Fashion at the Time of Fascism: Italian Modernist Lifestyle 1922–1943

The first visual history of Italian fashion during the two decades of Fascist rule, tracing how a modernist industry negotiated between international couture and the dictates of the regime.

Edited by Mario Lupano and Alessandra Vaccari, the book draws on extensive archival research in period magazines, photographs, advertising and design publications, presenting around 700 images in a running sequence of picture and text. The material is arranged under four themes, Measurements, Model, Brand and Parade, that follow the rhythms and rituals of the Italian day, from the standardised body and the autarkic textile to the branded label and the mass spectacle. Thematic maps, cross-references, an iconographic index and a full bibliography support both reading and scholarly use. Published by Damiani in 2009 in a 400-page hardcover.

Mario Lupano is an architectural historian and Alessandra Vaccari a fashion historian, both teaching at the Università Iuav di Venezia. The book belongs with the library's holdings on graphic design and photography of the interwar period, in which the same rationalist typography and photomontage seen here served advertising, propaganda and the illustrated press.