Since its beginning and during periods of great transformations, movie-going for both men and women was akin to going to a fashion parade. Before the explosion of digital technology and its enchanted world, access to fashion was mediated through cinema. Fashion and style became reachable for the masses through cinema. And, with the genre of the fashion film, this continues today.
Focusing on a number of crucial films and directors from the silent era to the present, this study will offer, for the first time, an in-depth exploration of the interaction between fashion and Italian cinema. The study, however, will privilege the golden age of Italian cinema, especially the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s during which, through the marriage of fashion and film, Italian fashion and style were launched globally. Through the lens of fashion, the study will revisit the films of some of Italy's most important film-makers, such as Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti and others and films as old as Mario Oxilia's silent Rapsodia Satanica (1917) to Luca Guadagnino's I am Love (2009).
