Italian Style

Fashion & Film from Early Cinema to the Digital Age

Eugenia Paulicelli

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781501334924
• eBook ISBN: 9781623568580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Italian History

This is the first in-depth, book-length study on fashion and Italian cinema from the silent film to the present. Italian cinema launched Italian fashion to the world. The book is the story of this launch. The creation of an Italian style and fashion as they are perceived today, especially by foreigners, was a product of the post World War II years. Before then, Parisian fashion had dominated Europe and the world. Just as fashion was part of Parisian and French national identity, the book explores the process of shaping and inventing an Italian style and fashion that ran parallel to, and at times took the lead in, the creation of an Italian national identity. In bringing to the fore these intersections, as well as emphasizing the importance of craft in cinema, fashion and costume design, the book aims to offer new visions of films by directors such as Nino Oxilia, Mario Camerini, Alessandro Blasetti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti and Paolo Sorrentino, of film stars such as Lyda Borelli, Francesca Bertini, Pina Menichelli, Lucia Bosè, Monica Vitti, Marcello Mastroianni, Toni Servillo and others, and the costume archives and designers who have been central to the development of Made in Italy and Italian style.

1

Fashion, Film, Modernity

Nostra Dea: the goddess of fashion

Performance Notes

Extreme rapidity is recommended in all changes of clothing. This recommendation is particularly addressed to the costume designer, who should bear it in mind when designing all of Dea’s dresses.

Act I

Dea is in her slip. She stands erect in the middle of the stage facing the audience, her arms hanging limp at her sides, motionless, her face absolutely without expression. There is something abandoned and at the same time rigid about her appearance, like a store window mannequin.

(Massimo Bontempelli, Nostra Dea, 1925)1

In Nostra Dea (Dea by Dea), a play written in 1925 by the Italian playwright Massimo Bontempelli, the female protagonist changes behavior, gesture, language and identity whenever her maid, her dressmaker or anybody who belongs to her entourage dresses her in a different outfit.2 When she is undressed, Dea appears as a formless and lifeless machine, a store window mannequin, a robotic body, the opposite of nature. This is, in fact, how Dea is introduced to the audience up until the moment when her first maid Anna, an older woman, picks out her outfit of the day. In her slip, Dea does not have a life, she seems to be in a sort of undetermined neutral and zero degree of existence. Clothing gives her motion and life. It is her maid who has the task of dressing her:

(with a discreet touch of her hand she leads Dea towards the screen. Anna goes to the wardrobe, which has remained open, quickly chooses a dress, and closes the wardrobe doors. She hurries over to her mistress, who has come to a full stop on the other side of the screen in the same mechanical position as before. Now they are both on the left of the screen). (258)

Anna plays the role of a costume designer assisting the actor to dress up before a performance. Clothing gives Dea not only motion and life but also gives her a context, a frame, a narrative. Clothing gives depth to the flatness of her naked body; it is like adding a stereoscopic lens transforming her body into a three dimensional identity.3 For each costume she wears, she has a different identity which provokes a different reaction in her interactions with other people. The naked body is similar to that of a lifeless mannequin, while the dressed body takes on many different variants, a plurality of identities, each one of which is characterized by newness and fleetingness.

Dress fires life into her body, which is otherwise trapped in an indecisive and “unnatural” nakedness:

(Anna deftly helps her on with the outfit, bright red in colour: a smart straight-cut tailor-made suit, very masculine and youthful. She takes a white carnation from a vase and puts it in Dea’s buttonhole.)

Dea: (with a huge shudder, as if her whole body had been galvanized into life, she turns to the mirror and takes a rapid look at herself. Then in a warm vibrant voice): Yes, it suits me. I look like a young man.

(Anna in the meanwhile rapidly buttons up the outfit.) I’d like to go out for a long walk. In fact I’m going to stay out for lunch. I know, I’ll go to a bistro.

