Breaking Point: The Unchangeable Men’s Fashion and a Magazine Born to Destroy the Machismo’s Stereotype

Abstract

At the end of the 1960s, the arrival of L’Uomo Vogue on Italian newsstands caused a disruption with the dominant male culture. Despite being a magazine designed for a man of average culture and bourgeois extraction, the magazine manages to link fashion to the avant-garde cultures of the times by mixing fashion references with cinema, music, literature… And it becomes a medium through the which to build a different awareness that frees males from the prison of gender clichés that keep them prisoners of a retrograde and conservative mentality so difficult to change. A historical hint on the birth and cultural nourishment of patriarchal stereotypes leads to the example of an attempt at change in the second half of the XX Century that comes through the first Italian men’s fashion monthly in a historical moment in which our country has not yet done modern achievements of social civilization, such as the divorce law, while the world is about to discover the demands for social modernity of 1968. An excursus closed by the unpublished memories of Flavio Lucchini, the founder and the first editor in chief of the magazine.