The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
mother tongue and national costume since they are nearest to us, writes
Bogatyrëv. They create a concept of community for which we can use the
possessive pronoun ‘our’: saying ‘our language’, ‘our culture’, ‘our
costume’ gives an emotional colouring to these phenomena (1937: 142),
due to the long and intimate coexistence established between them and the
community. In this sense, folk costume, which is subjected to community
censure, is the opposite of fashion: a garment subjected to rapidly changing
tastes does not have time to bond permanently either with the collective
social ‘body’ or any individual body (1937: 141).
Popular dress is part of an almost immutable community tradition,
whereas fashionable dress is cosmopolitan. Nevertheless, fashion has often
referred explicitly to the social imagery of a specific group or community,
through the use of different ‘texts’. Bogatyrëv maintains that a community
invests folk costume with an emotional value. And this makes sense even
today if we accept that fashion itself is a form of popular culture: it activates
and draws on that complex area of social imagery in which folklore
and images stratified in the collective memory coexist; in other words, texts
in which the semiotic material is made up of different languages.
A good example is the role played by Southern Italy in the construction
of fashion imagery. Dolce & Gabbana, Versace and many other Italian
designers have recently interpreted this role by alluding in their collections
to the part played by the South in shaping Italian cultural awareness, to
which, since the end of the Second World War, not only literature and the
fine arts, but also the mass media, including cinema and fashion, have all
contributed. The male vest, Al Pacino style pin-striped suits, close-fitting
white shirts, beachwear based on a La Dolce Vita ideal of male beauty are
all aesthetic ideals coming from the Italian deep south.
Ideals of female beauty and fashion, too: the dark Mediterranean type
epitomized by Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani, cloned today in various
guises, wearing tight-fitting black bodices and long, full skirts, perhaps
with white gym shoes and a headscarf, thick eyebrows, a full hour-glass
figure, a trace of down on the upper lip. We’re reminded of Stefania
Sandrelli in Sedotta e abbandonata, together with all the women, whether
real or imagined, who peopled the sun-drenched streets of Southern Italian
towns forty years ago.
The resonance of such imagery, not just on the haute couture catwalk or
in the designer’s atelier, but also in our everyday choices, is certainly proof
of how a community (in this case a nation) ‘imagines itself’ through a series
of small, yet significant bonds and not just through economic or commercial
pacts. While the latter type of pact often leads to a selfish closure
within the notion of ‘identity’, the bonds constructed by social imagery are
16