All Black Everything
History of the Italian Blackshirts
French filmmaker Jean Genet once said “fascism is theater,” but in 2017, the stage more closely resembles a reality TV set: Donald Trump, our mewling star, boasts both an arsenal of props (the bulging, important-looking folders full of blank pages) and a captive audience (the size of which is in dispute) — but what about the costumes? Fascism is an ideology in which appearance is everything — one need only look at past dictators to note that aesthetics remain a crucial part of the show. This week, we’ll look at the visual markers of Benito Mussolini’s Italy, and how they illustrated his vision for a return to greatness.
“Fascist art displays a utopian aesthetics — that of physical perfection,” wrote Susan Sontag in 1975. She was critiquing the revival of the trend after decades of rejection — but a half-century earlier, the promise of perfection, of greatness, was central to the rise of Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini, known as Il Duce — “the Dux,” or “the chief” — rose to power after his self-serving support of World War I earned him expulsion from the Italian Socialist Party. Riding the wave of nationalism that swept warring Italy, Mussolini distanced himself from anti-interventionist, orthodox socialists by blaming his former party for ignoring the circumstances that led to the war. He went on to form…
