Anna Piaggi

With her kiss-curled blue hair, pencil-ringed eyes, colorful canes, and fantastic hats, Italian Vogue's Anna Piaggi is unmistakable and unmistakably influential. Her fans range from Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana to Another Magazine's Jefferson Hack to her pal Manolo Blahnik, who calls her "modern beyond belief." Another friend, Karl Lagerfeld, chronicled 12 years of the journalist and self-styled fashion diviner's "anna-chronistic" looks—think a navy-blue Balenciaga suit padded at the hips with the croissant-shape pannier of an opera singer, or a priceless Poiret coat worn over Missoni pajamas—in his 1986 tome, Lagerfeld's Sketchbook. What the designer called Piaggi's "appetit graphique" is equally evident in her witty magazine work. She's produced more than 7,000 editorial pages, and Vanity, an illustrated journal she curated in the early eighties, is cultishly collected. Now, with Fashion-ology, a Topshop-sponsored exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum through April 23, this muse and style icon is set to win a whole new set of followers.

—Laird Borrelli