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Italy is widely romanticized as a country with a rich artistic and cultural tradition. The robust presence of medieval Italian poetry and Italian Renaissance artwork in the western cultural and scholarly imaginary, as well as the international fame and prestige garnered by modern Italian design (think cars, fashion, and furniture), attest to a potent investment in a historical connotation between artistic ingenuity and Italianness, an association that endows Italy with a privileged, romanticized status as a nation saturated with beauty. The premise of this dissertation hinges on interpreting this romanticization as a curated national narrative fabric replete with snags, tears, rips, and punctures that have been updated and maintained through an informal series of nimbly executed sutures, gathers, grafts, and pleats. Centering the practice and materiality of textiles, I aim to recuperate and retexturize the simultaneously quotidian and radical nature of these gestures of conjoining and mending, which have historically been regarded as menial women’s labor. I straddle the material and metaphorical capacities of textiles in my reading of a set of modern cinematic and written texts about women’s labor in the textile and fashion industries to elasticize the rigid discursive tensioning (pulling apart) of formal and informal textile labor, a tension that continues to serve the silken Italian ideal of comportment encapsulated by the term sprezzatura.
Despite recent liberal trends in scrutinizing the ethics of labor practices and the quality of products associated with the “Made in Italy” trademark, the invocation of Italianness or italianità continues to synonymize craftsmanship, exceptional quality, and sophisticated style. I point to this masterful, polished fantasy of “Made in Italy” craftsmanship as mystifying the very process of making and the particular existence of the maker on which it rests (the use of the passive form “made,” which elides the verb’s subject, is a case in point); indeed, it immortalizes this emblem (or, perhaps, relic) of 1980s export-driven economic policy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the constitution of the modern Italian Republic opens with the declaration that the nation is “founded on labor” (“fondata sul lavoro”), naming the fact or practice of work, as opposed to the workers themselves, as grounding the nation. I therefore turn to images and stories of textile workers and the process of textile work in order to re-entangle the narrative of Italian making.
Probing what “making” in Italy looks like or wondering what it consists of involves magnifying and examining the smooth, nonporous surface of the “Made in Italy” image. It involves considering “labor” beyond the confines of formal, lubricated economic relations to include piecemeal work carried out in the private space of the home, within tightknit communities, or other spontaneous social settings. This scope is particularly important for textiles considering the historically gendered nature of tasks such as sewing, weaving, knitting, and mending, much of which has been relegated to the realm of “domestic labor” or “housework.” Moreover, domestic work has historically been justified as a task that women innately perform, i.e. that housework is somehow encoded into the “biology” of female gender, and as such, constitutes a bodily function as “natural” as reproduction. Such misogynistic conceptions of the relationship between gender and textile work (not to mention the body), however problematic and outdated, inform the various films and texts I consider, the earliest of which is an essay published in 1905, an early moment in modern Italian feminism, and the most recent of which is a nonfiction short film from 1986, which follows on the heels of influential Italian feminist movements of the 1970s such as Rivolta femminile and Lotta feminista, as well as legislative victories such as the legalization of divorce.
I begin with the essays of Rosa Genoni, a Milanese dressmaker, socialist, and feminist who avidly wrote and spoke out about the importance of creating a clear, legible, properly Italian sense of style that would contrast with—and perhaps challenge—the then impermeable reign of Parisian fashion. A prominent turn-of-the-century figure, Genoni is commonly hailed as the progenitor of Italian style. In her essays, Genoni makes plain her investment in the narrative of Italian artistic ingenuity, naming the Renaissance and Antiquity as proof of the creativity she believes she has inherited as an Italian. This inheritance deploys “Italian” as a stable, unchanging category, not to mention the implication of genetics and race in italianità. Genoni’s fierce attachment to italianità, an identity inseparable from the Italian nation’s biopolitical soft tissue (organs, muscles, fat, connective tissue, etc.), clashes with her progressive socialist and feminist beliefs. In other words, women could attain their italianità (recognition by the state as good citizens) through their bodies and domestic duties while such efforts (birthing and raising children, cleaning, nourishing everyone) were also understood not as work but rather as “natural” female functions. I take recourse to Adriana Cavarero’s concept of the maschio-neutro to both parse the misogynistic aspects of Risorgimento rhetoric present in Genoni’s writing and to indulge Genoni’s unique perspective on the relationship between women’s bodies and machines. Ultimately, I emphasize Genoni’s vision of continuity between reproduction and artistic production, which she articulates via an unconventional web of kinship that she believes is the key to future Italian technological and artistic innovation.
Two decades later, the fascist regime grasped the importance of developing an Italian fashion style and industry, which they attempted to create by establishing regulatory institutions and schools, and conducting textile research. The progress and achievements of these efforts have been extensively documented in expos, photographs, ad campaigns, and newsreels. In Chapter 2, I hone in on the use of optical recording technologies in fashion and the rise of the mannequin, resulting in a discussion on the way in which modern time (regulated, standardized, metronomic, calculated, industrial time) shaped and molded the female body through fashion shows and images. While I primarily consider the use of film, the newsreels of fashion shows from the 1920s make evident the influence of mirrors, reflections, chronophotography, in other words, optical technologies that explore the body’s motion, dimension and contours. The fashion show newsreels fragment, refract, freeze and reanimate the live female fashion mannequin, signaling a crisis in the vitality of the modern woman. Probing the coherence or wholeness of her body, its size and shape, its integrity, etc., these images grapple with the threat imposed by the mannequin’s transgression of the hitherto presumed “natural” role of women. The mannequin, both animate and inanimate, flexes the visual potential of spatio-temporal continuity (e.g. seeing multiple of the same figure at once) made possible by film.
In the third and final chapter, I continue this exploration of the filmic surface through Filo a catena (1986) by Adriana Monti and Essere donne (1965) by Cecilia Mangini, two experimental nonfiction films that expand the visibility of women working in various economic sectors. With the help of Gilles Deleuze’s framework of the fold, I consider the filmic surface as separating and attaching an “inner” and an “outer,” creating a space that invites contradictions by being able to conceal and reveal, connect and separate, etc. Actively engaging this texture of the filmic surface, both Monti and Mangini re-corporealize the work of textiles, drawing threads of continuity between the women who sew in an atelier, operate industrial spinning machines, spin yarn by hand, and do piecemeal sewing work at home to be able to watch their children. I propose working with and amidst the surface to shift the emphasis away from breaking through the flatness of film and towards the immediacy of visual texture. I conclude with an analysis of the female protagonist of Mimì metallurgico ferito nell’onore (1972), Fiore, who is a young, northern Italian leftist and fiber artist in Turin. In this gag-filled fictional narrative that recounts the male protagonist Mimì’s migration from Sicily to Turin, director Lina Wertmüller mobilizes fibers and textiles to illustrate formal and informal, familial and state, and gendered power dynamics as a web of entangled relations. Fiore’s colorful knitted garments and blankets cocoon, enshroud, absorb, trap, swaddle, and shield characters, rooms and landscapes once again topographically complicating the narrative fabric and surprising the spectator with shifts in agency and power.
Given the eclectic array of materials presented throughout this project, I do not insist on a thematic or generic bundling together of these texts; rather, I draw out that way in which these different texts make use of the stability and instability of textiles, that is, the way they both make assertions and willingly leave themselves vulnerable to contradiction. I propose a method of reading audiovisual narrative that acknowledges and accepts unevenness and spontaneity, that allows for the visibility and complexity of the everyday, and that seeks continuity through connecting threads however frayed, tenuous, unsanctioned, or coarse they may be.