The Vogue Italia Archive

The Vogue Italia Archive will make available the entire run – spanning more than half a century – of one of the most influential and renowned international editions of Vogue. While the magazine had a trade emphasis when it launched in 1964, from the outset it regularly used leading photographers such as Albert Watson, Helmut Newton and Richard Avedon. It subsequently became more emphatically a magazine of style. It is now recognized as the least commercial and most artistic edition of Vogue. Its many innovative, often controversial, initiatives include an all-black issue for July 2008, featuring only black models and offering articles about black women in the arts. Other issues have featured, for example, a shoot on the site of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (commenting on American oil consumption) and the use of plus-size cover models as part of a campaign against pro-anorexia websites. Vogue Italia’s appeal is international, with almost half of its issues typically being sold outside of Italy. The current editor Emanuele Farneti has spoken of the magazine’s enduring ethos of minimizing its global reach through prioritizing visuals and recognizing that the image had to become the real language of the magazine.