Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Online First

While the influence of dive fashion on the cross-class audience of Italian silent cinema has been established, the relationship between fashion and silent Hollywood stresses the class-composition of the audience. The work of director Robert G. Vignola, born in Italy but active in the United States, clarifies the passage from a cinema addressed to the popular audience of the nickelodeon to the middle class, and specifically women, in the narrative and through stars, within the suggestions of fashion. There is a general consensus about Italian American culture being an extension of Italianness. In the press, Vignola was always identified as an Italian and his artistic sensibility was credited to his Italian origins, at a time where Italian silent cinema was incredibly popular on American screens. From a transnational perspective, the role of fashion in his work both within a historical perspective and in the theoretical debate on female silent film spectatorship also points to the underestimated relations between American media and Italian culture.

This article explores how the law affects an audience’s collective recognition that a film and fashion in film is of cultural interest. It argues that copyright law today can play an important and crucial role in a film’s continued relevance and in the preservation and valorization of cinema as copyright law regulates the copying and display of a film and its images, including the fashion images within it. Likewise, it shows how cultural heritage law plays an important and crucial role in the preservation and continued relevance of fashion through film as cultural heritage law applies certain rules and norms to the preservation of film reels and the archives and institutions in which they are stored. The article uses Roman Holiday (Wyler 1953) and La Dolce Vita (Fellini 1960) as case studies and considers Cinecittà’s description of itself as an ‘open heritage’ to explore the relationship between law, fashion and film.

This article analyses how fashion in the Italian crime series Suburra and Gomorrah is a significant facet of how these programmes’ visual and narrative discourses work upon audiences to communicate a privileged vision of the criminal subcultures they represent. Clothing and style are crucial to the series through the narrative dimension, in which costuming reveals character development and symbolizes shifts in plot and theme, as well by articulating the characters’ adherence to and deviation from their cultural milieu. Moreover, by presenting an ethnography of criminal subcultures as articulated through dress, these series have engendered a complex network of fashion fandom, raising significant questions about viewer identification and the reification of mob wear within mainstream culture. This in-depth analysis of the role of fashion in Suburra and Gomorrah aims to deepen our understanding of how these series constitute a significant intervention on the interplay of fashion and identity in Italy today.

This article analyses the insightful role that fabric, fashion and clothing shops have in Laura Muscardin’s Billo il grand dakhaar (Billo the Grand Dakhaar) (2008) and Phaim Bhuiyan’s first feature film Bangla (2019). Billo portrays the story of a young tailor from Senegal who dreams of becoming a fashion designer in Rome; Bangla fictionalizes the life of its director, Phaim Bhuiyan, a second-generation Italian of Bangladeshi descent. By analysing flashbacks and dream sequences as signifiers of cultural ties and by examining the role of the shops as emblematic spaces where the local and the transnational forge a new intersecting reality, the article aims to investigate how both protagonists become active agents of change and how fashion contributes to the reshaping of the landscape of the city of Rome.

The Alessandro Blasetti Archive is a unique source of information that traces the profiles and work of many professional figures of the film industry, including scenographers and costume designers. An examination of the director’s filmography reveals the names of the numerous maestri of Italian cinema who, between the 1930s and the 1970s, elevated the art of set and costume design beyond Italy. Among them were pioneers such as Virgilio Marchi, Gastone Medin, Gino Carlo Sensani and Dario Cecchi. The archive holds rare documents that concern them as well as documents relative to Marina Arcangeli and Maria de Matteis, two women who were as important as their male colleagues to the success of Italian talent in this sector.

This article introduces the interviews featured in this issue of the journal with filmmaker Alina Marazzi and creative director of the Maison Christian Dior Maria Grazia Chiuri. In 2020, Maria Grazia Chiuri commissioned Alina Marazzi to make a short film about the work of Lucia Marcucci, a feminist visual poet and artist, active in the 1960s and 1970s who combined the language of mass media and advertising, and addressed themes such as the changing values of family, domesticity and the role of women. Focusing on the work of Alina Marazzi and Maria Grazia Chiuri, this article provides a framework to explore the long history of fashion and film, as well as the collaboration between Chiuri and female artists. In addition to discussing the digital genre of the ‘fashion film’, the essay contextualizes the emergence and development of the field of fashion studies and its relationship with feminism, women, the media and the history of women and fashion.

Maria Grazia Chiuri, creative director at the House of Christian Dior, talks about her current role working for the French luxury brand. She reflects on how passionate she is about highlighting and promoting women’s multifaceted manifestations of work, image and creativity. Chiuri also discusses her long career in fashion, starting with her mother’s atelier, her studies at the European Institute of Design and then her work for the Fendi sisters and Valentino, both located in Rome, where she was born. Chiuri stresses certain books have been crucial for her, from Ngozi’s recent bestseller We Should All Be Feminists (2015), to Clare Hunter’s Threads of Life (2019) and classical texts by Simone de Beauvoir, as well as Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970). In addition, she emphasizes how beneficial it has been to be able to immerse herself in Dior’s rich archive. She finds inspiration in the history of women, fashion, feminism, the arts, cinema and how all these institutions promote necessary changes to the fashion industry of the twenty-first century.

Review of: The New Made in Italy for the 21st Century: Fashion, Film, Art and Design, Eugenia Paulicelli, Claudio Napoli and Massimo Mascolo (dirs) (2022), USA: Okozoko