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Hollywood Glamour in Postwar Italy
self. In Italy this element developed separately and followed a different social
trajectory to cinema.
Fashion and Aristocratic Glamour
Italian fashion in the 1930s and 1940s was modest and provincial. The few fashion
designers were known only to their almost exclusively local clients. They used
good quality materials but offered no originality; Parisian designs to the tastes and
pockets of their customers. Simonetta, Antonelli, Biki, Carosa, Galitzine, and
others were considered professionals of good standing but there was an abyss
between them and the stars of the Paris scene, Chanel, Schiaparelli, and Dior. The
latter were both more creative and more practical, more artistic and original and
more modern in their efforts to relate fashion to the needs of a broad stratum of
well-to-do women. An extreme example of the low standing of Italian fashion was
offered in October 1948 when Oggi reported that the police had raided the Paris
hotel where some Italian designers were staying during the autumn shows and
arrested an Italian sketch artist who had copied the Dior collection without
permission to sell cut-price to his Italian clients. 32
The turning point came with the Power–Christian wedding in 1949. One of the
great social events of the postwar period, it gave rise to massive publicity which
also worked to the advantage of the Fontana sisters, who made Christian’s wedding
dress. As Oggi wrote:
One hundred and fifty metres of very fine tulle were used by a large Roman fashion house
to create an original model with a bodice, a modest decolletée and a wide bell-shaped
skirt, artistically pleated: this is Linda Christian’s wedding dress. Paillettes and small
pearls add precious touches to the splendid toilette. Known as one of the most elegant
stars in Hollywood, fanciful in her tastes and impossible to satisfy in fittings, Linda is
always arguing with the dress designers even though she is dressed in a furcoat and jewels
worth sixty million Lire. 33
Pictured by numerous magazines in the Fontana sisters’ atelier, Christian provided
testimony to the skill and quality of the work of Italian professionals.
Italian fashion had been decentralized and largely provincial before the war. In
the early 1950s there was a serious attempt to unite it and promote it abroad, by
associating it with the traditional attractions of the Italian context. The idea was
conceived by Giovan Battista Giorgini, a Florentine trader with excellent contacts
among US department stores and the fashion press. The shows he organized in
Florence from 1951 are conventionally seen as marking the attempt to break Italian
fashion’s subordination to Paris and promote it abroad, and especially in America. 34
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