Born on January 23, 1881 in Milan, Italy, Luisa Adele Rosa Maria Amman was the younger of two daughters of rich parents, Alberto Amman and his wife Lucia Bressi, who made their fortune in the cotton trade. Her father founded the Amman-Wepfer factory in 1875, Italy’s most modernized and most successful cotton mill. Her mother died when she was 13 years old, and her father, two years later. They left behind an enormous amount of fortune, making Luisa and her older sister Francesca the most affluent single women in Italy at the time.
Marriage and Private Life
Luisa’s towering height (six feet), slender figure, and big green eyes made her insecure. Married to Camillo, Marchese Casati Stampa di Soncino in 1900, the union produced a daughter, Cristina. The couple lived separately throughout the duration of their marriage. They were legally separated in 1914 but remained married until Camillo’s death in 1946.
Shortly after her marriage, Luisa met poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, a severely indebted philanderer who slept with the most beautiful women of Europe. They wrote cryptic notes to each other and referred to themselves as Ariel and Core/Persephone. He made her his muse and he her lover.
Luisa’s Eccentricities
It was her affair with Gabriele that allegedly transformed Luisa into the femme fatale that she became known for. She cut her hair and dyed it red. She had her skin bleached with white powder, and made it even paler through doses of a poisonous plant-based supplement called belladonna, which she took to keep her pupils dilated and black. In order to accentuate her dark pupils, she wore black kohl around her eyes, complete with false eyelashes and strips of black velvet strips glued to her lids.
Luisa was notorious for her larger than life image. Never a big eater, her diet consisted of opium and gin. Avant garde, she was ahead of her time, both in fashion and in her way of life. She once incorporated peacocks in her costume—she plundered their feathers and accessorized the plumage with a dash of fresh chicken blood. She was one of the first to wear the Delphos gown by Henriette Negrin and Mariano Fortuny’s, a finely pleated silk dress meant to be worn without underwear, which was fine with the marchesa as she would usually appear in public in a see-through dress.
While in Capri, where she lived at the Villa San Michele from 1919 to 1920, she only donned herself in black and dyed her hair green to match the viridian flames, which she achieved by having her servants in 18th-century costumes throw copper fillings into the fire, all while “dressed in a pearl-embroidered gown with a stiff Elizabethan ruff and a neckline that plunged to her navel”. In Rome, she borrowed a lion from the zoo and tied it to her custom-made throne. Her pet boa constrictor once escaped while they were checked in at the Ritz Hotel.
Wax mannequins would sometimes sit as guests at her dinner table; some of those were rumored to have contained ashes of her past lovers. Known for her evening strolls, she would parade her cheetahs on diamond leashes while wearing nothing but fur and pearls. When hosting a dinner, the marchesa would sit next to a life-sized wax figure of herself—with a wig created out of her own hair—the guests would have a hard time figuring out which was the real one in a dim candlelight setting.
A fashion icon, Luisa inspired Cartier’s infamous “Panther” design. When she got tired of Mariano Fortuny’s tight creations, which were already being worn by other noblewomen, she switched to the theatrical pieces of Leon Bakst, who worked as a designer for the Ballets Russes. Bakst was also the person behind one of Luisa’s most infamous costumes, a dress made of tiny electric light bulbs that short-circuited and gave her an electric shock that forced her into a backward somersault. In a 1922 Bal Véntien at the Paris Opera, Luisa wore a Leon Bakst creation that was inspired by the character “Queen of the night” from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”. The costume was realized by the House of Worth for 20000 francs.
Luisa wore a costume entirely made out of wires and lights during the Beaumont Ball in Paris in year 1922. The piece was too wide she had a hard time squeezing herself through the doorway that she reportedly collapsed like a “smashed zeppelin”.
She also spent a fortune on lavish gatherings. Luisa’s most monumental party was said to be the 18th-century-inspired Grande Ballo Pietro Longhi held at the Piazza San Marco.
In Paris, Luisa was dubbed as “The Medusa of the Grand Hotels” as she would stay in luxurious hotels such as The Ritz, the Princess Hotel, and the Hotel du Rhin. The marchesa reportedly furnished her rooms with mechanical songbirds, magical trinkets, feathers, and animal skins.
