Franca Sozzani, the "Pope of fashion" who wanted to meet the Pope

If you're not into fashion, you may never have heard of her; if you're a fashionista, however, you're unlikely to have missed her name: Franca Sozzani, editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia, reigned over taste and fashion for decades. But, above all, the woman known primarily for her regular presence at fashion events converted to the true faith a few months before her death, while contemplating the Holy Shroud. Her son told the story: in 2016, when the shroud of Christ was on display in Turin, he accompanied her there. After contemplating the body printed on the cloth, the woman who knew she was seriously ill asked her son to wait for her, as she wanted to go to confession. Surprised, he agreed, and waited for three hours for her to come back. When she returned, Franca was a changed person: all she wanted to do was meet Pope Francis to understand the source of her new spiritual strength. Alas, time was not on her side: she died on 22 December as a result of her illness, full of faith and hope.

Franca Sozzani / © Shutterstock

Reasons to believe:

Franca Sozzani came from a world renowned for its superficiality and dissolute morals: one couldn't have foreseen her total and instantaneous conversion to Christianity.

Sozzani's conversion was triggered by contemplating the imprint of Christ's suffering body left on his shroud.

Immediately afterwards, she asked for the sacrament of confession in order to rediscover full communion with Christ and his Church. According to her son, this confession visibly transformed her and brought her lasting peace.

She developed a genuine filial love for the Pope, coupled with boundless admiration.

She left this world with a pacified soul, knowing that death is a return to God, and asked that the following words be read at her funeral Mass: "Better is the day of death than the day of birth" (Eccles. 7:1).

Summary:

Born in Mantua in 1950, Franca Sozzani moved around a lot during her childhood, following the professional assignments of her father, an engineer. But it was in Milan, Italy's fashion capital, that she spent most of her time. After studying literature at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, she entered the world of fashion at an early age, learning the profession of specialist journalist, and working for various international publishers.

At the age of 37, she became the editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia. She was facing big challenges, as the publication was struggling and everything had to be rehauled. Franca Sozzani did an impressive job, throwing all her energy into the magazine, which ended up attracting all the world's top designers and models. Little by little, she became a legend in the industry, notably by publishing an issue in 2008 featuring only black supermodels.

Married several times, she had a son with the director of the Italian Club Med. It was this son, Francesco, who accompanied her one day in 2016 to see the Holy Shroud on display in Turin Cathedral. He recounted this extraordinary moment in the documentary he devoted to his mother, "Franca: chaos and creation". What could have been a simple touristic visit, or an exercise in curiosity for this mysterious burial cloth that still defies science and reason, turned into a crucial moment of conversion. She, the lanky blonde with the signature long and curly hair, who was known as the "pope of fashion", suddenly felt like a small child in front of the physical image of the divine Savior, miraculously imprinted on his short-used burial shroud.

When Franca asked for confession, her son at first thought it was a joke. Then, when he had to wait three hours while she received the sacrament of reconciliation, he thought it was a bad joke. But then she told him: "Sometimes in life, you want to look inside yourself." And she added: "Manzoni went into a church once, and that was enough to convert him." Manzoni was a famous 19th-century Italian writer who, like the French writer Paul Claudel, was suddenly converted inside a church. She too, she would tell her son some time later, was converted at that moment, all at once.

This conversion, as profound as it was dramatic, gave her a living faith that would stay with her and sustain her through her battle with lung cancer from which she died a few months later. She left behind the memory of an energetic and visionary woman, "a force beyond measure", who used the same optimistic determination in her newfound faith as she had used in her long career in fashion reporting.

Jacques de Guillebon is an essayist and journalist. He is a contributor to the Catholic magazine La Nef.