Fashioning Rome: Cinema, Fashion, and the Media in the Postwar Years

Author(s): Eugenia Paulicelli

Source: Annali d'Italianistica , 2010, Vol. 28, Capital City: Rome 1870-2010 (2010), pp.
257-278
Published by: Arizona State University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24016397

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Eugenia Paulicelli

Fashioning Rome:
Cinema, Fashion, and the Media in the Postwar Years

In the postwar period, and especially during the years of the nation's great
transformation during the boom years, Italy and some of its cities projected
abroad and at home an appealing image of modernity and beauty. Among Italian
cities, Rome established itself in the imaginary of the time as one of the most
desirable places for foreigners to be, especially for those working in the movie
industry and related fields. In these years, Rome underwent something
approaching a re-birth, a new life. After the havoc left by World War Two and
the images of semi-destroyed buildings that were lodged in people's memory —
almost as they had appeared in Rossellini's Roma, città aperta (Open City,
1945) — Rome put on beautiful new clothes and became once again a tourist
destination. Both as a manufacturing and as a culture industry, fashion had a
great impact in constructing and reshaping modern, postwar Rome. In the
aftermath of World War Two, Italy, along with the other European countries that
were beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan, launched itself once again on the global
stage (White and Ribeiro).
Through the marriage of fashion and cinema, Rome projected a new image
of glamour, art, and beauty. Italy's reconstruction, and especially the recognition
of Rome as a fashion city, were facilitated by the movie industry and the
presence in the capital of the Cinecittà studios. Particularly crucial are the 1950s
and 1960s, the years of the so-called "economic miracle" — a defining moment
for the history of the Italian nation vis-à-vis the larger global economy.1 It is in
the context of post-World War Two reconstruction that the rich and multifaceted
exchanges between Italy and America must be examined. The identity of
European cities was also shaped through American mediation; in this process,
popular culture, fashion, film, photography, and tourism played a crucial role. In
what follows, I revisit these years through a new lens, that of fashion, in order to
show how fashion plays a key role in telling the complex story of how different
bodies, institutions, architecture, and systems of cultural mediation (film,
journalism, art, etc.) make their critical contributions to our understanding of
cities. More importantly, this essay will gauge the complex mechanisms that
produce the tropes and narratives by which a city is textualized in different
discourses, located and identified on maps — whether these maps be
geographical, imaginary, or touristic. In her 2009 book uncovering the

1 See Crainz, Storia del miracolo italiano and II paese mancato. I would like to thank
PSC-CUNY for the award that has enabled me to do research for this article.

Annali d'Italianistica 28 (2010), Capital City: Rome, 1870-2010

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258 Eugenia Paulicelli

mechanisms that have supported the image of Paris as a fashion city (Fashioning
the City. Paris, Fashion and the Media), Agnes Rocamora has emphasized the
importance of both the imaginary and the lived dimensions of the city and how
media culture contributes to the shaping and perception of the city she
examines.2 This process is made possible by "the well established tradition of
textualization of the city and its inhabitants" (Rocamora), to which a
considerable body of literary works, travel writing, and journalism has
contributed. Let's remember that the word "text," in its Latin etymology (texere:
to weave), contains the intricate practice that weaves narratives and, in our case,
produces the city itself. At the core of the present essay is the unravelling of the
fabric, threads, and tissues that constitute and have constituted both Rome as a
fashion city and the perception of its haptic and optical dimensions in cinema.
From this perspective, we will see an example of the role of fashion in the
processes of modernization that have taken place at different times in history,
and especially during periods of great cultural, political, and economic
transformations — in which the identity of a nation is always revisited and
reshaped. The scholarly contribution of what I would call a new historical
geography, combining time and space in a relational mode, has been crucial for
a critical and deeper understanding of fashion and its "many direct points of
contact with the study of a city" (Gilbert 6).3
Rome, then, is considered here as a city and a trope of multiple narratives
that came into being during the boom years. As John Agnew has noted, fashion
takes an active role in "spatializing the world — dividing, labeling and sorting it
into a hierarchy of places of greater or Tesser' importance" (4). Although
Agnew is writing about the present, the principle he elaborates holds good for
several historical periods and identifies why and how fashion comes to the fore
and contributes to the weaving of the narrative and identity of a given nation or
city, adding them to the map of desirable places to be in or to dream of. This
mechanism has grown especially visible in the last two decades, as fashion has
become an ever more powerful and desirable element of cultural capital for the
cities of the world. The high visibility enjoyed by fashion designers, brands,
spokespeople, and celebrities, as well as by fashion weeks — when new
collections are presented twice a year — all emphasize the seductive quality of
fashion and its role as a motor of economic growth (Zukin 13). The fashion city
as "global capital of fashion" is now a feature of the global competition between

2 See also Breward, Fashion (169-216).

3 In his introduction to Fashion's World Cities, Gilbert offers an important framework
within which to study how and why, at a given time in history, a city becomes a fashion
city. I would like to further these theoretical assumptions and add the work by Harvey to
which I will refer later. In a longer study on which this essay is based I found that
scholarship in cultural geography can shed new light in repositioning Italian cultural
history and identity as well as offering alternative modes of writing the history of fashion.

