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Hollywood Glamour in Postwar Italy
and elaborated image to become more than a pale imitation of American glamour.
Television personalities, for example, always sought to highlight their down-toearth
qualities even while cultivating an appearance in line with international
glamour. Yet, the long-range influence of the American idea of glamour within
Italy is evident not just within television, but also in fashion. Italy’s most successful
export industry in the 1990s, fashion produces jobs, earnings, and image on a
grand scale. Yet the imagery of fashion marketing is resolutely American and refers
back invariably to the Hollywood golden age. Versace used supermodels who
recalled the ice-cool blondes of the 1950s, while Giorgio Armani draws on the
masculine tailoring of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. Valentino and Dolce
and Gabbana, designers for whom the domestic Italian market is less important,
draw on images inspired by La Dolce Vita (the celebrated moment of Anita Ekberg’s
screen dip in the Trevi Fountain – already a re-elaboration of a real-life stunt –
was restaged by Valentino in 1996 with Claudia Schiffer in the place of Ekberg)
and neo-realism. But this is Italian glamour for export. Italians made their transition
to consumerism with the aid of and led by American imagery. Over time they
caught up and elaborated original and useful images of glamour for foreign
consumption. These conferred a magical aura on the country which still functions
to aid tourism and the sale of goods. But informing it all is an idea of American
glamour which has never been matched or superseded, only reworked, repositioned,
and re-elaborated.
Notes
1. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily
Dickinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. 67–8.
2. Some pertinent issues are considered in Reka C.V. Buckley and Stephen Gundle,
“Fashion and Glamour,” in Nicola White and Ian Griffiths (eds), The Fashion Business:
Theory, Practice, Image (Oxford: Berg, 2000) and Stephen Gundle, “Mapping the Origins
of Glamour: Giovanni Boldini, Paris and the Belle Epoque,” Journal of European Studies
29 (1999), pp. 269–95. A fuller elaboration of these ideas will be presented in Clino Castelli
and Stephen Gundle, The Glamour System (in preparation).
3. Margaret Farrand Thorp, America at the Movies (New Haven, CT: 1939). Quoted in
Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930-1939
(London: Routledge, 1984), pp. 157–8.
4. For a case study, see Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and
Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
5. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979); Laura Mulvey, Visual and
Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989); Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image:
Essays on Representation and Sexuality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985).
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