English Version | La Giovinezza

The most interesting women hide within them a thousand and one other women. Benedetta Barzini is one of those women. Mother, feminist, Marxist, teacher, muse, she is the personification of the word “icon.” This is, however, the kind of label that Barzini, the first Italian model to appear on the cover of Vogue, abhors. Her elegance and wisdom allow her, at 78, to refuse any glorification of beauty. She prefers, instead, to remain curious, assertive, restless. The camera remains fascinated by her strength and youth, which reappear with every click. But Barzini has other plans. She wants to disappear. This is her last act.

“Who is this?”  Benedetta Barzini (Porto Santo Stefano, Italy, 1943) is a few meters away from me and looks at me suspiciously. I hesitate between reaching out and introducing myself and waiting for the right moment. “Who is this?” she asks my interlocutor again. “It's the journalist from Vogue.” The reaction is not the best. It's only when the cigarette I've been hiding in my right hand appears that Barzini feels she's in safe territory. “Ah! I want to smoke too.” I put on a small smile, afraid. Now what? The Italian model is in Lisbon for the Festa do Cinema Italiano, where her son Beniamino Barrese premieres his documentary, The Disappearance of My Mother (2019). The work is an attempt to rescue the link between Benedetta, the woman and the icon, and the camera, at a time when images and memories are too heavy a burden — disappearance is, for her, the only escape, the final release. “Are you going to see the movie?” I could evade the answer, but I take a chance. “I already saw.”  And I leave invisible reticences in the air, which confirm my nervousness. “Oh. You shouldn't... But it's okay, it's going to be okay.” Barzini probably refers to the moments when his disposition is not the best: there are scenes in which, despite Beniamino's enthusiasm, it is impossible for him to hide his contempt for the project; on the big screen, their interaction is a sway between the candor of the one and the impatience of the other. However, during nearly an hour of conversation, it is clear that Benedetta is proud of the end result. Her steady posture hides a tenderness that whispers calm and empathy. She's someone we'd be talking to for a long, long time. Her desire, however, is different: to disappear. “Now I don’t have the physical energy to do that. So I decided that I can disappear by staying still. Which means ignoring the world around me. Disappearing can also be standing still. And that’s unfortunately the only disappearance that I can put in act now.” 

Benedetta Barzini's story could, itself, make a film. At the age of 20, she was “discovered” on a street in Milan and shortly afterwards Diana Vreeland, then editor-in-chief of American Vogue, asked her to go to New York to photograph with Irving Penn. In no time she signed with Ford Models and, instead of ten days, she stayed for several years. She worked with the likes of Richard Avedon, Henry Clarke, and Penn, with whom she collaborated on numerous occasions. She was the model chosen for the cover of the first Italian edition of Vogue. When her career came to an end she returned to Italy, married and had four children. She joined the Italian Communist Party, participated in various movements for the emancipation of women, studied, taught. Beauty, he guarantees, is a fluke. The compliments on her physical appearance do not interest her. “I don’t react to that. I decided that the person who says ‘whoa, you were so beautiful when you were young’, they are not interesting to me. You’re born the way you are born, you haven’t decided anything. What is important is what you do with yourself, not the way you look.” What is beauty, then? “It's the authenticity of a person. Even if the nose is crooked or the legs are crooked, is somebody who is simpatico, somebody that communicates, somebody that wants to talk to you, who wants to listen to you. That’s beauty. And defects are not defects, they are your patrimonio. Beauty is what a woman does with herself, not to herself.”

What did Barzini do? “I didn’t do much. I used my experience as a model to think. After all was finished I started studying: anthropology, sociology, religion, why it dresses women one way or another, and with this general outlook I understood that women have never decided their own looks. And I also thought about the fact that women don’t have a genealogical descend. You have the name of your father, and your son can have the name of your husband, and the name of his grandfather, but there’s no feminine genealogical descend. Studying I realized that women have never counted. They have always been in the shadow. And that makes it easier for the industrial market to work on women to sell goods to women because ‘they haven’t anything else to do.’ Today is not quite as bad, but it’s still there. Thinking about the way women dress in our society made me teach a course called The Meaning of Clothes in Time. And all of it started because I had all of these clothes on me, and the feeling of being a person that, because of the looks, but not only the looks — the makeup, the photographer, the lighting, and so on — I was lying to women. Our job is to make them think that they must do everything to be beautiful. In Italian we say ‘ingannare’ (to cheat) when the real message is ‘be authentic’ and have the courage to not obey, because that’s the only way women can gain self-confidence, not because they have a Louis Vuitton bag. Women look in the mirror and see what society wants them to look like. So I worked on some women’s movements, and I think that we should start with very small things, because we don’t change things, we can’t change the way society wants us to be, but we can mediate, find something in the middle.”  

