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Stephen Gundle
merely the elimination of a certain 1950s style stuffiness and rigidity. The modern,
elegant woman - represented in La Dolce Vita by Anouk Aimée (Maddalena) - was
not defined by conformity to social norms or by grace and poise, but rather by
autonomy, style, travel, wealth. Women of any class, provided they had the looks
and determination could, it was implied, take on this role; it was an option not a
birthright.
Among the lower and middle classes, it would be wrong to suggest that the great
curiosity in royals which flowered in the immediate postwar years was expunged,
but there was a qualitative change. Royals were no longer deferred to or admired
in a conventional way, as had been the case at the time of the coronation of Queen
Elizabeth II in 1953. There was much greater interest in the exteriority of splendor.
The change was apparent in the way the Iranian royal family acquired prominence
in the magazines in the early 1960s. In 1963 Soraya, the spurned wife of the Shah
who became the “sad princess” of the time, undertook her first screen test,
arranged by Dino De Laurentis. She passed without difficulty from court life to
the nightclubs and the resorts of the jet set. In the same year Gina Lollobrigida
visited the Shah in Teheran and escorted the readers of Oggi through the magnificence
of the royal palaces. Although the actress made all the right deferential
noises, it was apparent that she was being treated as an equal by the Shah and Farah
Diba and that her clothes were of equal interest as the “enormous stupendous
rooms” of the palace. 49
Yet the provincial connotation remained. Foreign glamour followed by domestic
consumerism was insufficient to eliminate a dimension of life that remained firmly
rooted in the experience of family, community, and place. In fact Italy gave rise to
no domestic glamour in the full sense of the term. The techniques of glamour were
often learned, mastered, and employed in designing and marketing products but
these took on truly glamorous implications only outside Italy. 50 Elegant clothes,
fast cars, and luxury goods provoked desire abroad when combined with Italian
natural settings, architectural achievements, and other aspects of the country. At
home, however, even cars as romantic and overtly glamorous as Ferraris tended
to be seen as products of a craft tradition - the substance counted more than the
image. Even in the 1990s, in order to market itself Ferrari employed Sharon Stone
or Ivana Trump to add glamour.
Conclusion
In Italy, celebrities eventually became part of the system of consumerism; they
endorsed products and offered themselves as consumers and objects of consumption.
But they never truly acquired glamour. No one achieved the necessary
separation from family, place of origin, and the familiar for even a worked-over
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