and designers at the acclaimed Roman theater school the Centro Sperimentale at Rome’s Palazzo Delle Esposizioni, which I visited earlier this year, included footage of Tosi instructing actors how to move correctly in period clothing, and berating his students while he imparts his precious knowledge. Examples of his protégé’s work were included in the exhibition and revealed that they carry the torch for his fanatical attention to nuances of cut, color, and decoration: the Tosi magic lives on.

In Praise of the Late Piero Tosi, the “Costume Designer’s Costume Designer” By Hamish Bowles. Vogue , August 27, 2019.

There’s many ingredients to a good film… it needs to be plausible on so many levels; a brilliant movie resonates with the audience because they believe in the storyline, and true emotions  – sorrow, anger, joy, and bewilderment – are evoked within them. But what and how the actors speak is just one part of that. Interiors, make-up, location, hair and clothes all help accomplish that. The clothes worn by the actors has to be as credible as the lines and facial expressions. If they fail to communicate who the character is and what he or she is going through, the costumes and, indirectly, the film has failed. That’s why the role of a costume designer is one of the film world’s unkown heroes. Sure, they can win Oscars but few filmgoers pay them much attention. Luckily, the actors realise their importance. “If clothes make the man, then certainly the costume designer makes the actor! The costume designer is not only essential, but is vital for it is they who create the look of the character without which no performance can succeed,” Audrey Hepburn said in her speech at the 1986 Academy Awards ceremony.

But is it even correct to call them costumes? The word makes you think of Halloween pranks and circus clowns. In most films, costume design is the polar opposite; it’s not about attire for special occasions, it’s an everyday wardrobe, the clothes you are comfortable in on a daily basis. The role of a costume designer is to tell a story. All good narratives contain different elements and together they form a web of intrigues, destinies and lives. Costume design does that to films by giving actors a sartorial tool, a way of describing emotions without saying anything.

Sometime this is made more difficult by the fact that the film is based on real events; the people portrayed actually lived and the clothes need to reflect that. But the everyday-rule obviously doesn’t apply to all films and costume designers. Italian film legend Piero Tosi has lived and worked a larger-than-life career. His credits include Senso, Bellissima, The Leopard, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Death in Venice, The Night Porter, and La Traviata on which the BAFTA Award winning costume designer worked on with film directors Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

David Hellqvist: How did you get into costume design?

Piero Tosi: It all started with a bit of luck… Visconti came to Florence in 1948, during the Musical May Festival, to work on Troilus and Cressida. I was in Florence then and was asked by Franco Zeffirelli, whom I knew well, to be costume designer Maria de Matteis’ third assistant. Of course I was so pleased and accepted straight away. This is how my career started, really.

I was later asked by Visconti to work as a costume designer on his next movie Bellissima with Italian actress Anna Magnani. I was only in my early 20s, but I was very courageous, strong and passionate…

David: What is your research process like?

Piero: I believe that an actor’s costume has to mirror the character wearing it, and also life. Therefore, it is especially important to know the historical period where the movie is set and to research into traditions.

David: Where do you look for inspiration?

Piero: What inspires me are things that are far away from what I am looking for!

David: What is the importance of costume design in films, according to you?

Piero: It is definitely one of the most important elements in the making of a movie as it helps bringing characters into real life. I especially admire English costume designers and I consider them to be among the best. Films like Dangerous Liaisons, The Madness of King George, Quartet – they all are very high calibre works of costume design.

David: Who, and why, is the most iconic actor you’ve worked with?

Piero: Marcello Mastroianni, because he always managed to become the scripted character and to bring him into life. And Jean-Maria Volonté. Best actresses I worked with… definitely Silvana Mangano and Sofia Loren, for their incredible elegance and acting talent.

David: Which one of all your films was the most stylish, and why?

Piero: Death in Venice, for sure – Silvana Mangano had this unique gift of wearing a dress and turn it into something very special, thanks to her personality and incredible style. But I would also like to mention two low budget movies, but particularly good ones, I worked on… La Viaccia and Metello.

David: What projects are you working on now?

Piero: I now teach at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, part of Cinecitta in Rome. I love this new role of mine, I am learning a lot from my fantastic students!

In Conversation: Piero Tosi, Costume Designer.  By David Hellqvist. Port Magazine ,  April 9, 2013

When news came earlier this month of the passing of Italian costume designer Piero Tosi, aged 92, it seemed possible we would not see his kind again. In spite of digital technology and the wide net of resources available to cinema’s contemporary designers, it’s hard to imagine the level of analogue precision with which Tosi undertook his life’s work.

