I went to see these striking watercolours of the life of Marchesa Luisa Casati by Walton Ford a few weeks ago (if you’re in New York, they’re up for just a few more days and you must go), and I realised that I have never talked about Casati on here, despite the fact that she is one of my favourite figures in fashion history and a constant reference in all my non-newsletter work. So without further ado, here she is! You’ll definitely want to open this one in your browser.

Marchesa Luisa Casati is buried in Brompton Cemetery in London clad in a leopard skin coat and a pair of false eyelashes, clutching her taxidermied Pekingese dog. The epitaph on her gravestone, borrowed from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, reads: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. Even in death, she remains alluringly enigmatic, prone to mythologising herself from beyond the grave.

Though she did not become a household name in the same manner as her dear friends Man Ray and Cecil Beaton, Casati has held a profound and undying spell over the world of fashion for the past century. Casati was born in 1881 to an esteemed Italian family who had made their fortune in the cotton trade. When orphaned as teenagers, Casati and her older sister became the wealthiest women in Italy—at least according to the local press. But Casati desired far more than fortune. She wanted, as she stated upon her arrival in Venice in 1910, to become ‘a living work of art’. Casati kept no diaries and wrote no memoirs, preferring instead to craft her image through the eyes of others: in the paintings of Boldini, in the dresses of Fortuny, and in the poetry of her lover, the infamous Gabriele d’Annunzio.

It was unsurprising that Casati captured the attention of many, given that she was six feet tall and whip-thin with skin as pale as freshly driven snow. She took near-lethal doses of the belladonna plant that enlarged and darkened her pupils, rimmed her eyelid in kohl, glued them with strips of black velvet, and applied layers of false eyelashes, all with the intent of turning her eyes into large black circles. She kept her hair trimmed into a short proto-Flapper bob that she dyed a flaming red, save for one summer in Capri she changed her hair to green and instructed her servant to keep tossing copper shavings into the fires around her home, sending their flames up in matching verdant plumes. (The servant was later found collapsed by the fire. Casati had painted him gold, unaware or uncaring that, in a moment foreshadowing Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger, this would suffocate him in the summer heat. Casati’s landlord scrubbed his skin clean just in time).