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 Fashioning Rome:Cinema, Fashion, and the Media in the Postwar Years 259

cities that, through their "cultural industries," gain visibility in the geography of
consumption, tourism, and imaginary and desirable places (Gilbert). The
importance of this process has accelerated and reached extraordinary
proportions because of the revolution in new media and technology. However,
as the case of Rome shows, this mechanism manifests itself in different
historical phases and comes to the fore during the periodic processes of
modernization or great transformations of nations — as was the case for Italy
during the economic miracle of the 1960s.4 These years also witnessed a shift in
cinematic and aesthetic terms.5 It is for these reasons that we can talk about
"multiple modernities" within the narrative of a nation. We might wish to look
at these phenomena in a comparative perspective — considering, that is, other
countries at different times in history — and see how fashion has played a
crucial role in shaping this process.6 If Italy at the time of the "Grand Tour"
represented both a necessary stop on the journey of every northern European
gentleman's education and the place to romanticize narratives of national
identity, in the postwar years of an increasingly mass society — from the 1950s
onwards — tourism became a veritable industry.
David Harvey has described in detail the complex mechanism through
which cities acquire "monopoly rent" and symbolic collective capital. Harvey
identifies in fashion one of the strongest vehicles through which cities acquire a
mark of distinction that is, in turn, transformed into symbolic capital to attract
tourism, capital, business, etc. (Harvey, Spaces of Capital) Following Harvey's
theory, we may say that it was in the boom years that Rome gained "monopoly
rent." However, the mark of distinction that characterized Rome was not born of
nothing. Rome has, of course, played a crucial role in the foundational myths of
the Italian nation. But. more importantly, Rome has been central to a
Eurocentric vision of the world in which Christianity is seen as a superior form
of religion and civilization. Rome, in fact, had always occupied a special place
in both Italian and global history. For Old Europe, Rome had represented the
"fulcro metafisico" ("metaphysical fulcrum," Sloterdijk 163). Within the Italian
context, Rome was seen as a site of "universal history," a narrative that has been
retold and re-used in different historical epochs: one may think, for instance, of

4 The case of Paris studied by Rocamora could be considered in a similar vein and in a
comparative perspective.
5 It is interesting to see how clothing in Italian cinema and especially in certain films by
Antonioni and Fellini in the 1950s is staged into costume and then it becomes fashion. I
am considering this particular shift in a theoretical and historical framework in
Antonioni's 1950s film trilogy in a forthcoming article, "Cronaca di un amore: Fashion
and Italian Cinema in Antonioni's Films of the 1950s," to be published in a volume of
Italian Cultural Studies edited by Graziella Parati (Farleigh Dickinson Press,
forthcoming).
6 This view can be verified in the case studies presented in Paulicelli and Clark.

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260 Eugenia Paulicelli

how Mussolini quoted from and used imperial Rome in order to legitimize his
Fascist present.7 But Rome and its images have also lived in the experiences and
memories of many a foreign traveler and visitor.
In the context of fashion, however, Rome was not the sole competitor in the
race to be considered the capital of style. Rome had to compete with other
fashion cities, most notably Florence. After World War Two, before Rome and
even Milan had established themselves as fashion cities, it was from Florence
that "Italian fashion" had been launched nationally and internationally. In this
shifting of Italian fashion capitals, there is a peculiar pattern that has attracted
my attention, namely, the similarity of the shifting capitals of the Italian nation
during the Risorgimento. In fact, when Italy was unified in 1861, its first
national capital was Turin, followed by a move to Florence in 1864 and, finally,
to Rome in 1871. But Turin can boast another first: that of being also Italy's first
fashion capital during the Fascist regime. It was in Turin that the biannual
fashion shows were established (Paulicelli, Fashion Under Fascism ). In the
Fascist nationalist propaganda that aimed to establish and promote Italian
fashion, France was enemy number one. The Fascist regime nevertheless
thought that it would be a good idea to locate Italy's fashion capital
geographically and culturally close to Paris — the world capital of fashion and
chic at the time. Following Turin, Florence became Italy's fashion capital in
1951, with the "Sala Bianca" shows. Following Florence, it was then Rome, the
Eternal City, that became the center for alta moda. With its significance located
in a history that, although distant, was clearly visible in its architecture and
ruins, Rome became the theatre on whose stage some of the most influential
images of Italian style and la dolce vita were forged and transmitted to the world
via the powerful medium of cinema. The "new" Italian identity that emerged
from the boom years and the emergence of Rome as capital of chic were perhaps
epitomized most tellingly and memorably by Federico Fellini 's film La dolce
vita (1960): as both film and idea, this is a mandatory starting point when
talking of Italian style. Even today, a glance at the sales catalog of many a high
end American department store shows how Italian style is still fashioned under
the Fellinian trope of La dolce vita. Despite Milan's status as the global fashion
city that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s, Rome is still seen and wants to be
seen as the place for alta moda, in contrast to the Milan of prêt-à-porter. The
competition among Italian cities for the mark of distinction as fashion capital or
"monopoly rent" is still fierce and ongoing.8

