Every summer, Italy and its acute sense of elegance offer an exceptional playground for designers and creators from all over the world. Transalpine femininity, with its blend of glamour, casualness and joviality, is all the more accessible, as a simple black or red dress matched with the right accessory is all it takes to follow in the footsteps of the greatest actresses of Cinecitta.
There’s something timeless about the Dolce Vita style.
This summer style for men and women, envied beyond its transalpine borders, became exceptionally popular on the threshold of the 1960s. This period coincided with the release of Federico Fellini ‘s moral fable of the same name, which was condemned by the Vatican. Since the mythical scene of Anita Ekberg, wearing a Valentino’s little black dress, immersing herself barefoot in the Trevi Fountain, it was now the turn of the Italians, a few years after the Frenchwoman Gabrielle Chanel, to associate this hue not only with mourning and religiosity, but now also with wild nocturnal jaunts through the sleepy streets of the Eternal City.
The Dolce Vita style in solid colors, at once sexy, simple and elegant, was officially born.
Elegance from head to toe
“I’m Monica Vitti” exclaims actress Jennifer Coolidge (aka Tanya McQuoid-Hunt) in season 2 of the hit series The White Lotus. The heroine offers a condensed version of Dolce Vita style: printed silk day dress , matching babushka scarf and huge sunglasses, topped off with a pink Valentino bag, the emblem of made in Italy.
This Dolce Vita style blends in with the history of post-war Italian fashion, that of an Italian woman seeking the right balance between being desirable without being too flirtatious, opening up to the world while defending her cultural singularity. The resulting silhouettes are, in essence, nostalgic for a certain golden age, reminiscent of the period known as “Hollywood on the Tiber“, when the greatest American film studios were infatuated with the ancient ruins offered by the city of Rome to shoot peplums and other mega-productions.
In fact, the style rendered on screen in the Dolce Vita film is very much imbued with the dress codes inherited from the 1950s. For example, the little black dress worn by Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita owes a great deal to the 1957 bag dress designed by Spaniard Cristobal Balenciaga, who, in the words of the Italian filmmaker, “made beautiful a woman who could be a skeleton of misery and solitude inside.”
Indeed, if the Italian woman places so much importance on her looks and matching accessories, this second-skin reflex derives from the 1930s. At this period it was still used as a social marker.
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