In the early 20th century, Casati became famous all over Europe for her decadent style. The child of a Milanese count and countess, Casati became one of the richest women in Italy after both her parents died when she was still a teenager. Poiret dressed her; Augustus John painted her; the Italian futurists idolized her. Sometimes she appeared with a makeshift necklace out of bites from her lover.
In Venice, she would often take her ocelots and borzois on walks outside her palazzo wearing nothing but a fur coat, pearls, and a face full of makeup. And she was fascinated by the occult, always carrying a crystal ball and collecting wax replicas of herself, including one that was life-sized with a wig made from her own hair: when hosting dinner, she would sit the figure next to her and in the dim candlelight her guests struggled to make out which was the real Luisa.
Casati was physically striking, enhancing her features in an unusual way, as a profile in The New Yorker described. Yet Casati was not simply a flamboyant eccentric, as Mackrell reveals in her book. The outfit that electrocuted Casati was itself a piece of art: the bulbs were at the tips of hundreds of arrows that pierced a suit of silver armour, and by embracing modern technology it was intended to show her credentials as a Futurist a group of artists welcoming the new age of the machine. While her attempts at creating art with her outfits had mixed success, Casati could inspire painters and sculptors both as muse and subject.
Her portrait was painted by Augustus John and Jacob Epstein sculpted her in bronze. All of this was inextricably tied to the Casati of the gossip pages. And Casati encouraged the mythologising, although it made her biography harder to untangle. Like the cloud of perfume released from a microscopic incense holder worn on her little finger, the urban legends about Casati enhanced her mystique but also obscured her. Marchesa Luisa Casati, once one of the richest women in Italy, lived a life of extremes in her myriad of lavish palaces around Europe.
She was an heiress, muse and patroness of the arts who during the early twentieth century lived a life of decadence to the point of destruction. Along with her out of control spending habits, Luisa Casati became infamous across Europe for her flamboyant dress sense and alarming behaviour. It was rumoured that she walked her pet cheetahs in the moonlight through her gardens wearing nothing but furs.
She would often wear her pet boa constrictor around her neck to parties and was rumoured to keep the ashes of her ex lovers in urns dotted around her home. Image 1. Her striking looks and eccentricities showcased the designs perfectly and she enhanced her haunting beauty by hennaing her auburn hair, fashioning false eyelashes from fabric and ingesting belladonna to dilate her already oversized pupils.
Image 2. One design partnership Luisa Casati nurtured for many years was with that of the prolific French designer Paul Poiret. Image 3.
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