7 On the meanings of Rome or the Roman Empire as a "universal history" to which non
Italian kings and emperors linked their name and their political and religious power (such
as Carlo V and even Napoleon), see Settis. As for the term "classico": according to Settis,
"lo sforzo di legittimare il presente scegliendosi nel passato i modelli 'giusti'" (80) has
been recurrent in Western cultural history since Petrarch.
8 Rome in many ways is still putting forward the idea that it can and would like to take

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 Fashioning Rome .-Cinema, Fashion, and the Media in the Postwar Years 261

The Sala Bianca fashion show, the result of an initiative by Giovan Battista
Giorgini — who gathered Italian couturiers and journalists, along with
American and European buyers from prominent department stores — launched
Italian fashion on the global scene. Giorgini was well aware of the richness,
beauty, and attractiveness of Florence, the quintessential Renaissance city so
loved by foreign visitors; he therefore organized several parties following the
shows, staged so as to emphasize the splendor of the past and the city's
architecture. An example was the party organized at Palazzo Vecchio on January
25th, 1953, in which Giorgini evoked the wedding between Eleonora di Toledo
and Cosimo de' Medici. For the foreign press and buyers, Florence — and Italy
with it — became that unforgettable sartorial, cultural, and personal experience
that was often, and still is today, romanticized in literature and cinema. In the
early 1950s, along with women's fashion, men's fashion, whose sartorial
elegance was epitomized by BrionP's "Roman style," was also presented at the
Sala Bianca. The representatives of the B. Altman department store — one of
the American buyers present at the show — commissioned Brioni to produce
evening jackets in black shantung, or colorful velvet, that were later marketed in
the U.S. B. Altman's decision to display Brioni's dinner jacket in its Fifth
Avenue windows was a decisive step in the launching of Brioni's international
career9 (Pictures 1 and 2). Launched as a brand in 1952, Brioni's "Roman style"
was, in the early 1960s, given even greater exposure by the continental suit
already launched in the late 1950s and epitomized by Marcello Mastroianni in
Fellini's La dolce vita.10
It was, then, the encounter between Italy and the U.S. that launched Italian
fashion on a global scale, in terms of both image and business. And it was
cinema that provided the fashion industry with a high-profile and increasingly
international shop window for promoting and publicizing Italian designers'
creations. Albeit on a smaller scale, this had been the case since the 1950s. In
Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1953), Ingrid Bergman's
wardrobe and her star persona were refashioned and glamorized in Roman

Milan's role in the global map of fashion cities, and Italy has indeed many fashion cities
and capitals.
9 One of Brioni's 1952 jackets was on display in a recent exhibition titled "Fashion +
Film. The 1960s revisited" held at the James Gallery at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. Interestingly, the show that I curated was located in the B.
Altman Building, now the location of the Graduate School of the City University of New
York. Some photos of the show are contained in the catalogue I co-edited with Maraldi.
10 It was this white suit with black shirt and foulard, worn by Mastroianni at the end of
Fellini's film, that was later reinvented by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (John
Badham, 1977. (Badham is the director of the film, so you either eliminate it or I do not
think we should add him in the bibliography, we do not do this for the other film
directors)