Barzini has strong views on the role of women in society. An outspoken feminist, she likes to observe the world in order to be able to comment on it later. Doesn't like to talk about color. Her experience gives him the necessary framework to justify her claims. Even the most controversial ones. “All the magazines for women are based on a market of women that work, are independent, bring up their own children, get divorced, are free (with quotes, because freedom doesn’t exist) and therefore the most emancipated part of the feminine society is the part that obeys to the rules. But I don’t know if Vogue is happy to hear this… The unconscious will of the oppressing men want women to stay at home and to shut up and not express another point of view.” Vogue is happy to hear this, we assure her. It is important to see and think about fashion from all perspectives. Question it. There are more and more campaigns whose protagonists are plus size models, editorials with mature women abound, fashion shows are filled with different bodies, which make up a patchwork very different from the standards that the industry has accustomed us to. Is fashion more inclusive, more real? Barzini has no doubts. “No. Only if women wake up and stop obeying something will change, otherwise is only personal marketing or a matter of an artistic desire of a creative person. Women don’t need to take power, they need to, at least, become aware.” She recalls the small number of successful female designers, and gives an example of how the scales are out of balance in this eternal war of the sexes: “If you started thinking about a model with a glamours outfit and a photographer with his camera, you realize she’s a prey and he’s a hunter.” Can’t she ever be in control? “No. She can only be in control if she’s very famous and the photographer needs her for his career.” We want to know where these firm positions come from. Did she always think like that? “No, because when I was young I was accumulating experiences and I never sat back and really try to understand the meaning of what I was experiencing. But then when modeling stopped…” We interrupted. Why did it stopped? Benedetta opens her eyes wide, already expressive. She cracks a smile, she shrugs — discreetly, we suspect she's not the kind of person who does it often. “Because the phone didn’t ring anymore. And you are left without any power. You can’t do anything. You are used and throned out. Basta!”  And why did it stopped ringing? “Because I wasn’t good for advertising because of my Mediterranean face. I only did editorial, 99% was editorial. So after five years they said, ‘Basta, Barzini!’ So when the phone stopped ringing I started thinking. When I was 30, 35 I had accumulated experiences and I started considering a future. Fashion is a very dangerous momentary occupation because those are the years when you should be studying and if you don’t study in those years you are not gonna study later on. What are you gonna put in you cv, ex-model? But I’m very grateful to modeling, and to Benedetta, because I never fel into traps. I never thought I was beautiful, for instance. What I knew was beautiful was the work they did on me but they could have done it on anybody… well, more or less.” Barzini refers to fashion as a “momentary occupation”, she prefers not to call it a profession. We can see that she has a love-hate relationship with the industry. “Even the bad experiences were good experiences”, she guarantees. Maybe that's what, after all these years, makes her accept some invitations. “It’s a bit like horseback riding. After 30 years you get back on the horse and you pick it up where you left it of. Actually, I was beginning to feel I was getting to be what I considered a good model when the phone stopped ringing. So when I was asked to do a fashion show or a photo session I picked up where I left it of and that was interesting to me to see how I could go on. And I was very curious to see how things have changed in these years. The industry became an assembly chain. It was vey interesting to see that in my days there was time. You could do a beauty page in two or three days. One picture. Because Penn or Avedon didn’t like the way the hair was and it was five o’clock. It would be like 'next day.' Today you do 10 or 15 pictures in a row… And [I also accept] because I need to pay the rent. But I don’t care about the result. I have always been the kind of person that takes off the makeup and it’s done.” 

The passage of time does not bother her. Nor old age. “I look in the mirror and I say 'Barzini, you're different, you're losing hair... Pazienza.'” In those moments, what do you see? “A little tenderness, which I never had. I repeat: ‘Barzini, you did the best you could, you don’t have anything to be ashamed of’. It’s nice to be an old lady. Getting older takes away your health, your looks, but it gives you more intelligence. It makes you selective. You slow down. You can see things that you couldn't see before. I’m very happy that I am going to die. I’ve had enough of this life.” Benedetta Barzini no longer wants to simply disappear. She wants to leave. How would she like to die? “I think everybody would like to die with a heart attack when they’re sleeping. What I know I will not do is end up in a hospital with tubes all over the place. No. I have a funny feeling that your death is connected to the way you were born. I think that our death is related to our life, our thoughts, how much power we have inside of us to say ‘hey, heart, basta, stop’. I will probably die alone, at night, I don’t want anybody crying around me, that’s their business. That’s la perfezione. Va benne, it won’t be that way. Basta, enough talking.” And suddenly the 78-year-old woman is 38, 28, 18 again, and has a mischievous smile that radiates youth. “Shall we smoke a cigarette?” 

Originally published in the Time issue of Vogue Portugal, from December/January 2021/2022.Full credits and story on the print version.