(Anna in the meantime puts a red hat on her head that matches the dress, adding to the overall impression of vivacity, youth, and self-confidence). (259)

And, later, Anna, describing Dea to Vulcan, a male friend of hers, says:

Anna: Madam is very sensitive. […] Very sensitive to the clothes she wears. She’s amazing! If she has on a bright-coloured dress, she’s bright, like today; if she has a timid dress on, she’s timid, like yesterday: and she changes altogether, altogether. She talks differently. She’s not the same person. One day I saw her in a Chinese outfit, and she began speaking perfect Chinese. If I were to put a black dress on her and a long black veil, she’d be off to the cemetery to blubber over one of the tombs. (263)

By the end of the play, several dresses have covered her body; and for each one of them she acts accordingly, assuming different gestures, body language and personality; she is a woman of multiple frames, each one adding a different dimensional depth.

Dea is not alone in being a creature of the clothes she wears. Dress has a structural function, also, for the play’s male characters, and shapes the narrative and the interactions among them. Very astutely, Bontempelli tells us that dress, fabric, color and texture do not leave either us or the wearer in a state of indifference. Indeed, dress leads into a minefield of emotions. The theater stage, and by extension the cinematic stage, become important vehicles for the visual performance of costume and clothes. They move with the characters; and they move the audience with them.

In her permutations of dress, Dea condenses a series of important ideas that are pertinent to the present study. In the doubleness of her nature (the naked body) and technology (the dressed body), Dea embodies modernity and a new visual awareness. But the realms of the naked and the dressed are never completely separated; rather, they are linked to circularity, interexchange and a process of negotiation. It is in Dea’s multiple and ever-changing identity that Bontempelli’s play is at its most modern. Indeed, Nostra Dea echoes Baudelaire’s analysis of fashion, the artificial, and the natural, and the impact that gesture and deportment have in defining a particular historical epoch. Even from differences in draping and the way pleats are arranged, he says, one can gauge a “new system” (The Painter of Modern Life, 1863).4 More importantly, what Baudelaire emphasizes is the way fashion manipulates and inscribes the body and its images in new frames and forms.

But it is with Walter Benjamin’s writings on modernity that Nostra Dea shares stronger echoes, especially in the face of what was a new, emerging mass society where fashion and cinema were two of the most tangible manifestations in the maelstrom of a technological revolution, in a time in which technology allowed both for reproducibility and new visions and for apperceptions of the self and the world. Benjamin’s concern with the relationship between image (the naked body/“truth”) and copy (the dressed body) is very much Bontempelli’s concern, but, far more than in Bontempelli, Benjamin’s discussion has as its context the development of two industries of mass consumption: fashion and film. As Peter Wollen has noted, for Benjamin, under modernity, it is the copy that becomes “associated with the true, and the original with the false” (Wollen: 48).5 Nostra Dea illustrates eloquently this two-way dynamic of modernity: the image and the copy, the naked Dea and the dressed Dea; stasis and movement; dress and costume as a technology of the body and social performance. In this way, as in several films of the same time, Nostra Dea is the embodiment of the contradictory forces of modernity, materialized through, on the one hand, fashionable clothing, and, on the other, costume and spectacle—as we see in the extravagant snake dress that Dea wears at the costume ball at the end of the play. Bontempelli’s concern with doubleness in Nostra Dea is also a concern of some of the landmark films of the period such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), which came out a couple years after Nostra Dea. Doubleness in Lang’s film is represented by the split of the two Marias: the real one (the “good” Maria), and the false one (the “bad” Maria), the robot constructed by Rotwang, the mad scientist, who is also reminiscent of the medieval magician. The false Maria is turned into a femme fatale and a temptress, when she dances wearing the spectacular costume created for the film by Aenne Willkomm. She is also a seducer hinting at unbridled sexuality. In Wollen’s words: “Technology and sexuality are condensed in the figure of the robot Maria” (Wollen: 46). In order to be credible she needs to wear clothing that will convey, and perform, the message. If, in Metropolis, Maria performs her robotic actions thanks to light and electricity, Dea, in Nostra Dea, condenses, in one person, the different forces of technology with multiple changes of dress. There is, however, in this dynamic of true and false, real and imaginary, image and copy a trajectory well described in relation to the two Marias in Metropolis by film theorist Francesco Casetti:

