Designers Gather in Milan to Remember Anna Piaggi The flashbulbs have not dimmed for a moment in the front rows of Milan Fashion Week despite the notable absence this season of the late Italian editor Anna Piaggi, perhaps the last great example of a fashion eccentric who managed to inspire designers as much as she was inspired by them. Today, a new generation of self-created runway fixtures has emerged to take the place of singularly dressed editors of the 20th century, the indelible figures like Ms. Piaggi, Isabella Blow and Diana Vreeland. But you get the sense that creative direction now goes only one way, since many of the current bloggers and street-style stars are often dressed by designers or even paid to wear their clothes. While they are entertaining to watch, it was Ms. Piaggi who was a true originator, one whose aesthetic sensibility was informed by her own tastes, her remarkable collection of centuries-old vintage designs and her detailed knowledge of fashion history. More than 200 people gathered at the Palazzo Reale in Milan on Friday night for a memorial service for Ms. Piaggi, who died in August at the age of 81. It was somewhat fitting that guests entered by walking through a major Picasso retrospective that opened in the museum this week. In a New York Times video that was played at the beginning of the service, the photographer Bill Cunningham described Ms. Piaggi as "fashion as art - how she dressed herself was really the same way a painter, with his tubes of paint of color, creates his canvas. Anna simply did it with cloth, feathers, furs, jewels, herself. Each time she appeared, she would create a new startling picture. Among the speakers were several designers - Carla Fendi, Rosita Missoni, Manolo Blahnik and Stephen Jones - who similarly expressed Ms. Piaggi's ability to inspire. Mr. Jones, the great milliner, described her as "a talisman for those who believe that fashion is a way of life and that freedom of expression should manifest itself in what you wear." Her eccentricity was awe-inspiring, sometimes surreally so, as evidenced by photographs that showed Ms. Piaggi wearing a ball gown with the skirt spread open to reveal a large clock, or a knit sweater dress that showed the cartoon figure of a woman naked from the waist up, or elaborate gowns with ruffled scrolls, or an Art Deco fur coat that matched the pattern of her wallpaper or, on one occasion, the burgundy polyester vest of a McDonald's uniform. Her face was powdered white with bright rouge dollops on her cheeks, and she never, or at least not in the last few decades, left home without wearing a comically shaped hat. When Mr. Jones was a student at Central Saint Martins in London, he recalled seeing Ms. Piaggi with Karl Lagerfeld, the designer with whom she was most famously associated with during the glamorous years of Paris in the 1960s and '70s. She was like a beacon for all of those young students who were eager to be a part of the world of fashion, and her openness and gentleness seemed to invite them in. When Ms. Piaggi, working as an editor for publications like Vanity and Italian Vogue, became one of his customers, Mr. Jones discovered just how inspiring her confidence could be. "Anna would always take me out of myself," he said. Unchecked, I can be a bit studied and analytical, and she would inject spontaneity in whatever I did. She would take a hat and put it on upside down, or back to front, and when she had proved me completely wrong, she would say, 'There, you see?' Her dedication to fashion was so intense that comfort and sensibility were often considered to be an inconvenient afterthought. Ms. Missoni, who frequently vacationed with Ms. Piaggi, recalled a particularly difficult journey through an airport when they were delayed because of the tiny shoes Ms. Piaggi insisted on wearing, and the amount of time it took to pass through a security checkpoint because Ms. Piaggi was wearing so much jewelry. Mr. Jones said that on one of those vacations, likely to a spa, Ms. Piaggi called him up to ask for some hats that were waterproof.