Daniela Petroff, AP’s longtime fashion and Vatican reporter, dies at 80

ROME (AP) — Daniela Petroff, who helped shape The Associated Press’ fashion and Vatican coverage for nearly four decades with style, authority and wit, has died in Rome. She was 80.

Petroff died Tuesday at home, where she was recovering from a fall, said her husband, Victor Simpson, the retired AP Rome bureau chief.

Petroff worked for The Chicago Tribune and Time magazine in Rome before moving onto the AP as a Vatican reporter and Milan fashion correspondent. She launched what became a mainstay of the AP’s culture report, covering the four weeks of menswear and womenswear each year.

In 1985, the Simpsons endured an unfathomable tragedy: Their 11-year-old daughter, Natasha, was killed during the Dec. 27, 1985, terrorist attack at Rome’s airport that also wounded Simpson and their son, Michael. When their youngest daughter, Debbie, was born two years later, Pope John Paul II called to congratulate Petroff.

In announcing Petroff’s death, Simpson wrote that she had gone to sleep after lunch and decided not to wake up, “to finally embrace again her beloved Natasha.”

Led AP’s Milan fashion coverage

Fluent in Italian, German, French and English, Petroff spearheaded AP’s Milan fashion coverage just as Giorgio Armani was becoming an international figure, setting the pace for other reporters with informative, succinct, fact-based dispatches that stayed away from opinion and reviews.

“She had a gift for putting the facts into kind of a very artful context,” said Lisa Anderson, who covered Milan fashion for The Chicago Tribune for nearly a decade starting in the mid-1980s. “She looked at that industry, which often takes itself too seriously, with a lot of amusement as well as respect, which is probably the right combination of qualities to approach fashion reporting.”

Petroff’s last AP byline appeared in September, when her authoritative profile of Armani was published following the designer’s death.

“Starting with an unlined jacket, a simple pair of pants and an urban palette, Armani put Italian ready-to-wear style on the international fashion map in the late 1970s, creating an instantly recognizable relaxed silhouette that has propelled the fashion house for half a century,” Petroff wrote.

She covered the rise of Gianni Versace, Gucci in the Tom Ford era, Karl Lagerfeld at Fendi and the Missoni fashion dynasty, and often put her fashion knowledge and smart wordsmithing to work on the Vatican beat.

In one 2014 story about Pope Francis’ new batch of cardinals, she mused: “But with the ‘slum pope’ now calling the sartorial shots, fashionistas and Vaticanistas are wondering how his new cardinals — who hail from some of the poorest places on Earth, including Haiti, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast — will dress themselves for their new role.”

In between those assignments, Petroff covered some of the biggest cultural events in Italy, including the 2003 reopening of Venice’s La Fenice opera house after a devastating fire. “True to its namesake the phoenix, La Fenice has risen up from the ashes,” she wrote at the reopening.

Petroff’s way with words caught the eye of The New York Times’ William Safire. In a 1993 “On Language” column, he quoted her describing how Italian fashion designers that season were interpreting the grunge trend. He said Petroff suggested “that the winter woman would wear tattered jeans under a sable coat in an exhibition of drunge: ‘midway between a dandy and a grunge.’”

Early life in Paris, New York

As an only child born in 1945 in Mecklenburg, Germany, Petroff grew up first in Paris and then New York, where she attended the all-girl Convent of the Sacred Heart Catholic school. Her family moved to Rome for Petroff’s final two years of high school, which she completed at Marymount International School.

After attending Manhattanville College in New York, Petroff returned to Rome and graduated from La Sapienza University with a degree in modern languages. In Rome, she soon met the new AP news editor, Victor Simpson. They were married in 1973.

A childhood friend from New York, Gail Willett Bejarano, recalled ice-skating in Central Park, afterschool ice cream at Schraftt’s and pushing the rules with the nuns at Sacred Heart. While Petroff was a top student, she was also part of the posse of girls who would go to ogle the boys at nearby Loyola, “hike your uniform up and put lipstick on, all forbidden,” Bejarano recalled.

After retiring from AP in 2017, Petroff dedicated herself to her alma mater, Marymount, where she served as chair of the board.

A private funeral is scheduled Thursday. A memorial service is planned for Monday at Marymount.

In addition to Simpson, Petroff is survived by her son, Michael, and daughter, Debbie.

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Barry contributed from Milan.