We face two polar opposites (nature/artifice), as well as the possibility of their continuity. This continuity is assured by the absolute likeness between the Real Maria and the False Maria: the exact same body lends itself to both woman and automaton. […] There is a circularity and synthesis between nature and artifice. The negotiation changes the terms of the problems […]. At the same time, it assures the active presence of both sides. Each pole of the dialectic has something that has to be preserved. (Casetti: 109)

Fashion is as much a negotiation with modernity as is film; they both expose the seams of technology. It is in this light that Nostra Dea demands to be read. Thus, dress, as it appears in Bontempelli’s play, has the emotional and affective power that is epitomized by visual performance. As Nostra Dea illustrates, clothing has a highly symbolic charge, affecting the wearer, and his or her perception, in any social space. More specifically, clothing, fabrics, their color, shape and texture variations, frame the apperception of self. Clothing materializes a sentient way of perceiving the body in space.6 The materializing in film of the dynamics of image and copy, the natural and the technological, costume and clothing takes on the form of a dense and precise essay on language and signification.

Fashion and film are very powerful industries; they are also media machines that shape and construct equally powerful symbolic narratives and identities, as true today as at the outset of cinema, even in our after-the-digital-revolution and globalized world. It is hardly surprising, then, that writers and filmmakers alike have been fascinated by the transformative power of the language of clothing and fashion and the impact that this language has on style, consumption and behavior.

Pirandello, cinema, and clothing: elective affinities

I look at the women in the street, note how they are dressed, how they

walk, the hats they wear on their heads; at the men, and the airs they

have or give themselves; I listen to their talk, their plans; and at

times it seems to me so impossible to believe in the reality of all

that I see and hear, that being incapable, on the other hand, of

believing that they are all doing it as a joke, I ask myself whether

really all this clamorous and dizzy machinery of life, which from day to day seems to become more complicated and to move with greater speed, has not reduced the human race to such a condition of insanity that presently we must break out in fury and overthrow and destroy everything. […]

I am an operator. […]

This is what I do. I set up my machine on its knock-kneed tripod. One or more stagehands, following my directions, mark out on the carpet or on the stage with a long wand and a blue pencil the limits within which the actors have to move to keep the picture in focus.

(Luigi Pirandello, Shoot!, 1915)7

Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) was one such writer. It was he who directed the first production of Nostra Dea in Rome on April 22, 1925. Ten years earlier, Pirandello had published the first novel—Shoot! (1915)—about the new art born of science, technology and machines: film. The protagonist and narrator of Shoot! is the camera operator at the Kosmograph film company, Serafino Gubbio. Through his thoughts and reflections we are able to gauge both the anxieties generated by the technological revolution brought about by cinema, and the new possibilities brought about by the use of the camera. Serafino Gubbio defines himself as “a hand that turns the handle”; and while he turns the handle, complying with his director’s orders, he reflects upon his mechanized gestures and those of the actors:

“Are you ready? Shoot!”

And I start turning the handle.

I might indulge myself in the illusion that, by turning the handle, I set these actors in motion, just as an organ-grinder creates the music by turning the handle. But I allow myself neither this nor any other illusion, and keep on turning until the scene is finished. […]

Long live the Machine that mechanizes life!

(6–7)

The triumph of the machine that has mechanized life also structured workers’ lives in the factories, as we can see in Lang’s Metropolis or Chaplin’s Modern Times. The factory workers carry out repetitive gestures and bodily performances; in Metropolis, they walk, dressed identically; the nu...

Table of contents

• Topics and Issues in National Cinema
• Title
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Fashion, Film, Modernity
• 2 Italian Fashion and Film in the 1910s: From the Futurists to Rosa Genoni
• 3 From the Body of the Diva to the Body of the Nation
• 4 Fashion, Film, Modernity, under Fascism
• 5 Launching Italian Style in Cinema and Fashion: The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni
• 6 Rome, Fashion, Film
• 7 After La Dolce Vita: La Grande Bellezza (2013) by Paolo Sorrentino
• Appendices:
• Selected Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright