Transatlantic Modern Consumerisms: Italian Goods and Commercial Cultures in Postwar America, 1949–1972

In her welcoming remarks to the guests of the sixteenth Transatlantic Award Gala Dinner that the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy held in Rome on December 6, 2022, the Italian ambassador to the United States Mariangela Zappia emphasized the continuing significance of the Made in Italy sector for US-Italy relations: The United States appreciates more and more Made in Italy, far beyond the established and famous 3Fs of food, fashion, and furniture, showing great interest for high-quality products in the most innovative sectors, those of the economy of tomorrow. Furthermore, in the current geopolitical scenario, which makes strengthening relationships between "trusted friends" more important than ever . . . the potential for growth of our already extraordinary economic partnership with the United States is enormous. Italian businesses can be sure that the United States is their principal and most enthusiastic audience, as well as a still widely unexplored market where Made in Italy producers can find tremendous opportunities for exports and exceptionally valuable partnerships. (La Posta 2023)The vibrant declarations of the Italian ambassador came at a time when the newly elected government of Giorgia Meloni had just created a brand-new Ministry of Businesses and Made in Italy, helping bring the concept back to the center of Italian public debate. This renewed attention to Made in Italy confirms that, besides the vital importance of exports for Italy's economy, the nation has placed more trust than ever in its high-quality productions as the most valuable means of what political scientist Joseph Nye has called soft power. In a context of increasingly globalized markets and multipolar international relations, Made in Italy products and styles are just as important to Italy for cultural diplomacy as they are for its economy (Nye 1990; Iriye 1979; Ellwood 2021; Winder 2020).Zappia's words suggest important considerations about the historical role the United States has played as the primary market in the global diffusion of Made in Italy–labeled goods and narratives of style. First, Zappia asserts that the international commercial impact of Made in Italy extends beyond a few "classic" sectors, such as fashion, food, and design, with which it has generally been associated because those were the first to break through in the American market after World War II. The ambassador goes on to speak about Made in Italy as the main diplomatic asset to maintaining the Atlantic alliance with the United States, Italy's "most trustworthy friend," in a challenging geopolitical context (the reference being to the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, and the international crisis it engendered). Zappia's remarks express the recognition of the United States' essential role in providing a large market for Made in Italy products and style and in expanding the label's influence.The five contributing authors to this special issue of Italian American Review critically reconstruct the history of the early development and success of Made in Italy, establishing its origins in the US-Italy transatlantic context between 1949 and 1972. Methodologically, these articles interpret Made in Italy broadly, not only as a commercial label, consumer style, and economic resource but also as a public discourse on Italian identity and a historical-cultural construct in the making. The transatlantic development of Made in Italy, as both an immaterial value added to Italian products and an array of symbols and imaginaries about Italy and Italians, was a vital factor in the intersecting dynamics of Italian "nation building"—the definition and promotion of an Italian national identity—and the Italian performance of what scholars ever more regularly call "nation branding"—the strategies aimed at promoting the image of the country internationally (Aronczyk 2013; Viktorin et al. 2018). The US-Italy special relationship within the post–World War II framework was the critical and necessary arena for these interconnected processes to develop and thrive.This special issue contextualizes the Italy-US transatlantic transfer of goods, commodities, tastes, style, and ideas that is at the origin of Made in Italy in the specific, and probably irreplicable, geopolitical context of the Cold War, the Marshall Plan, and the international financial system based on the US dollar created with the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944. The dialogue and exchange between Italy and the United States, in the context of the modernization of Italy and the ideological and political imperatives of the Cold War, had a fundamental role in determining Made in Italy's forms, developments, and success. The need to rebuild Italy after World War II, as well as to consolidate and reassure the West of Italy's allegiance to its system of transatlantic values in an international scenario of bipolar ideological conflict (especially given the presence of a strong Italian Communist Party), prompted Italian political and economic leaders to reimagine and redefine an Italian cultural identity that reunited the country domestically (nation building) and restored its image internationally (nation branding). From these domestic politics and international relations came the promotion of a new image of the nation, focused on a specifically Italian style of modernity able to keep up, and even compete, with not only the products and models of the other Western European countries but also those of the United States.1Contributors to this issue analyze the construction of a transatlantic taste for Made in Italy products, models, and lifestyles during the years of undisputed US world economic hegemony and the Italian miracle economic boom, from after World War II to around 1972. Chronologically, the analysis takes as its starting date the exhibition Twentieth-Century Italian Art, held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City from June 28 to September 18, 1949, which signaled and celebrated the "Renaissance" of Italian arts and culture after the dark hiatus of Fascism and the war. As its ideal point of arrival, this special issue adopts another exhibition that MoMA devoted to Italian modern design, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape (May 26 through September 11, 1972). That exhibition opened a decade that, with the end of the worldwide system created at Bretton Woods, the decline of the global influence of the United States, and the turmoil in international economy caused by the oil crisis, ushered in the notion of "the global" and hence also a new phase in the history of Made in Italy.Rather than focusing on the short period typically considered the golden era of Made in Italy—the 1980s—this special issue aims at rethinking the origins of Made in Italy in a wider chronological frame and from a transdisciplinary perspective capable of capturing the many instances of transatlantic transfers that would remain hidden by a perspective that continued to privilege nationally centered or bidirectional patterns of exchange. Historicizing the emergence of Made in Italy within a broader space means rebalancing its center of gravity in the international arena itself rather than anchoring it on either side of the Atlantic. At the same time, this shift provides the methodological conditions for intercepting and detailing through specific