Italian Fascism and Fashion

To be in line with the “modernity” of more advanced capitalist nations, such as France, Great Britain, and the United States, the Italian Fascist regime, especially during the 1930s in its second decade of existence when it had become a consolidated presence, dedicated a great deal of attention to culture industries (cinema, sports, fashion, popular press, and publications). In the culture industry, Fascism saw a crucial and powerful machine able to create what historian Philip Cannistraro has called the fabbrica del consenso (the factory of consensus). This was, of course, a phenomenon identified by the Frankfurt school and developed in a much more sophisticated manner by Walter Benjamin, who wrote extensively on fashion and its mechanisms of power, politics, and the body in a developing ...