Aldo Fallai (Florence, 1943) lives and works in his native city and in Milan. With a diploma from the Florentine Istituto d’Arte, where he later taught, he opened a graphic design studio with the photographer Mario Strippini and began to approach photography himself. In the middle of the 1970s he met Giorgio Armani, who was making his debut as a designer at the dawn of the worldwide affirmation of Made in Italy, to which Fallai’s photography made a fundamental contribution. His first assignment from Armani was a reportage for «L’Uomo Vogue”; this marked the start of a collaboration that was to continue for a quarter of a century, in the course of which Fallai helped to build and consolidate the image of the designer’s brands (Giorgio Armani, Emporio Armani, Armani Jeans). A famous reportage of 1976, pivoting on the topic of second-hand apparel, helped to make his name as a fashion photographer with a disenchanted, restive and unconventional style. Having achieved international fame, Fallai also worked for labels such as Hugo Boss, Canali, Cerruti, Salvatore Ferragamo, Gianfranco Ferré, Calvin Klein, Valentino and Ermenegildo zegna. His reportages appeared regularly in the Italian and international fashion press, in magazines including «Amica», «Anna», «Annabella», «Elle», «GQ», «Grazia», «Harper’s Bazaar Italia», «Max», «Moda», «Mondo Uomo», «L’Uomo Vogue», and the English, Italian and Australian editions of «Vogue». In the early 80s Fallai worked with models of striking personality, such as Angela Wilde, Antonia Dell’Atte and Gia Marie Carangi. At the same time he began to address the icons of the history of art and the portrait genre, which he bound to fashion in a highly personal synthesis; this strand of his work was to have notable developments, in particular as a result of his collaboration with the Istituto Marangoni. Tuscan Mannerism, Caravaggio, the Pre-Raphaelites and the exoticism of the French orientalists have been identified by the critics among Fallai’s artistic benchmarks. He has published the photo books Almost One Year (1993), inspired by Federico zeri and Kazunori Iwakura, and In fabbrica (2007), an intriguing interpretation of Italian entrepreneurial vitality.