Eugenia Paulicelli

Fashion, the Politics of Style and National Identity in Pre¿Fascist and Fascist Italy

The essay offers an analysis of fashion and its bearing on the construction of national identity and politics of style during fascism in Italy. No recent work on fascism has analysed the role of fashion in the complex and contradictory phases of the cultural politics of Mussolini’s regime. The essay aims to illustrate the two sides of fashion and their relevance to the period in question. It shows, on the one hand, how the regime used fashion to discipline the social body, especially women’s, and to create a national style recognisable as such; and, on the other, how fashion is also an individual act through which was expressed the creativity both of the people working in the fashion industry and of ordinary people who used fashion and style to demonstrate their non–conformity with the diktats of the regime. Pointing out that it was as a result of the debate on nationalism of the pre–fascist liberal period that premises for fascist policy were set, the essay argues that the history of fascist fashion policy is one of continuities rather than ruptures.

Fashion: The Cultural Economy of Made in Italy

Abstract The article examines the concept of Made in Italy in the context of the long history of Italian fashion and Italian nation building. It wishes to pose some methodological questions: it argues for a more sophisticated understanding of Made in Italy, suggesting that it must be considered in relation to the complexity of the formation of an Italian style that harks back to early modernity when a prolific literature and culture came to the fore and elaborated an Italian taste or sprezzatura that was then exported to the rest of Europe. Second, the article argues that todays Made in Italy must be examined in the context of both a multilayered identity and a plurality of fashion cities and capitals. Lastly, the article argues that, as is the case with sprezzatura, a study of Made in Italy must be attentive to how Italian style has been, over the years, translated and exported beyond the spatial confines of the nation and the temporal confines of history.

Italian Silent Cinema. A Reader

helped by his argument that Fascism and the Church shared the same enemies, enemies he was in the best position to repress: liberals, socialists, and masons. A key part of the story of these years is how the Church distanced itself from the Italian Popular Party (PPI), and Guasco offers a thorough account. Founded in 1919 and headed by a priest, Luigi Sturzo, the PPI was one of the major obstacles Mussolini faced in solidifying and maintaining his power. How Mussolini was able to convince Pius XI to withdraw clerical support for the party is well told here. By the time of the first elections under Mussolini, in the early spring of 1924, the pope had forced Sturzo from the party’s leadership. The PPI (like the socialist parties) found it almost impossible to campaign amidst widespread Fascist violence and intimidation. Yet, while the Vatican protested the violence against the PPI, it alternated these protests, as Guasco shows, with regular praise of Fascism’s favourable actions towards the Church and a distinction between the good work of Mussolini and the Fascist authorities on the one hand and the lamentable action of out-of-control individual Fascists on the other. The chapter on the Matteotti affair makes clear how close Mussolini came to falling from power in the wake of the Fascist murder of the socialist leader. As Guasco shows, the PPI leadership was convinced that the king was ready to appoint a new, non-Fascist prime minister. Guasco details how the pope aggressively intervened to prevent the king from deposing Mussolini by preventing any PPI support for the coalition that would be needed to bring Mussolini down. The author includes 150 documents as an appendix to the book. These are taken from a variety of sources: including the archives of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, the Vatican Secret Archive, the central Jesuit archive in Rome, and the archive of the Jesuit journal Civiltà Cattolica. He includes too a number of published articles from the Vatican-linked press and a few published primary documents. Together this body of materials offers a rich basis for understanding the Holy See’s evolving attitudes and actions in the early years of Fascism. Cattolici e fascisti is among the earliest major works to explore the recently opened Vatican and Church archives for the papacy of Pius XI. It does an excellent job of showing how the Holy See came to throw its support behind Mussolini and how it helped make Italy’s Fascist dictatorship possible.

Mapping the world: The political geography of dress in Cesare Vecellio's costume books

Non è che l’immagine del mondo da medioevale che era divenga moderna; ma è il costituirsi del mondo a immagine ciò che distingue e caratterizza il Mondo Moderno. Nessuna meraviglia quindi se solo là dove il mondo è divenuto immagine si impone l’umanesimo. [...] Egli designa ogni dottrina filosofica dell’uomo che spieghi e valuti l’ente nel suo insieme a partire dall’uomo e in vista dell’uomo [...]. La novità concerne il mondo nel senso che si è fatto immagine.1

Fashion Writing under the Fascist Regime: An Italian Dictionary and Commentary of Fashion by Cesare Meano, and Short Stories by Gianna Manzini, and Alba De Cespedes

Eugenia Paulicelli is Associate Professor of Italian, Comparative Literatures, and Women’s Studies at Queens College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Her latest book Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt will be published by Berg (2004). She is currently working on a study tentatively titled “Dressing and Undressing the Public Self in Sixteenth Century Italy” and a cross-cultural project dealing with migration, ethnicities, and dress. Fashion Writing under the Fascist Regime: An Italian Dictionary and Commentary of Fashion by Cesare Meano, and Short Stories by Gianna Manzini, and Alba De Cespedes1

Italian fashion: yesterday, today and tomorrow

The article considers Gianna Manzinis ‘La moda e una cosa seria’ (La Donna, 1935, July, 36–37) as a forerunner of current scholarly approaches to fashion in general and Italian fashion in particular, for three reasons. First, it asserts the importance of a gendered history of fashion; second, it argues for the importance of boundaries and lines of demarcation in the study of fashion that do not pertain solely to time but also to fields, disciplines and the other arts, as well as social and political domains; third, it raises the question of the relationship between fashion and nation. In examining how and when to establish the beginning or the origin of Italian fashion, the article argues for a long history of Italian fashion that stretches as far back as early modernity, thus reframing a number of historiographical questions. The article goes on to signal the difficulty involved in establishing neat points of ruptures and origins, and continuities in any historical or cultural spectrum in view of the porosity of national boundaries; and makes the case for considering fashion, both todays and that of yesteryear, in both its national and transnational dimensions.

Exhibition Review: Form Follows Fashion

Eugenia Paulicelli is Professor of Italian, Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center where she coordinates the Fashion Studies Forum. She has co-curated an exhibit “The Fabric of Cultures. Fashion, Identity, Globalization” (Godwin Ternbach Museum at Queens College, Spring 2006). Her book, Fashion under Fascism was published in 2004 (Oxford: Berg). She is the editor of Moda e Moderno dal Medioevo al Rinascimento (Rome: Meltemi, 2006) epaulicelli@gmail.com Reviewed by Eugenia Paulicelli Exhibition Review: Form Follows Fashion

Performing the Gendered Self in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, and the Discourse on Fashion

Habitus, from the Latin habeo, corresponds both to “dress” and “way of being,” and as such opens up the possibility of a dialectic between these two terms.1 Clothes, in so far as they cover, adorn, and dress the body, bear the signs of a complex and ambiguous relationship with identity. An identity which is both hidden and suggested in the veil of images forming its public and private faces. To this kind of process, fashion and clothes have a great deal to contribute and tell. My aim in this paper is to illustrate how such a fashion discourse is presented and how it contributed greatly to the performance of the self in one of the most canonical literary texts of the Italian Cinquecento, namely Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528) by Baldassare Castiglione.2