Getting Dressed is a Bit Like Travelling. Interconnections Between Fashion and Tourism in Italy from the Postwar Period to the Seventies.

Abstract

The article explores the modalities through which the Italian fashion, primarily connotated by a deep-seated relationship to its own territory and cultural heritage, chooses exotic countries and cultures as the most alluring scenarios for its own representations. This paradigmatic shift illustrates how Italian fashion – in the aftermath of World War II and through an ongoing process of internationalization – acknowledged its own creativity; and, in addition, it reveals the modalities Italian sartorial language appropriated atmospheres and styles connected to distant places. From this vantage point, the main domestic and international fashion magazines offered an innovative representation of clothing and territories to the imaginary and material fruition of fashion and tourism as well. It was a shift punctuated with cultural ambivalences revealing how the sartorial research was entagled with exoticizing and self-exoticizing feelings and attitudes oscillating from inspiration to appropriation into the wider framework of ethnocentrism.