“I want to be a living work of art”: On the Marchesa Luisa Casati

“If the public can predict you, it starts to like you. But the Marchesa didn’t want to be liked.” For the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Marchesa Luisa Casati astounded Europe. Artists such as Man Ray painted, sculpted, and photographed her; writers such as Ezra Pound and Jack Kerouac praised her strange beauty. An Italian woman of means who questioned the traditional gender codes of her time, she dismissed fixed identities as mere constructions. Gathering on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the first publication of Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati (the first full-length biography of Luisa Casati, now offered in an updated, ultimate edition), Michael Orlando Yaccarino joins Valerie Steele, Joan Rosasco, and Francesca Granata in conversation about the enigma that is the Marchesa Casati.

Michael Orlando Yaccarino is a writer specializing in international genre film, fashion, music, and unconventional historic figures. Scot D. Ryersson (1960–2024) was an award-winning writer, illustrator, and graphic designer. Michael and Scot collaborated on many projects, are coauthors of Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati, The Ultimate Edition, and are founders of the Casati Archives. www.marchesacasati.com

Valerie Steele is a fashion historian and director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Steele is the author or editor of twenty-five books, including Paris Fashion, Fetish, and Fashion Designers A-Z.

Joan Rosasco taught at Smith College, Columbia University, and New York University, with focus on European art and culture, French literature, and the Belle Époque period. She is author of numerous publications including The Septet.

Francesca Granata is associate professor of fashion studies at Parsons School of Design. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary visual culture, fashion history and theory, and gender and performance studies. Granata is editor of Fashion Criticism and author of Experimental Fashion, and wrote the afterword to Infinite Variety.

Praise for the book:

"Ryersson and Yaccarino are judicious historians of frivolity who capture the tone of a life that was obscenely profligate yet strangely pure."
—The New Yorker

"A meticulously researched biography, Infinite Variety is as much art history as chronicle of personal obsession."
—The New York Times

"Fascinating . . . with or without her cheetahs, the Marchesa Casati’s circus of the self makes her a natural for the new millennium."
—Vanity Fair

Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of Marchesa Casati, The Ultimate Edition is available from University of Minnesota Press.