Fashion under Fascism

Eugenia Paulicelli is Professor of Italian and Women’s Studies at The Graduate Center and Queens College of The City University of New York, USA, where she is the Founder and Director of the Concentration in Fashion Studies. She is author, editor and co-editor of 13 books and monographs. Among her latest publications: Italian Style: Fashion & Film from Early Cinema to the Digital Age (Bloomsbury: 2016); The Routledge Companion to Fashion Studies (with V. Manlow and E. Wissinger, 2021).

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsPreface: Fashion/Fascism: Odd bedfellows?Chapter 1: Introduction: Fashion/FascismFashion and historiographyMethodology. Thinking Fashion, Rhythm and Spatializing TimeObject and IntersectionalitiesBeyond the Black Shirt: Continuity and ChangeLa moda è una cosa seria. Fashion is a Serious BusinessGianna Manzini and her Approach to FashionStructure and SourcesChapter 2 Fashion/Fascism: Why and How it MattersOrigins of Italian Fashion?Fashion and totalitarianismUniforms and Fashion under Fascism“Read my Pins”Chapter 3 Per una moda italiana: From the Interwar Years to Fascism Imagining an Italian Style: Between Modernity and TraditionRegional Dress and Fashion during FascismRosa Genoni: Fashion and Feminism in 1910sPerforming Dress and Gender: Futurist Avant-gardes between Nationalism and RevolutionFrom Balla to Thayhat: Transgressing Gender and Genres in the New Language of DressThe Fascist “New Woman.” Lydia De Liguoro and the Project for an Italian Fashion“An Italian Fashion does not exist yet. We must create it”Chapter 4 The Language of Fashion: Narratives, Style and Women’s Voices under FascismThe Discourse on Fashion under the Fascist Regime: the 1936 Italian Commentary Dictionary of Fashion by Cesare MeanoRestless Voices. Femininity, Motherhood and Gender in Women’s Writing in the Fashion Magazine BellezzaDress, Style and the National Brand: Meano’s Commentary on NationalismSport, Gender and Models of Femininity in Meano’s CommentaryChapter 5 Cinemoda and Cinelandia under Fascism The Istituto LUCE Fashion Film: Education, Entertainment, Propaganda Fashion, Film and the Politics of the Regime From Hollywood to France and then to Italy: Alta Moda in Alessandro Blasetti’s Contessa di Parma (1937)Grandi Magazzini, Department Stores and Standardization Dressing the Mass Market: I Grandi Magazzini (1939) by Mario Camerini Chapter 6 Nationalizing the Fashion Industry?The Intelligent Fibers: Between Innovation and AutarchyFashion and Fascism for Export: Race, Colonialism, Empire. From Ethiopia to New YorkItaly at War. Autarchic Textiles and Clothing at the 1941 Venice ExhibitionLooking Back: The National Conference on “Clothing and Autarchy.” Turin, June 1940. Italian Fashion between Alta Moda and Confezione (Ready to Wear)Chapter 7 ConclusionsFashion and Fascism after FascismInterrogating the Past. Fashion between History and Memory:Appendices: Interview with Micol Fontana by Eugenia Paulicelli (June 2000)Gianna Manzini, “Fashion is a Serious Business”Alba De Céspedes, “Eve and the Feathers”Illustrations from the fashion magazine BellezzaNotesBibliographyIndex

This book demonstrates why fashion is such a great lever to activate our thinking about politics – politics of space, material and the body. The holistic understanding of such multiple politics, grounded in historical studies of moving clothes and moving images, emerges here forcefully from Eugenia Paulicelli’s study of Fascism’s cultural genealogy. Her book exposes Italian Fascism as an insidious ideology of the everyday, of a ‘way of life', and she strongly reminds us that Fascism may change its guise but, alas, has yet to go out of fashion.