Marella Agnelli (1927–2019) was an Italian socialite and a member of the international jet set. Descended from Naples nobility, she married Gianni Agnelli, owner of the Fiat empire, in 1953. She was a jewelry lover and one of the most elegant women of the 20th century.
Princess Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto was born in Florence to an Anglo-American mother and an Italian father on May 4, 1927. She studied art and design at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris before moving to New York in the early 1950s. In Manhattan, she became a model, then the assistant to Erwin Blumenfeld, a fashion photographer who contributed to Vogue.
After marrying Turin businessman and industrialist Gianni Agnelli in 1953, she devoted her life to the pursuit of elegance and the art of living well: decorating their dozen or so homes, hosting dinners and parties, and being dressed by the greatest fashion designers of the time. With her husband, Marella Agnelli acquired an exceptional collection of contemporary art, including works by the likes of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Lucio Fontana, and Frank Stella. All these pieces are now exhibited at the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli in Turin. Nature was her other passion. With the help of botanists Russel Page and Madison Cox, she set about beautifying the grounds of her properties, the most striking example probably being the garden of her Moroccan villa. This experience is recounted in two books she co-authored: Gardens of the Italian Villas and The Agnelli Gardens.
A woman of taste, Marella Agnelli possessed a unique beauty, with a long, graceful neck, a slim figure and impeccable poise. She captured the imagination of artists and fashion designers. Andy Warhol and Richard Avedon both produced portraits of her, Valentino Garavani dressed her for much of her life, and Truman Capote considered her one of his “swans,” the sophisticated women he liked to surround himself with.
A lover of fashion and jewelry, Marella Agnelli was an eminent Cartier client. Along with other personalities such as María Félix and Nina Dyer, she began wearing the panther motif in the 1960s.
The Maison’s archives contain the designs for two brooches purchased by her husband, dating from 1966 and 1968 respectively, while the October 1967 edition of Vogue photographed her in her panther bracelet at Villa Agnelli.
In 2004, she published The Last Swan, an autobiographical work combining her life story, family photographs and interior design projects. When she passed away in 2019, that title was unanimously echoed by the press to pay tribute to this icon of 20th century elegance.