2002/11/01 by Eugenia Paulicelli · 8 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Italian Fascism and Post-war Society #Art, Politics, and Modernism
paper · doi:10.1111/1468-0424.00281
openalex publication_date 2002/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
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.