Get the latest gossip

Oliviero Toscani obituary

Photographer and art director who oversaw a series of controversial ad campaigns for the Benetton fashion brand

Toscani extended that concept into a “family of man” theme in 1984, assembling young models from the wider range of ethnicities available in the fashion business since the 1970s, and pushed that further by casting amateurs from many countries and cultures. He was born in Milan, to Dolores (nee Cantoni) and her husband Fedele Toscani, a Corriere della Sera photojournalist of the hardest school, his most famous image the hanging corpses of Mussolini and his mistress. Toscani thought they no longer needed to appear in the ads – “Selling jumpers is the company’s problem, not mine” – and that the expensive page, wall and television screen space they occupied could be better employed to show life itself, with an occasional inflammatory joke, such as actors cast as a nun and a priest kissing.

Get the Android app