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262 Eugenia Paulicelli

couture style by the Rome-based Fernanda Gattinoni fashion house. Gattinoni's

was one of the maisons that, along with that of the Fontana Sisters, were already
in place immediately after the war. The artisanal know-how of Italian fashion
couture as displayed in the creations of Brioni, Simonetta, the Fontana Sisters,
Fabiani, Galitizine, and others found its industrial channel in the United States.
The skills and bravura of the American ready-to-wear industry were well
known, as was the talent of this industry in adapting and translating European
clothing aesthetic and style into American terms. Italian fashion was particularly
welcome because it combined elegance, color, and sophistication with ease and
comfort. In the 1960s Emilio Pucci was celebrated for shirts and clothes that
were ideal for traveling: easy to pack and wrinkle-resistant. A May 1960 edition
of Harper's Bazaar reported that Pucci's "miraculous packable silk jersey only
takes up the space of a handkerchief in a travel case and never needs to be
ironed" (Harper's Bazaar, May 1960, 15). Most of the fashion houses that took
part in the Sala Bianca fashion shows were based in Rome. It is, therefore, back
to Rome and its distinctiveness on the map of Italian and global history that I
now turn.

Since the end of World War Two, more and more Americans, including
actors and film people, spent time in Italy, and especially in Rome, filming in
the Cinecittà studios and transforming the city into what became known a
"Hollywood on the Tiber."11 Fashion houses such as the Fontana sisters'
(located in Piazza di Spagna) and Fernanda Gattinoni's (near Via Veneto and
strategically close to the American Embassy and the night life known as la dolce
vita) were instrumental in establishing the relationship between glamour
cinema, and the city. The Hollywood stars frequented the Rome-based fashion
houses not only for the costumes in their fdms, but also because they had
discovered that Italian couture was beautiful and stylish; above all they felt a
distinctly warm and friendly environment in their ateliers. Micol Fontan
recalled that "i salotti da prova" (fitting rooms) were like an intimate parlor
where stars chatted about their personal lives while being fitted for their outfits
12 The process of making a dress was also an occasion for persona
conversations between dressmaker and client. This often meant knowing the
secrets of the body shapes and measurements of the stars while at the same tim
fashioning their public image and style. The Fontana sisters, for example, mad
Linda Christian's wedding dress when she married Tyrone Power in Rome — a
dress that ended up on the cover of Life magazine (Picture 3). In fact, the sister
claimed that both their international career in fashion and the idea of a
glamorous "made in Italy" started when the American Hollywood star
advertised their creations in the media and popular press. The same happened

11 Hollywood on the Tiber is the title of a recent documentary recounting those years,
Marco Spagnoli (2009); the film is made of material from the Istituto Luce Archive.
12 Personal interview with author, Summer 2000.

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 Fashioning Rome .-Cinema, Fashion, and the Media in the Postwar Years 263

for male fashion and helped bring about the fortunes of tailors based in
Rome,such as the already-mentioned Brioni and Caraceni, who dressed Tyrone
Power for his wedding. In "reglamorizing" in the Italian style American
Hollywood stars such as Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Ava Gardner,
Gregory Peck, and Cary Grant, as well as the American Ambassador in Rome at
that time, Claire Booth Luce, Italian fashion designers capitalized on the
notoriety of their clients as vehicles of the increasingly international status of
Italian fashion. The Fontana Sisters created a dress called "Roma antica"
("ancient Rome") for Ava Gardner, one of the American representative
Italian fashion invited to Grace Kelly's wedding (Pictures 4 and 5). Th
increasingly hegemonic role played by Rome and by the city's designer
dictating what was fashionable and looked good also led to changes in m
fashion. In fact, a different image of masculinity was taking shape, thanks t
suit that was gradually softening the previously armor-like, stiff edges, in o
to embrace the body with soft fabrics and sartorial fineness of detail.
The 1950s and 1960s must have been a vibrant time in Rome. The city w
a magnet that attracted both foreign and Italian filmmakers, the locus
creativity that revitalized design, fashion, and the arts in general. Rome as a c
and as a trope became an ongoing "dreamt spectacle," a promised land f
visitors from abroad and from the Italian provinces who hoped to play a part
the city's stage. We see these characters in Fellini's movies, where costu
plays a key role in the process of fashioning and doubling, and in the mise-
abîme of identity.
In Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1951), Fellini proves to be ahead o
his time in immediately grasping the impact of a growing media culture and
effects of fotoromanzi (comic-strip photographic novels) on young women
Wanda, the film's protagonist. The fotoromanzi started in 1947 and enjoyed
huge boom during the 1960s. The protagonists, often women of modest mea
were attracted to romance and determined to follow their dreams and fantasies
that, for the most part, coincided with the pursuit of a male protagonist as their
hero. Fellini's Wanda represents the quintessential reader of fotoromanzi. She
goes to Rome on her honeymoon, but instead of spending time with her husband
— portrayed as a banal, petit-bourgeois, provincial stereotype — she seeks out
her real hero: a character in the fotoromanzo she avidly devours each week,
named the White Sheik (played by Alberto Sordi). Wanda throws herself into
the masquerade. She is offered a role in the making of the latest fotoromanzo,
dresses in exotic costumes, and ends up playing the part of the Sheik's love
slave. Later, however, the White Sheik's elegant and exotic mask drops when he
is revealed to be a pathetic seducer victimized by his own wife. Parallel to
Wanda's search for a world of fantasy is her husband Ivan's quest to maintain a
façade of bourgeois respectability and participate in the ritual audience of
"newly married couples with the Pope."
In The White Sheik, Fellini focuses on the nuances and meanings of dress in

