It is with great pleasure that I catch the invitation of Panorama to write about the genesis of my book La Fashion in Fascist Italy. Not only Black (Dario Cimorelli Editore): the result of many years of research that resumes the latest English edition of the volume Fashion Under Fascism. Beyond The Black Shirt (Bloomsbury) and enriches it with the addition of an iconographic apparatus and some unpublished texts.
At the origin of my work there is a research that I conducted at the end of the nineties in the newspapers of the fascist period. Consulting them I discovered an article published in the magazine La Donna, who in 1935 headlined: “Fashion is a serious thing”. The author Gianna Manzini claimed that the fashion was considered as an integral part of the culture of a people and, above all, that it should be treated with great seriousness and rigor just as it is done with painting, literature, cinema.
I couldn’t agree anymore. His theory fully supported not only my research, but also the project to promote fashion as a new field of study to be integrated into the academic plans already consolidated in universities, in particular my institution: the graduate center of City University in New York.
While working abroad – I live in New York since the 1980s – I deepened the history of Italy and investigated the least studied periods, such as fascism, to connect them to the concepts of “made in Italy” and “Italian style”. There were many omissions on the time between the two wars, especially as part of the study of the role of fashion and women involved at work level. So I began to identify those particularly crucial historical periods to deeply examine the relationship between style, history and construction of national identity, and the impact of fashion in the multiple processes of modernization. And one of the elements that emerged from this last study is the concept of “multiple modernity”. On the one hand, fashion defines itself as and configures as an artufactured industry that branches out in a complex chain, on the other it is a powerful symbolic machine in which desires, styles, dreams and even anxieties cross.
Another point that I want to emphasize concerns restoring Italian trendy historical dignity. Its genesis has always been attributed by most publications to 1951, with the Florentine fashion shows organized by Giovanbattista Giorgini. But, in reality, already in the early twentieth century and then during the fascist regime period there was talk of the birth of the National Fashion Body (1932 and 1935), the first government institution to control the fashion and textile chain. That is, a process of industrialization of clothing in a ruralization policy of the country was hoped for an industrialization process. A very significant contradiction, to think about it. And not the only one, as we will see.
It should not even be overlooked that women like the socialist Rosa Genoni, who had dreamed of an Italian fashion since the beginning of the twentieth century (and which I dedicated the first bilingual monograph in 2015) and as the fascist Lydia de Liguoro, director of the Italian monthly costume and fashion Lidel (1919-1935). They already fought for a Made in Italy fashion in those years. Which also meant promoting forms of participation and female emancipation, while traditional models to family and women impose themselves from above.
Therefore, more than the origin of fashion, I am interested in tracing both the economic points and the points that report new historiographic paths to identify innovationsthe experiments, the openings of thought occurred in the textile manufacturing industry, in culture and consequently in civil society.
What emerges is that, perhaps, no more fashion theme is able to demonstrate the contradictions of the fascist period: The many realizations of the twenty years have materialized on opposite direction tracks and speed. Just think, for example, of the Americanism and anti -cosmopolitanism of the regime, while the models to which they aspired both the middle and popular classes, came from overseas and from the most modern European countries. What to say of the autarchy and populism that imposed reductions in consumption and uniformity of behaviors and needs, against the needs of diversification of the lifestyles to which the various layers of the bourgeoisie of the rise regime aspired.
In this regard, the videos of the Istituto Luce are a precious source, who not only documented Italian fashion fashion shows, but had reportage from the United States (many), from France, even from China and Mexico. The films animated the photos of the tailoring garments present in fashion magazines and told them for a wider audience that went to cinemas.
Furthermore, let’s not forget that Cinecittà and the school of cinematography were born in the 1930s: For the first time he professionalized the role of the cinematographic costume designer. The fashion and cinema report synchronizes precisely in this period, both in the parades taken from the Istituto Luce, and in the film production (as Countess of Parma by Alessandro Blasetti; department stores of Mario Camerini, as well as many others). Looking at the works of the time, it is understood how fashion houses produced heads of elegance and good taste no less attractive than those designed in Paris. The thirties parades, documented by the light, also show the experimentation inherent at the process of filming the fashion and the relationship between fashion, cities, landscape and Italian cultural heritage, in advance of the current fashion shows in the historical sites made by the brands, such as Dolce & Gabbana.
Working abroad occupying Italy meant inhabiting two worlds also in the field of archival research. At the New York Public Library I examined materials relating to the Italian pavilion of the Universal Exposition of the Big Apple of 1939, and I discovered an unpublished document written by Eleanor Lambert, called “godmother” of American fashion, of the New York fashion week and the annual party at Met, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is still held today. Well, in addition to the parallels between Italian and American fashion in the 1930s, and the relationship of subordination with the Parisian one, testimonies of independence of their own industrial, commercial and cultural project that could invest politics, institutions, the press emerge. Not a propaganda operation of the regime, but a widespread will of the people employed and engaged in the textile industry to contribute to the best to represent Italy.
Once again, therefore, there were contradictory forces: on the one hand the need to promote a manufacturing industry of the country and with it to pass on an aesthetic-cultural identity; On the other, the fight against vanity and bourgeois closes.
The massage of a rural environment and the sporting and athletic woman, the civil uniforms and the first institution of the fashion entity to promote precisely that bourgeois elegance that conflicted with the idea of black shirt. But dressing is a daily activity that serves to cover the body, to protect it but also to decorate it. The dress communicates our being in the world in a temporal and cultural space.
This is why in the book, to the high fashion photos of the patinated magazines, with splendid suits and evening clothes, hats with mysterious sails and fabric flowers, the images of the archives of Michele Cioci (1915-1972) of Canosa di Puglia and those of Giulio Parisio and the Troncone brothers of Naples were joined.
Photographs that have contributed to telling the complexity of the period in questionthey do not read as subordinate material to the written text, but as a story in parallel in which many subjectivity of different classes are documented.
Photography tells the story and photographers make the architects of the documentation of their territory. For example, in one of the photographs of Michele Cioci it is possible to compare how the fascist uniform manipulated by making it at home and adapting it to the body of a child. Civil uniforms cost and not everyone could afford them.
In the volume I wanted to highlight how crucial to study these shots in aesthetic details, focus on the mechanisms of self -representation and representation, on the choice of clothes, on the poses, on the hairstyles. There is everything in these images: the models portrayed in fashion houses (Cassisi, De Finizio, won) but also on the streets of Naples (Parisio and Troncone), the great influence of cinema in the poses, the tradition of the family portrait.
The images are in themselves important documents, but also opportunities to deepen a social and cultural history of fashion and customs of an era. The photographs of Cioci, Parisio and Troncone tell us how the dress is an integral component of our humanity by entering the folds of history.