His first film credit was Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima (1951), starring Anna Magnani, and he would go on to work with Visconti on nine more films, including The Leopard (1963) and Death in Venice (1971). In interviews, Tosi would later mention the latter as his most stylish film. An appraisal of young Tadzio’s juvenile sailor suits and Silvana Mangano’s grandiose Belle Epoque silhouettes would tend to confirm his opinion.

Among his other contributions would be to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (1969) and works by Federico Fellini and Franco Zeffirelli, but his most memorable remained the historical costuming he did for Visconti, who shared his obsessively meticulous approach to historical accuracy. From 1860s Germany to early 20th-century Venice, no era captured on-screen went undissected.

In a piece for Vogue, Hamish Bowles noted that Visconti insisted on accuracy even in items that would never appear on film, including a lace handkerchief in a purse or a set of period-correct underwear in a closed drawer. This feverish zeal for accuracy might seem a little pedantic, but these costumes – along with the equally exacting set design – helped to create a space in which actors could truly belong to a historical era, and for Visconti, who framed his tableau shots like a master painter, they were an intrinsic part of character.

In the famed ballroom scene of The Leopard, Claudia Cardinale was dressed in fresh white organza by Dior, which was underlaid by a dozen layers of tulle and a period-correct, rib-bruising corset; but all the many decorative extras were costumed lavishly, too, with no expense spared on detail. Poring over antique fabrics, vintage buttons, and with little regard for comfort, Tosi and Visconti worked to make their actors move and posture themselves as though from a bygone age. The stiff fabrics assured that. And if those fabrics couldn’t be found – which they often could not – Tosi would oversee a team of artisans who recreated these obsolete materials from scratch. As The New York Times wrote in 2006, this perfectionism could border on the pathological. For The Leopard, “the red shirts worn by Garibaldi’s soldiers in the battle for Palermo were famously soaked in tea, left in the sun, buried, redipped, resunned and reburied for extra worn-in verisimilitude.” Few filmmakers or designers could recreate a gilded epoch on the edge of decay with such vivid clarity.

Beyond Garibaldi’s rebel army, Tosi outfitted the jaunty hat and exquisitely-fitted monochrome gown on Romy Schneider in Ludwig (1972); the prissy three-piece white suit on Dirk Bogarde in the final scenes of Death in Venice (1971); the uniform buttons on Austro-Hungarian soldiers in Senso (1954); and the downright vogue started by The Damned (1969) for 1930s glamour, as personified by Charlotte Rampling in a slinky cream lace dress.

Tosi’s legacy has been cemented over the decades by his long-term involvement with Umberto Tirelli’s respected Roman costume workshop. Contemporary progeny, working under Tirelli’s banner and from Tosi’s influence, have gone on to design period-correct costumes for Barry Lyndon (1975), The Age of Innocence (1993) and Marie Antoinette (2006).

In spite of his attention to period costuming, Tosi’s work has been quoted both periodically and liberally by fashion designers. Dolce & Gabbana are particularly fascinated by Tosi’s work: from a full collection in 2012 inspired by Cardinale to this year’s Alta Moda show in the Sicilian filming location for The Leopard, his influence is not going away. Manolo Blahnik and Valentino have mentioned Tosi as a reference and an influence. Perhaps it was Roberto Cavalli who captured the spirit of Tosi’s work best when talking about the themes of The Leopard. “The more it changes, the more it stays the same... [is] a good metaphor for fashion,” he explained. Anachronistic though it may seem, the opulence and detail of Tosi’s work with Visconti is an enduring influence on fashion and cinema alike.

Remembering Piero Tosi, Visionary Costume Designer to Visconti and Fellini. By  Christina Newland. Another Magazine ,  August 19, 2019.

The grand ball that ends Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) was unprecedented in the movies. There had been crowded costume scenes before, but none with the same historical reality: hundreds on screen in the full dress of 1860, as individual and complete on those in the far background as in foreground closeup. The women are laced into bodices laden with ornament and jewels, atop tent-sized crinolines; their hairstyles are often accurately unflattering. Yet nobody looks conscious of being in period costume; they are just wearing extraordinary clothes that shape them into the postures and gestures of another time.

Piero Tosi, who has died aged 92, was the Italian designer who created that time-travel effect. He could produce characterful modern costumes – pitiful singlets and thin blousons for peasant workers in Rocco and His Brothers(1960) – but his honorary Oscar in 2013 (by which time he had been nominated five times) was for his historical imagination.