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264 Eugenia Paulicelli

its emotional and social impact, relating it to the world of appearances, rituals,
and religion, but all the time blurring the boundary of the sacred and the profane.
Later, in La dolce vita, Fellini has Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), who is visiting the
city, dress in a priest-like outfit — an idea Fellini got from the Fontana sisters'
1955-56 winter collection, the "pretino" worn by Ava Gardner (Picture 6). In
other moments in La dolce vita, Fellini treats "religious miracles" as media
events and as pretexts for the fabrication of new heroes. In both their theatrical
and everyday rituals, dress and appearance in The White Sheik tell the story of
the development of a new Italian identity, suspended somewhere between
fantasy and glamour on the one hand, and petit-bourgeois hypocrisy and
decorum, on the other. The final shot sequence, centered on the dress etiquette
for papal audiences, is emblematic. The detail of the black tulle veletta (veil), a
customary accessory for women in the presence of the pope, underlines the
petit-bourgeois masquerade of the newly married couple.
In the Rome of the boom years, fashion and film find the ideal place to
focus their "magnifying lens" on reality. Similarly to the process described by
Rohdie in his comments on Fellini's work, it is the process of "deformation" that
helps to emphasize not so much the object, but its representation. Images can be
seen as "forms that, like grammar, are machines for the production of whatever
utterances" (Rohdie 115). Fashion and film are powerful mechanisms that
communicate meanings and emotions, the one drawing sustenance and power
from the other. As fashion historian Christopher Breward put it: "If fashion can
be said to be cinematic in its social and visual effects, then cinema is also very
clearly a primary product of the aesthetic and technological processes of
'fashioning'" (Breward, Fashion 132).
It is even more significant, in terms of these mechanisms for fashioning
identity, to consider Rome in 1960, the year the Olympic Games were held in
the city. It is interesting to see how the foreign fashion press covered Italy and
Rome at the time. One American photographer, William Klein, was sent to
Rome by Vogue in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His photographic account and
related texts in his book entitled Rome + Klein provide a fascinating journey.
During his stay, Klein was asked to do a photo shoot of Italian fashion for the
October edition of the magazine titled, "Italy: Fashion Triumphs in a Gala
Olympic Year." The best names of Italian fashion were represented: Capucci,
Simonetta, Fontana, Galitizine.
The Olympic Games contributed to the projection of a modern and
appealing image of Rome. They were a global event that exported an image of
Italy and Italian fashion to the American market. In Klein's photos we can see
the central role of place and urban architecture in presenting fashion. In the same
year of the Olympic Games, Emilio Shubert opened his new atelier in Rome and
Princess Irene Galitzine launched her "pigiama palazzo" (Pictures 7, 8 and 9).
Klein's book contains a photo shoot of a party set up by American Vogue to
celebrate Galitizine's collection of "Palazzo pajamas." In his sarcastic

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 Fashioning Rome .-Cinema, Fashion, and the Media in the Postwar Years 265

commentary accompanying the photos, Klein notes the cachet of Roman

aristocracy in the launch of a sophisticated and seductive Italian look that, again,
goes hand in hand with the city's architecture, including its beautiful palazzi and
gardens. The neologism "pigiama palazzo," created to launch Galitizine's
alternative evening wear, wittily evokes the glamorous parties taking place in
"palaces":

Present are several authentic noblemen and women, among them on the left, la
principessa herself ,[...] But that was not enough, we needed at least a duke or two, a
marquis, a viscount, and other patricians. Where to get them?
Cinecittà was not far away so central casting could help us out. Since this shoot was for
American Vogue, and for me it was all a joke, we invented prestigious titles like the
Marquis de Campari Soda and the Baron of Bollito Misto, among others. But,
unfortunately, someone fact-checked and removed them.
(Klein 46)

