Aldo Fallai's latest exhibition, Bravo Portraits, celebrates the opening of an Italian fashion institute in Shanghai. Gao Erqiang / China Daily

Aldo Fallai brought fashion fantasies to life for decades, but he got his start by accident, he tells Xu Junqian in Shanghai.

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For Aldo Fallai, a one-time painter and art teacher, it took just an impulsive whim and "a very young age" to grab a camera and shoot images for six pages of the fashion bible Vogue some 40 years ago. But to be the photographer of the earliest and some of the best campaigns of style luminaries such as Giorgio Armani, Salvatore Ferragamo and Valentino, the now 70-year-old Italian says it's more about talent, or passion, or creativity ...

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"You need to love art, music, dance, movie, theater, to travel, and, to live fashion," says Fallai, one of Italy's - and the world's - top fashion photographers.

If Giorgio Armani builds his sterling reputation in the fashion history for tailoring and dressing a revolutionarily sleek-silhouetted age of men, Fallai is the pioneer who can make a beautiful and elegant man step through the lens.

"Before him, nobody can 'camera-see' the beauty of a man," says Roberto Riccio, managing director of Marangoni Group, who invited Fallai to mount a show for the opening of the Italian fashion institute's Shanghai branch. The exhibition, Bravo Portraits, is a collection of black-and-white images taken by Fallai of the institute students in Milan.

Looking back at his career as a fashion photographer, Fallai says it was a lucky accident when he met Giorgio Armani - before he was "the Giorgio Armani" - at a private party in the 1970's.

"We both freelanced for a T-shirt company, where he was the designer, and I was the one who painted the print on the T-shirt. And then at this party, he asked me if I knew a photographer who can do a six-page project of Vogue, and I said I would try", he recalls.

"I had taken pictures for myself, but never for fashion magazines," he says, jokingly. "I was very young and stupid," he says, but confident that he could do it.

That brash confidence has paid off. Fallai's photo shoots have been famous for a refined aesthetic and formal purity, recognizable from his early work to his latest photographic forays. He presents a distinct sensibility in the capturing of bodies and faces.