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A surprise exhibition during the Copenhagen Fashion Weekend event offered fashion and photography fans the opportunity to rediscover Franco Franceschi’s work.

Text by Anna Battista   |   Published 12 August 2009

Chances are that if you ask Italian photographer Franco Franceschi what fascinates him about fashion, the answer will be one single word, “details”.  Franceschi’s attention to details is indeed what constantly characterised his entire photographic production since the early days.

With a background in arts – drawing and paintings are two of his main passions – Franceschi started taking pictures and collaborating with different magazines in the ‘70s, focusing on different subjects such as culture and travelling. At the end of the decade he opened a studio and decided to switch his interest to fashion. From then on he collaborated with many international fashion and style magazines, from Italian Amica to Harper’s Bazaar, while developing also further interests in cinema, nature and architecture.

For his exhibition entitled “Vintage” and organised at the Italian Culture Institute of Copenhagen during the local fashion weekend event , Franceschi gave visitors the opportunity to rediscover some of his favourite images from the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Dazed Digital: What inspired this exhibition and how was it received in Copenhagen?
Franco Franceschi: My passion for the fashion industry. A while back I got in touch with the Italian Culture Institute in Copenhagen and with the organisers of the local Fashion Week and we carefully examined all the photographs. They liked them all and felt they tied in well with the event, so we decided to do the exhibition. I must admit I never imagined it could have been such a successful event, also considering that the Italian Institute is not located in the city centre. Yet we had a lot of visitors and all of them seemed genuinely interested in my work. I also found the Copenhagen Fashion Week and Weekend amazing events: everything was meticulously organised and it was interesting to see a tradeshow that reunites all together men, women and children’s wear and allows buyer to have a complete perspective about trends and fashion.  

DD: Is there a special anecdote behind one photograph part of this exhibition that you particularly remember?
Franco Franceschi: Each image is connected to an exact period of my life and each of them reminds me of something. I also have lots of memories of the models featured in the pictures and I actually kept in touch throughout the years with many of them. Yet there is a photo shoot with a peculiar story behind it and it’s the one shot in the Tunisian desert. It was 1991 and we were on the Tunisian coast, ready to start working, when the Gulf War broke out. A group of German tourists was assaulted and I was travelling together with all these beautiful models, so the Tunisian authorities asked me to head to the south. In the end we decided to stop there and take the photographs in the desert. The model in this photo shoot, Daphne Deckers, got in touch with me a few days ago and we remembered this episode that happened to us such a long time ago. Now Daphne is a famous Dutch TV star, but she was one of my favourite models at the time and I’ll always remember her as a beautiful, clever and sensitive woman.          

DD: According to you, in which ways has the fashion industry changed since you first started working as a photographer?
Franco Franceschi: The fashion industry has changed in many ways: in the past many Italian designers would create extremely outlandish pieces, nowadays they tend to look at functionality and practicality. There was also another interesting attitude: sometimes an idea became an inspiration in many different fields and sparked off a wide range of trends. For example, a topic such as the Middle Ages was used for films, fine arts and even fashion with collections inspired to the Medieval time. This doesn’t happen anymore, but there is a sort of big cauldron in which different trends, ideas and inspirations are mixed all together.
Other things that have changed are editors and models: in the past you would have great editors who were almost obsessed with their search for perfection and I remember they used to rebuke even internationally known photographers for insignificant details. Now perfection is not a priority, but there is also less money to invest in spectacular photo shoots. Regarding models, I recently read an interview with the manager of an important fashion agency in Italy who stated that there aren’t any important top models at the moment because the continuous model turnover allows to save a lot of money. Yet models are suffering the consequences of this trend and they have turned into a sort of choir: as a photographer you end up hearing lots of voices and seeing lots of faces, but none of them is a true soloist.  

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