This idea of place and its imaginary stories is reinforced in another photo
shoot called "Rome Loves Ford, Ford Loves Rome," published in Harper's
Bazaar. This text represents the two Rome-based fashion houses of Fontana and
Gattinoni, along with two red suits where the color red is associated with Rome
(an early edition of the "Valentino Red" of more recent years). The models are
two Roman aristocrats described in the captions. The Fontana Sisters' "easy suit
decision" and Gattinoni's buttonless jacket over a pink satin blouse matching the
jacket's lining were copied by David Crystal for Saks and sold for $110. It is
worth recalling that fashion magazines of the 1950s and 1960s often featured
advertisements of cars accompanied by the perfect dress to match color, style,
and level of income. In the growing Fordist economy, cars became the foremost
symbol of progress and mobility and, of course, served the new need for social
mobility that informed the urban revolution. It is precisely at this time that
suburbs and shopping malls reconfigured space in America (Harvey).
In a similar vein, the Fordist economy in Italy correctly perceived the
central role of vehicles such as cars — but also of the "Vespa" (literally, wasp),
the scooter that quickly became an icon of Italy's modernity and style. In Roman
Holiday (William Wyler, 1953), Gregory Peck, playing an American journalist
working in Rome, rides a Vespa with his new flame (Princess Anya, played by
Audrey Hepburn), refashioned in Italian style (Church Benson 2005). In his
Roman diary, Klein observes how the Vespa has revolutionized Italian life:

The Vespa has broken not only the Italian eardrum but also several links in Catholicism's
chain. In Rome, where it is illegal for a hotel to accept an unmarried couple, love must
seek the wide-open spaces. The Vespa has, therefore, given Roman youth a means of
transport; hastened the development of a new morality, and contributed to the march of
romance. The Vespa has thus caused the greatest revolution in Italian life since
Mussolini. [...] There are Vespas everywhere, but where outside Italy are these

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266 Eugenia Paulicelli

instruments played with such a style and such variety of styles? Witness for example the
Holy Family Style and the Noble, Christian, Firefighter, Terror, Madonna, resigned.
Myopic, Rococo.... that's not to overlook the Espresso, Jesuit, Mean, and Christian
Democrat Styles.
(Klein 15)

Klein's fashion photographs, which he describes as "almost private jokes,"

were able to capture the playful side of fashion and costume and marry it to
what Rome as a city and a stage had to offer. In the section of the book called
"Moda" ("Fashion"), the author comments on the following photo: "A Roman
composite: classic architecture (a Titian or something), a waiter delivering
coffee, and top model, Simone Daillencourt, striding in a Capucci dress. What
more could you ask for?" (Klein 45). This photograph epitomizes the different
ingredients that make Rome, as a city, unique and at the same time so appealing
to the foreign eye. Klein's book is a great photographic account that goes
beyond a mere document of the 1960s in the Eternal City. Much like Fellini,
whom he frequented in Rome, Klein calls attention to the very form of
photography while reinventing the art of fashion photography. In focusing on
certain details, bringing together the city and its settings, passersby, models,
nuns and priests, writers and artists, true and fake aristocrats, Klein calls on the
ability of the image to "magnify" reality. This is what Rohdie describes as
happening in Fellini's films and what Barthes points to in "L'Obvie et l'obtus."
In this essay, Barthes distinguishes the "obvious" meaning of a sign (which
responds to the logic of communication or the "simple" act of decoding a
message) from its "obtuse" meaning. Barthes relates the obtuse meaning to the
notion of sens supplémentaire, which gives an imaginative openness to any kind
of text, visual or verbal. Klein also commented on how the interplay of images
produces an excess of meaning (Barthes's "obtus") that takes the viewer
elsewhere, allowing him/her to migrate and to make new associations (sens
supplémentaire) in which other images and meanings are encountered; as a
result, the boundaries of the image are called into question while fantasy and
dreams are triggered through processes analogous to those of fashion. The
different sections of the book capture the changing times, the many faces of
Rome, and, above all, its theatricality. Rome as a stage setting is no less real
than the Rome of real life.