The cinema had never seen Tosi’s standard of re-creation, executed after 1960 by his longterm collaborator Umberto Tirelli, who collected antique garments to study and established a company to replicate them. Each ensemble was unique – they made a single gown for Claudia Cardinale to wear during the five months spent shooting that ball; it had days off for cleaning and repair. Tosi influenced and trained a new generation of costume designers whose forte was the past, including Gabriella Pescucci and Milena Canonero.

He researched through art, especially conversation pieces and genre paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries, since an artist showed both the architecture of clothes and how they were worn – the attitude, gait and gestures that expressed class and gender. Tosi’s favourite recreation was people-watching; he could construct a whole life out of a T-shirt. Only non-fashion photographs inspired him, and his most remembered costume, Silvana Mangano’s walking suit for Death in Venice (1971), evolved from an early colour photograph of Visconti’s mother.

Tosi came out of the artisan traditions of his birthplace, Florence, where his father taught him the family business of metalwork. But the boy secretly loved theatre, reading Shakespeare and inventing costumes. He loved Hollywood movies, too, and his favourite designer was Travis Banton, to whose decadent fur and lace for Marlene Dietrich Tosi paid homage in The Damned (1969) and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974). The boy’s artistic talent won him a place in Florence’s applied arts institute for artisans, the Porta Romana.

At barely 20 he helped with costumes for a local theatre production, but his break came through Franco Zeffirelli, also an art student from Florence, although at a different college; they had known each other for years. Visconti came to the city in 1949 to stage Troilus and Cressida for a music festival, and Zeffirelli, then assistant to Visconti, got Tosi a beginner’s job on the costumes. In the same year Tosi’s aunt took him to the Venice film festival (he had never been out of Florence, and he never went to another festival, even when his own work was in competition) where he saw Visconti’s La Terra Trema and knew he wanted to make movies.

That meant moving to Rome, where he, Zeffirelli and Mauro Bolognini (later a director who commissioned Tosi) shared an apartment, the rowdy centre of their creative circle. Tosi worked on stage productions for Visconti, who came to trust his sure taste and never-satisfied research. His first film for Visconti was Bellissima (1951), starring Anna Magnani as a working-class woman venturing into Cinecittà studios; the contrast between her simple cotton frock and the movie people’s cool adds pathos to the comedy. Tosi then worked for Visconti on 12 films.

Modern realism was economic with cloth, but from Senso (1954) to L’Innocente (1976) Visconti also made huge-scale period productions on budgets that fluctuated sharply, sometimes during shooting (The Leopard’s funding dwindled from day to day) and demanded materials that were out of fashion, or no longer manufactured, even in textile-conscious Italy.

Visconti could find authentic locations and dress them with genuine antiques, but, other than an occasional original accessory, Tosi had to create voluminous costumes from scratch, searching warehouses for outmoded fabrics and trimmings. The Damned demanded slithery crepe de chine when most silks in stock were hard and crisp; seaside outfits in Death in Venice had to be of linen, a fibre superseded by cotton or synthetics. Italian artisans could provide what could not be found, but it took time and Tosi’s exacting supervision.

He loved the search, and, when Visconti intended to film Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Tosi went to Paris to track down descendants of its characters’ originals, hoping for family pictures. Proust was Tosi’s ideal challenge, a writer who knew how a pair of shoes were both character and narrative. To Tosi’s regret, the film was never made.

He designed for Zeffirelli – La Traviata (1982) and Storia di una Capinera (1993), set in Tosi’s beloved 1860s – and for Pier Paolo Pasolini an ethnographic Medea (1969) in which Maria Callas clanked with metal plaques like something out of his childhood. Federico Fellini longed to work with him; however Tosi could not abide Fellini’s chaos and the closest they came was Tosi improvising wild makeups (unusually for a designer, he liked styling hair and painting faces) for Satyricon(1970).

His Oscar may have been for period pieces, but, to appreciate his skill, look at Magnani in Bellissima in an underslip that elevates her ungirded figure from comic to tragic, or Sophia Loren in very little lingerie, craftily sculptured and layered, in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963); the image sold the film.

In 1988, Tosi began to teach and coach at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, which later helped organise exhibitions of his costumes in New York, Rome and Florence.

Outside work, which he seldom was, Tosi was totally private; his personal life never became public knowledge.

Piero Tosi obituary. By Veronica Horwell. The Guardian,  August 15, 2019.