Fashion at the Time of Fascism: Italian Modernist Lifestyle 1922–1943 (review)

From the Bologna-based art and photography publishing house Damiani comes this beautifully designed and visually stunning coffee-table book on modernist fashion in the age of Mussolini's fascist reign. Unlike other scholarly books on fashion and fascism, such as Eugenia Paulicelli's Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt (Berg, 2004) or Irene Guenther's Nazi Chic: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Berg, 2004), this volume prioritises images in the analysis of fashion's complicated intersections with Italian corporatist politics. In drawing on material from such varied archives as women's fashion magazines, fashion house photo collections, exhibition catalogues, manuals on dress-making and tailoring, as well as on selected publications by governmental bodies, the editors have compiled a rich collection of miscellaneous sources with the aim of contributing to the "critical discourse on the modernist concept of fashion design in Italy: from conception to production, from distribution to consumption" (9).

The material presented is loosely organized under four separate headings: "measurement," "model," "mark," and "parade." Accompanying texts are essayistic in nature, used primarily in an auxiliary function to emphasize the images' thematic outlines and inflections. The result is a book that has all the virtues of an exhibition display. Due to Fashion at the Time of Fascism's impressionistic nature and alluring imagery, readers are invited to immerse themselves in individual themes or become absorbed in the study of particular images rather than reading the book from cover to cover. Indeed, it seems perfectly possible to look at the assembled pictures and images in a manner reminiscent of strolling through an art gallery: randomly, lingering over specific items, intrigued by the beauty of the details put on view. In its appearance and formal structure—which is difficult to describe and convey adequately in a review—the book thus replicates some of fashion's seductive allure and attraction. Conceivably, fashion historians Mario Lupano and Alessandra Vaccari, in writing this book, made the conscious choice to put the accent on style and elegance.

This is not to say, however, that Fashion at the Time of Fascism lacks an overall narrative principle. In my view, what holds together the distinct sections is the volume's focus on avantgardist aesthetics. Discomfortingly, modernism emerges as the leitmotif that connects the playful and evocative nature of fashion with the austere and draconic force of fascist politics in 1920s and 1930s Italy. For instance, if fragmentation and serialization are resonant keynotes in modernism's mode of production, the book's section on "The Body in Pieces" vividly illustrates the pivotal role of both concepts in fascist tailoring—practices in which "the body is broken down and worked on by individual anatomical parts" so as to be presented in "a repertoire of fragments" in contemporary fashion magazines (40). In using such focused examples—the cinema or the motor car as an emblem of modern transport technologies are other obvious cases in point—Fashion at the Time of Fascism is successful in indicating the recurrence of specific modernist iconography in both fashion and fascist documentation.

The last section on "parade" then pools the book's thematic fragments by examining the significance of mass-production in both fashion displays and fascist military parades. Before the reader reaches this last part, the totalitarian regime's attempts to standardize individuality is already indicated parenthetically in sections such as the one on the rise of Hollywood cinema and its role as trendsetter for fashionable types. In the 1930s, the editors argue, it "was Hollywood and no longer Paris that called the tune: it built up the collective imagination and fine-tuned the styles ahead of the times" (124). But here, in the final passages of the book, the similarity between the mannequins paraded on the Italian catwalks in the 1930s and the synchronized procession of uniformed and unified bodies in the totalitarian regime's monumental military spectacles is explicitly underlined. In both scenarios, it...