The culmination of pastiche, bricolage, and excess of this process can be

seen in Federico Fellini's film Roma (Fellini's Roma, 1972). In its different
episodes, the city appears as an incredible costume parade where the Fascist past
is hinted at as a continuous historical citation. The ghosts of the past, and
especially those of Fascist Italy, punctuate the story and the myths of the
present. Borrowing from Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
as elaborated in Walter Benjamin's theory of history, we may say that "the
specters of history" in Fellini's Roma come back like a Freudian return of the

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 Fashioning Rome:Cinema, Fashion, and the Media in the Postwar Years 267

represseci, yet all dressed up in self-parading garb.11 In the beginning of The

Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx refers to the idea of repetition in history: "Hegel
says somewhere that, upon the stage of universal history, all great events and
personalities reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add that, on the
first occasion, they appear as tragedy; on the second, as farce" (Marx 23,
emphasis mine). Fellini's Roma exemplifies, in cinematic terms, this complex
mechanism of citation of the past — a mechanism that is also inherent in
fashion. The tragedy of Italy's Fascist past reappears refashioned in a Fellinian,
grotesque farce. We may wish to recall that Benjamin, writing in the late 1930s
in the midst of the triumph of Nazi Fascism in Europe, elaborates on Marx's
notion of history by connecting his "theses on the philosophy of history" with
his commentary on fashion, with its "tiger's leap" in the Arcades Project: "The
French Revolution [...] evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes
of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the
thickets of long ago; it is a tiger's leap into the past" (Benjamin 263). In Fellini's
Roma we have a conflation of both these theories, even as the grotesque and the
excessive — Rome as a dream, spectacle, and a trope — engender an explosion:
the revolutionary trace is cinematic language and the language of clothing is
masquerade. Fellini's fashion shows in his films, and in Roma in particular, are
the precursors of shows by Alexander McQueen and John Galliano both visually
and theoretically: in their extreme fashions, contradictions, sickness, beauty, the
clownesque, and excess are distinct features, as well as the fragility, the
ephemeral nature of the "now" time of fashion — not to mention the
ineluctability of death (Evans).14
The apotheosis of this aesthetic process can be found in the ecclesiastical
fashion catwalk, an episode most tellingly situated between the whores' fashion
parade in the Fascist brothel and the "the festa de noantri" (the feast of us all),
with its parade of food and drinks. Here, among the people sitting at the tables,
the viewer encounters American writer Gore Vidal, who is asked why foreigners
— and especially Americans — are attracted to Rome. Vidal answers that the
main reason is that "Rome is the city of illusions. The ideal place to see the
end." A sense of death and decay is present in the above-mentioned
ecclesiastical fashion show, where parody reaches its highest degree. The
fashion show is a tour de force in which elements of theatricality, rituals,
intricate dress, color, and texture typically associated with the elaborate rituals
of the Catholic Church are revisited in a surrealist turn. At the same time, the
fashion show, a variation on the cinematic, conveys a haptic and optical

13 Evans offers a thorough and fascinating analysis of Marx's and Benjamin's theories in
interpreting contemporary fashion designers and their fashion shows, such as the late
Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Shelley Fox, Martin Margiela, and others.
14 Fellini's Roma has also been the inspiration for Prada's photo shoot advertising
campaign of the 2008-2009 collection.

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268 Eugenia Paulicelli

experience of clothing and fabric replete with silk, laces, luxury fabrics, light
hats and veils, exquisite attention to details and workmanship, crystals and
beading, sequins that cover the bodies of the unusual models. Among the
"aah's" of the audience, the pope himself appears on the catwalk almost at the
end of the show. The human shapes of the models turn into machines, robotic
bodies with clothes that walk by themselves, without a body inside them.
Costumes become independent forms and dressing up calls attention to the very
processes of illusionism, distortion, and representation that are an integral part
of reality and its construction. The ecclesiastical fashion show, set in Rome and
performed by Roman representatives of both Church and aristocracy, ultimately
erodes the separation between audience and spectacle, corroding the borders of
image and identity, self and otherness. Indeed, as Rhodie notes:

Fellinian images are at a border between desire and reality, the subjective and the
objective. They seem to be reflected, the image of an image, or more precisely projected,
as if they are what we wish them to be while the distance between the wish and a view
that Fellini imposes of their "reality" is the source of their mystery, their grotesqueness,
their self-parody. It creates a fascination because no image, no sight is ever stable.
(Rhodie 9-10)

Similarly, the narratives surrounding the different tropes and images of a

city like Rome are in a constant flux and process. They too are never stable. In
his Roma, Fellini announces the end of an era and the self parody of institutions,
spaces of leisure and consumption, and icons representing the city's "identity":
the pope appearing in a fashion show, Anna Magnani playing herself and going
back home, the semi-orgiastic feasts of food and people out in the street, and of
course even Fellini himself. Fellini's Roma and the crucial role that costume and
fashion play within its narrative is emblematic in its blurring of the boundaries
between the lived, real Rome on the one hand, and the imagined, fantasized
Rome on the other. Both cities, however, carry equal weight. Film and fashion
show, as in Fellini's Roma, are signifying machines that textualize cities and
countries. With their magnifying lenses metamorphosing reality, fashion and
cinema disfigure representation of cities and places while touching their most
intimate and hidden truths.

