Oliviero Toscani, an Italian photographer who used images of an AIDS patient and death row inmates to break the boundaries of fashion imagery as the creative mastermind of Benetton’s advertising campaigns, died on Monday. He was 82.
His death was announced by his family on Instagram. They did not say where he died or cite a cause of death, but in August Mr. Toscani told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that he had been diagnosed with amyloidosis, a rare and incurable condition in which there is a buildup of protein.
His shock-and-awe campaigns in the 1980s and ’90s helped turn Benetton from a small Italian brand into a global fashion powerhouse, with provocative advertisements that blurred the lines between marketing and activism, high art and consumer industry.
In one ad, an AIDS patient lay on his back, his mouth open, his hands curled on his chest. His dark eyes stared past his family, who had gathered around his deathbed. The patient, David Kirby, looked almost Christ-like.
And there, near the bottom right, a few words hung in a green box: “United Colors of Benetton.”
The advertisement, which ran in the 1990s, was one of the most provocative and divisive in recent fashion history, prompting furious debates over whether Benetton, and Mr. Toscani, were creating art, engaging in advocacy or exploiting the epidemic to sell its clothes.
Notably, Mr. Toscani had the Kirby family’s permission to use a colorized version of the image, which was shot in 1990 by the photographer Therese Frare. The Kirbys said the campaign had helped broaden awareness about AIDS.
“Benetton didn’t use us, or exploit us,” the Kirby family said, maintaining that this was a way for their son’s portrait to be “seen all over the world, and that’s exactly what David wanted.”
Mr. Toscani’s ads were often socially progressive, with images of racially diverse and gay families. They were also meant to shock. He used pictures of horses copulating. He used the bloodstained uniform of a soldier killed in Bosnia-Herzegovina. One ad featured actors dressed as a priest and a nun kissing.
“Advertising agencies make millions by repeating the same old thing,” he told The New York Times in 1995, adding, “We try to go another way.”
Mr. Toscani sometimes crossed the line even for Benetton. He joined the company in 1982 and left in 2000 amid an uproar over an ad campaign that featured photographs of death row inmates across the United States.
He returned as creative director in 2017. But his career at Benetton came to an end in 2020, not because of the calculated and daring risks he had taken in photography and advertising, in which he delighted in his broadside challenges to conventional ideas of respectability. Rather, it was because of an offhand comment he made in a radio interview about a bridge collapse in Italy in which more than 40 people died. “Who cares that a bridge collapsed?” he had said. Though he apologized, Benetton fired him.
Italian politicians and creative leaders honored him in social media tributes on Monday. The designer Valentino Garavani, the creator of Valentino, called him “a visionary who challenged the world through his lens.” The designer Giorgio Armani wrote that “the directness and visual impact of his language set a standard.”
Oliviero Toscani was born in Milan on Feb. 28, 1942. He followed in the footsteps of his father, Fedele Toscani, a photojournalist. Mr. Toscani trained at the Zurich School of Applied Arts and worked as a fashion designer before he joined the Benetton Group as art director in 1982.
His survivors include his wife, Kirsti Moseng Toscani, and their three children, Rocco, Lola and Ali. Mr. Toscani was married twice before and had three other children. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
In his final months, Mr. Toscani told the Corriere della Sera that he had lost weight while being treated for amyloidosis and that his sense of taste had declined. Wine tasted different to him, he said. “I am not interested in living like this,” he added.
But in September, he traveled to the Museum fur Gestaltung Zurich for a major retrospective of his work called “Oliviero Toscani: Photography and Provocation.” It closed just over a week before he died.
“I have found out that advertising is the richest and most powerful medium existing today,” he told The Times in 1991. “So I feel responsible to do more than to say, ‘Our sweater is pretty.’”
Elisabetta Povoledo and Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting.
