‘In America è vietato essere brutte’: advertising American beauty in the Italian women’s magazineAnnabella, 1945–1965

Abstract

This article examines how the American conception of female beauty introduced new and distinct understandings of beauty and femininity to postwar Italy. In analysing beauty product advertisements from one of the most popular women’s magazines of the period,Annabella, the article articulates the components of the American beauty ideal and illustrates how these notions broke with previous Italian ideas of beauty. Moreover, the article also examines how this new ideal promoted democratic consumer capitalist values – freedom of choice, individualism, and affluence – which had an important political and cultural significance in Italy’s Cold War struggle. In light of this struggle and the country’s postwar redevelopment, the American beauty ideal sought to influence the women who readAnnabellaand the way in which they fashioned and identified themselves – as the Italian ‘Mrs Consumer.’