Queens College
and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

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 Fashioning Rome:Cinema, Fashion, and the Media in the Postwar Years 269

Works Cited

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Barthes, Roland. L'Obvie et l'obtus: Essais critique III. Paris: Seuil, 1982.
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MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999.
Bondanella, Peter. The Cinema of Federico Fellini. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
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Breward, Christopher. Fashion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
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Breward, Christopher, and David Gilbert, eds. Fashion's World Cities. Oxford: Berg,
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Bruzzi, Stella. Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies. London:
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Church Benson, Pamela. "New Stars, New Fashions and the Female Audience: Cinema,
Consumption and Cities 1953-1966." Breward and Gilbert 89-106.
Crainz, Guido. Storia del miracolo italiano. Culture, identità, trasformazioni fra anni
cinquanta e sessanta. Roma: Donzelli, 1996-2005.
. Il paese mancato. Dal miracolo economico agli anni ottanta. Roma: Donzelli,
2003-2005.

Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: British Film Institute, 1988.

Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the Edge. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.
Giddens, A. Modernity and Self Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
Gilbert, David. "From Paris to Shanghai. The Changing Geographies of Fashion's World
Cities." Breward and Gilbert 3-32.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Klein, William. Rome+Klein. New York: Aperture, 2009.
Marx, Karl. Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul.
London: Allen & Unwin, 1926.
Paulicelli, Eugenia, and Hazel Clark, eds. The Fabric of Cultures. Fashion, Identity,
Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2009.
. Fashion under Fascism. Beyond the Black Shirt. Oxford: Berg, 2004.
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Ribeiro, Helena C. "Made in America. Paris, New York, and Postwar Fashion
Photography." Paulicelli and Clark 41-52.
Rocamora, Agnes. Fashioning the City. Paris, Fashion and the Media. London: I.B.
Tauris,2009.
Rohdie, Sam. Fellini Lexicon. London: British Film Institute, 2002.
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270 Eugenia Paulicelli

40.

Stubbs, John C. Federico Fellini as Auteur. Seven Aspects of His Films. Carbondale:
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 Fashioning Rome .-Cinema, Fashion, and the Media in the Postwar Years 271

Picture 1. Brioni, Red froisse-velvet tuxedo jacket, shawl collar in black silk, 1952
collection presented by Brioni at the Florence "Sala Bianca" Fashion shows. The jacket is
shown in the show "Fashion + Film. The 1960s Revisited" at the James Gallery, The
Graduate Center of The City University of New York. The show was curated by the
author. Photo, courtesy of Don Pollard, CUNY Graduate Center

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272 Eugenia Paulicelli

V
Picture 2 Another view of the show "Fashion + Film." Photo, Courtesy of Don Pollard,
CUNY Graduate Center

Picture 3 . Linda Christian on her wedding day. Dress by the Fontana Sisters, 1949.
Courtesy of Micol Fontana Foundation, Rome

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 Fashioning Rome:Cinema, Fashion, and the Media in the Postwar Years 273

r.A-3

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Picture 4 . Ava Gardner in an evening gown designed by the Fontana Sisters. Courtesy of
Micol Fontana Foundation, Rome

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274 Eugenia Paulicelli

EXKMU - ^

Picture 5 . Label of an evening coat by the Fontana Sisters. It reads "Fontana export."
The coat in silk jacquard brocade with velveteen lining was on display in the show
"Fashion + Film. The 1960s revisited. Photo, Courtesy of Anna Colan

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 Fashioning Rome:Cinema, Fashion, and the Media in the Postwar Years 275

Picture 6 . Ava Gardner wearing the "Pretino" for the collection "Linea Cardinale"
(1955-56). The dress caught the imagination of Federico Fellini who then dressed Anita
Ekberg in a similar style in La dolce vita. Courtesy of Micol Fontana Archive.

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276 Eugenia Paulicelli

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Picture 7. Inauguration of Emilio Schubert's new boutique in Rome, 196

Photo by Giuseppe Palmas. Courtesy of Giuseppe Palmas Photographic Archive

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 Fashioning Rome:Cinema, Fashion, and the Media in the Postwar Years 277

Picture 8. See Picture 9.

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278 Eugenia Paulicelli

Pictures 8 and 9.Princess Irene Galitzine in her atelier in Rome in 1960. Photo by
Giuseppe Palmas. Courtesy of Giuseppe Palmas Photographic Archive

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