“Why would anyone buy Italian Vogue?” she once queried, “They wouldn’t—only Italians read Italian.” She knew that she needed to communicate instead through powerful imagery, and by showcasing her photographers’ work in this way, she earned their unswerving loyalty and their willingness to work with her magazines’ negligible budgets. “When I sent all these photos to you, I would write on the package ‘personal,’ ” Weber wrote to her, “I now realize that I took them for you because you would be the only one who would understand.”

At the same time, Franca became an indispensable part of the Italian fashion scene, a shrewd power broker with an unequaled reach to its designers and the manufacturers and industrialists who keep the industry’s wheels turning. She ensured, in the process, that her stable of photographers and editors were also working on lucrative advertising campaigns—which meant, of course, that her exacting standards of editorial excellence were reflected in the look of the magazines before one even reached the editorial content.

In 1988, she was appointed Editor in Chief of Italian Vogue—the same month that Anna Wintour was made the Editor in Chief at American Vogue. (By 1994, she was made Editor in Chief of Italian Condé Nast, enjoying great support from Jonathan Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast International.) Franca immediately shook up the formulaic title with dynamic covers and content, creating a magazine that, in her words, would be “extravagant, experimental, innovative.”

Her first issue, for July/August 1988, with the single cover line “Il Nuovo Stile,” and a sepia-washed black-and-white image by Meisel of the pillowy-lipped model Robin MacKintosh wearing a plain white Ferré blouse, signaled that she was not going to be playing by anyone else’s rules. Meisel has shot nearly every subsequent cover for her magazine. As she had at Lei and Per Lui, Franca soon created a powerful visual language for the magazine, drawing on the talents of a core group of photographers—Weber, Roversi, and Lindbergh among them—whose collaborations with her would set the bar for fashion imagery through the decades and launch and mold the great models of the age. “Before fashion,” she said, “I love images.” In the process, she turned Italian Vogue into a magazine powerhouse with a reach and influence far beyond its relatively modest circulation. By contrast, the first-person blog she launched five years ago discussed contemporary issues in an endearingly forthright and revealing way.

franca sozzani Courtesy of Francesco Carrozzini

Franca’s ethereal, otherworldly beauty, with her limpid blue eyes and tumble of pale blonde Pre-Raphaelite waves, belied her indomitable personality. “I listen,” she said, “but I must go my own way.”