Dressing the Part: ‘Made in Italy’ Goes to the Movies with Lucia Bosé in Chronicle of a Love Affair

Abstract

‘Made in Italy’ is a term associated with style, elegance and quality goods (Fortunati and Danese, 2005). The nationally-specific dimension of Italian fashion emerged in the 1950s as the industry sought to break away from its over-dependency on Parisian style and to establish itself as an important force on the international stage. While numerous texts exist on Italian fashion and style, relatively little scholarly attention has been devoted to assessing the place of costume in Italian cinema.1 This disparity in Italian film studies appears at odds, for example, with the now established body of work existing on fashion, style and costume in Hollywood movies including Stella Bruzzi’s Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (1997), David Desser and Garth Jowett’s edited volume Hollywood Goes Shopping (2000), Sarah Street’s Costume and Cinema: Dress Codes in Popular Cinema (2001) and Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume and Transformation in American Film (2010), to name but some. These and other texts have clearly illustrated the significance of costume to the film text in terms of mise-en-scene, assessing character and plot development, identifying genre, denoting the class, gender and sexuality of the wearer, and its extra-textual meanings to audiences (Stacey, 1994).