“If the public can predict you, it starts to like you. But the Marchesa didn’t want to be liked.” For the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Marchesa Luisa Casati astounded Europe. Artists such as Man Ray painted, sculpted, and photographed her; writers such as Ezra Pound and Jack Kerouac praised her strange beauty. An Italian woman of means who questioned the traditional gender codes of her time, she dismissed fixed identities as mere constructions. Gathering on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the first publication of Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati (the first full-length biography of Luisa Casati, now offered in an updated, ultimate edition), Michael Orlando Yaccarino joins Valerie Steele, Joan Rosasco, and Francesca Granata in conversation about the enigma that is the Marchesa Casati.



Michael Orlando Yaccarino is a writer specializing in international genre film, fashion, music, and unconventional historic figures. Scot D. Ryersson (1960–2024) was an award-winning writer, illustrator, and graphic designer. Michael and Scot collaborated on many projects, are coauthors of Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati, The Ultimate Edition, and are founders of the Casati Archives. www.marchesacasati.com

Valerie Steele is a fashion historian and director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Steele is the author or editor of twenty-five books, including Paris Fashion, Fetish, and Fashion Designers A-Z.

Joan Rosasco taught at Smith College, Columbia University, and New York University, with focus on European art and culture, French literature, and the Belle Époque period. She is author of numerous publications including The Septet.

Francesca Granata is associate professor of fashion studies at Parsons School of Design. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary visual culture, fashion history and theory, and gender and performance studies. Granata is editor of Fashion Criticism and author of Experimental Fashion, and wrote the afterword to Infinite Variety.


Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati, The Ultimate Edition, is available from University of Minnesota Press.

“I want to be a living work of art”: On the Marchesa Luisa Casati

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020.

More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold

A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold

“I want to be a living work of art”: On the Marchesa Luisa Casati

University of Minnesota Press

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