Italian Style Fashion & Film from Early Cinema to the Digital Age

by Paulicelli, Eugenia

• ISBN13: 9781441189158
• ISBN10: 1441189157
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-09-22
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Focusing on a number of crucial films and directors from the silent era to the present, this study offers, for the first time, an in-depth exploration of the interaction between fashion and Italian cinema. The study, however, will privilege the golden age of Italian cinema, especially the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s during which, through the marriage of fashion and film, Italian fashion and style were launched globally.

Since its beginning and during periods of great transformations, movie-going for both men and women was akin to going to a fashion parade. Before the explosion of digital technology and its enchanted world, access to fashion was only accessible on the big screen. Fashion and style became reachable for the masses through cinema. Through the lens of fashion, the study will revisit the films of some of Italy's most important film-makers, such as Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti and others and films as old as Mario Oxilia's silent Rapsodia Satanica (1917) to Luca Guadagnino's I am Love (2009).

Author Biography

Eugenia Paulicelli is Professor of Italian, Comparative Literature and Women's Studies at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, US. At the CUNY Graduate center she directs the interdisciplinary concentration in Fashion Studies. She teaches courses on fashion cultures, Italian Literature and fashion and film. Among her recent publications are the volumes Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt (2004), Moda e Moderno: Dal Medioevo al Rinascimento [Fashion and Modernity: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance] (2006, editor), The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity, Globalization (2009, co-editor) 1960: Un anno in Italia. Tra Cultura e spettacolo (2010).

Table of Contents

Part I. Fashion, Cinema and Italian Identity


Chapter 1. From France to Italy. Fashion, Modernity and Film
Chapter 2. Nationalism: Fashion as Propaganda in the 1930s




PART II. Towards the Launch of Italian Style through Cinema, Fashion and Design




Chapter 3. From Neorealism to the Launch of Italian Fashion (1942-1966)
Chapter 4. Fashion, Film and Consumption during the Economic Miracle. Rome: City of Fashion, City of Film
Chapter 5. From Modernism to Excess: Antonioni, Fellini and Visconti. Italian Filmmakers and their Transnational language
Chapter 6. The Italian Road to Modernity: Between Crisis, Melodrama, Comedy and Critique




Part III. From Rome to Milan: The Crisis of Couture and the Launch of Milan Prêt-a-Porter
Chapter 7. Italian Fashion Brands and Foreign Movies: Giorgio Armani and American Gigolo, The Untouchables (1968-1980s)
Chapter 8. Film and Fashion Nostalgia in the New Millennium: Between the Digital Revolution, Globalization and 'Made in Italy'