#4 Gia Carangi: A thing of beauty

Getting to know Gia, understand her somehow, is a long, painful and yet wonderful experience. It’s probably a cliché, but you don’t know a thing if you have just seen the movie (1998, HBO, with Angelina Jolie). She was something different, and the movie (and Angelina) haven’t show it at all. Maybe it was impossible, I don’t know.
Anyway, you should really read “A thing of beauty” by Stephen Fried, not only because of all the details about Gia’s life he could tell, but also because of the incredible portrait of the high fashion world of the early ’80s in New York that he gave. It was a crazy world where people lived too fast and die too soon, where drug use (and abuse) was anything but an exception.
It was probably nothing different than the music scene nowadays, or the cinema business, but I never really got interested in high fashion before so what I knew was close to nothing.

For those of you who don’t know who Gia was I can only say that she was an incredibly beautiful girl who had been a supermodel for part of her life (somebody says she was the first supermodel ever), an addict, a lesbian, a rocker (she never really played, but she definitely had the spirit) and, above all, a lost girl.
You can see some of her pictures here.

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