Alta Moda
The Italian nationalist silhouette
People tend to view history as a series of chronological events, but culturally, history moves in gradients — like washes of color that stain or fade with time. That said, some periods are more sharply defined than others. The turn of the 20th century, for example, was host to a number of cultural, economic, and technological shifts that shook the world. In Europe, these changes set the stage for a fast-spreading fascist movement that was defined by aesthetics as much as it was policy.
In the epilogue of his 1936 landmark essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written as the Nazi regime was gaining power, cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote that fascism’s success in introducing aesthetics to political life was due in part to new technology. Throughout the world, radio broadcasting and image duplication allowed antidemocratic regimes to disseminate propaganda on an unprecedented level. Fashion, by way of print media like magazines, led the way in establishing the style and attitude of la nuova Italiana, the “new Italian woman”—an attempt by Benito Mussolini’s fascist state to court a burgeoning feminist movement while maintaining complete control.
The modern age was in full swing by the time Benjamin wrote his fateful essay on the spread of fascism. Technologies developed during the…