Her outlandish style was also reflected in her homes. In 1910, she took up residence at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni—situated on the Grand Canal in Venice—which Luisa embellished with mechanical birds in gilded cages, gold-painted servants, an ostentation of white peacocks trained to perch on her windows that are in the shade of her cypress trees, and a boa constrictor. The extravagant half-ruin was also inhabited by albino blackbirds, which were dyed different colors to blend with the themes of her parties, and cheetahs freely roaming around the twisting hallways, its gardens illuminated by massive Chinese lanterns. Her household staff included gondoliers with white gondolas, this even though the law only allowed black gondolas. The building was later purchased by Peggy Guggenheim and became the site of The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the most significant museum in Italy for European and American art during the first half of the 20th century.
On June 30, 1927, Luisa hosted the Soirée Magique at her rose-marble “Palace of Dreams” in Paris. As seen in a photograph by Hoyningen-Huene for Vogue, the Marchesa was dressed as 17th-century occultist Count Cagliostro. She had a mask on, a suit of gold and silver, high heels, and a crystal sword. The carefully staged event, however, was suddenly struck by a storm, which forced the guests to flee in their soggy wigs and crinoline.
Her array of ostentatious residences also included the Palais Rose—which she later renamed Le Palais du Rêve—in Paris, a red marble structure that had a detached pavilion converted into an art gallery, where 130 images of herself were being put on display. She also had a summer house in Capri, the Villa San Michele, where she a followed a non-conformist lifestyle that shocked even the island’s most bohemian residents.
Downfall and Poverty
By 1930, Luisa already used up her entire family fortune and her debt reached $25 million after spending lavishly on travel, opium, parties that always outshone the previous ones, palaces, Nubian servants, Egyptian statuary, extravagant clothes and pops usually by her favorite fashion designers Fortuny and Paul Poiret, crystal balls, cocaine, and champagne. She sent a telegram to Gabriel asking for money, but she never received a reply. As she was not able to pay her creditors, her personal possessions were put up in auction. One of the reported bidders was Coco Chanel. Luisa fled to London, where she lived in poverty, settling in a one-bedroom flat near Harrods. She sold her
remaining valuables and used the money she earned on gin and occult trappings.
Poverty, however, did not hinder Luisa from her avant-garde pursuits. So, she would scavenge for thrown away monkey fur and feathers from the Chelsea Palace Music Hall. She also used shoe polish in lieu of black kohl. “She could create nobility out of poverty,” said one of her friends, Cecil Beaton. While in London, the marchesa believed she could communicate through telepathy. She stopped writing cards and letters and instead spent her time doing spiritualist sessions with her remaining friends.
Death and Legacy
Luisa died of stroke on June 1, 1957 at 32 Beaufort Gardens in Knightsbridge, London, England. She was 76 years old. She was buried wearing her black and leopard skin finery and a pair of false eyelashes, and with one of her favorite taxidermied pekinese dogs. She was interred in the Brompton Cemetery. The inscription on her tombstone, which misspelled her name (“Louisa” instead of “Luisa”), said: "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety," a line from “Antony and Cleopatra” by William Shakespeare.
She was cited as an inspiration by fashion designers such as Tom Ford, Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano, Dries Van Noten, Alexander McQueen, Alberto Ferretti, and Georgina Chapman, whose fashion label Marchesa was named after Luisa. Alberto Martini described Luisa as a “slave to her dreamworld”. “She was a great artist, but not understood by the common people or even her own friends, who were jealous spectators of her artistic successes,” he added.
At the height of her fame and fortune, Luisa once said: “There is too much sameness. The world seems to have only a desire for more of this sameness. To be different is to be alone. I do not like what is average. So I am alone.” She had herself immortalized by sculptors Paolo Troubetzkoy, Jacob Epstein, Giacomo Balla, and Catherine Barjansky; photographers Man Ray, Cecil Beaton and Baron Adolph de Meyer; painters Romaine Brooks, Natalia Goncharova, Kees Van Dongen (with whom she had an affair), Ignacio Zuloaga, Giovanni Boldini, and Augustus John; and, illustrators Gustav Adolf Mossa, Drian, Alberto Martini and Alastair.
Images from Wikimedia Commons
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