- Born
- 29 January 1960Philadelphia, USA
- Died
- 18 November 1986Philadelphia, USA · aged 26
Gia Carangi
A model whose brief career challenged fashion’s conventions and whose death exposed the reach of the AIDS crisis.
Gia Carangi was born in Philadelphia in 1960. As a teenager she admired David Bowie and spent time in the city’s gay and lesbian clubs. At seventeen she moved to New York, where her modelling career developed rapidly.
Within a few years she appeared on the covers of “Vogue” and “Cosmopolitan” and in major fashion campaigns. Her dark, direct presence offered an alternative to the polished glamour then dominant in American modelling. Photographers responded to a look that could seem vulnerable in one image and defiantly self-possessed in the next.
Carangi was open about her attraction to women, though her personal life was often unstable. Heroin addiction increasingly disrupted her work. Attempts at treatment and a return to Philadelphia did not restore the career she had built so quickly.
She died of AIDS-related complications in a Philadelphia hospital in 1986, aged 26. Her death challenged the widespread assumption that AIDS affected only gay men. Stephen Fried’s biography “Thing of Beauty” and the television film “Gia” (1998), starring Angelina Jolie, later brought her story to a much wider audience.