case studies the circularity of the flows of goods, people, messages, meanings, and capitals between Italy and the United States as a fundamental factor in the creation of Made in Italy.The earliest studies of the political, economic, and cultural relations between Italy and the United States in the Cold War era centered on the Americanization of postwar Italian society, highlighting both its limits and its impact (Campus 2008; Ellwood 1985; Ellwood and Lyttleton 1985). Expanding critically on the Americanization of Europe, historians later considered the different strategies of cultural diplomacy that the United States deployed to undermine the popularity of Communist ideas and the electoral appeal of the Communist Party in Italy, which was of great concern to the US government and diplomatic officers. Studies of Hollywood films, supermarkets, and the practices, cultures, and institutions of consumption and consumerism that featured prominently in US soft-power initiatives (D'Attorre 1991; Gundle 1995; Brogi 2011; Tobia 2008; Fasce and Bini 2015) complicated an otherwise unidirectional perspective on the Americanization of Western Europe by evidencing the various forms of "selective appropriation" of American models in different European countries and by shedding light on reciprocal influences on both sides of the Atlantic (Kroes 1996; Pells 1997; Gardner 2020).More recently, some scholars have begun to consider not only the dominant west-to-east but also east-to-west transatlantic exchange flows. Several works have examined the growing popularity in the United States of a distinctive Italian style in fields like fashion, architecture, film, and general notions of beauty (Gundle 2007, 2020; Scrivano 2013; Bettiol 2015; Paulicelli 2017; Belfanti 2019). Historians and sociologists have studied the innovative character and the appeal in the United States of specific Italian models of industrialization. Examples of an Italian version of Fordism and post-Fordism—including Northern Italian business-products manufacturer Olivetti and Third Italy's industrial districts and small-scale, small-batch, design-intensive production—have inaugurated a more nuanced way of understanding the multiple directions of transatlantic transfer, adding players, objects, and instances of cultural mediation between Italy and the United States (Blim 1990; Putnam 1993; Cadeddu 2012).2These studies of multidirectional transnational exchange flows have broken important new ground with regard to the circulation of Italian products and paradigms in postwar American society by showing that circulation fed (and at the same time was fed by) the search for an authentically Italian style and production/consumer models on both sides of the Atlantic. They remain, however, premised in a disciplinary scholarship that this special issue challenges: they addressed Made in Italy in the United States by means of sectors, compartments, and languages (fashion, film, design, etc.) and using isolated case studies of noteworthy individuals (authors, film directors, artists, etc.). While commendable, the knowledge these studies advance represents only the starting point from which this special issue moves onward. Bringing together contributions from historians as well as scholars of fashion studies, design studies, and architecture (thereby pursuing a more comprehensive view of the systemic transfer of Made in Italy goods, styles, and discourses to the postwar United States), this special issue aims to overcome the sectoral, field-by-field, case-study approach of previous studies. Similarly, the research showcased here considers the production and consumption of Made in Italy in both the United States and Italy, challenging nation-based approaches in the existing literature that privilege either the sending or the receiving end of the exchange.The recovery of the many networks of transnational exchange—products, producers and consumers, languages, and ideas that progressively shaped Made in Italy—is central to the research project resulting in the articles collected here. Made in Italy is best understood as a discourse that contains multiple interrelated narratives and values. These include authenticity, craftsmanship, traditional knowledge, memory, integrity, seduction, taste, style, and sustainability. Accordingly, Made in Italy as a concept is endorsed, circulated, and projected by various languages and industries, be they fashion, film, food, design, or tourism, creating dense interconnections of meanings that bind them together in a usable and consumable national identity. The main argument of this special issue is that this system of materialities and meanings developed in the thick flows and webs of mutual influences produced by the shrinking of transatlantic space in the early decades of the Cold War (Nolan 2012; Berghahn 2001; Ellwood 2012). The intention is to clarify the actual distribution, appreciation, and consumption of Italian products and cultures in postwar American society. It is to show how political and economic relations between Italy and the United States not only influenced an emergent public discourse on modern Italian identity but also contributed to the expanding circulation of Italian consumer products, first across the Atlantic Ocean and then globally.The system of early transatlantic Made in Italy relied on an infrastructure of commerce made of vectors, networks, and nodes. These included airlines, airports, ships, and seaports; governmental and nongovernmental agencies; cultural and personnel exchange programs; exhibits and fashion shows; design, fashion, film, travel, and food magazines; department stores; company stores and showrooms—all of which oversaw, conveyed, and shaped the fruition of Made in Italy in the postwar United States. To make sense of such a complex infrastructure requires a multitextual as well as multidisciplinary study of the emerging public discourse on modern Italian identity, political relations, and commercial exchanges involved in the development and success of Made in Italy. By engaging such a multidisciplinary perspective, the five articles presented here track the emergence of notions of italianità as a symbolic asset for global markets in the mediation of infrastructural relations, material objects, and cultural artifacts.The special issue concludes, therefore, that—far from being a construction and a culture produced in Italy and exported abroad—Made in Italy was fundamentally influenced and shaped by the way it was received and consumed in the United States as well as by its circulation among different consumer markets and sociocultural contexts. This circulatory perspective helps overcome the classic dichotomy of Americanization versus Europeanization and suggests that much of what we nowadays perceive as distinctly "American" or "Italian" is the result of lasting processes of cultural transfer and hybridization.Furthermore, adopting a dynamic and circular perspective allows for better framing of the relationship of the original Made in Italy to the imperialist politics and nature of postwar US consumer culture. This phenomenon manifested itself in the creation of a global emporium of cultural difference from which US consumers could selectively pick national and ethnic goods, often within unequal relations of power between the United States and those nations being "consumed."The working hypothesis is that the United States expanded its influence on the rest of the world also through the creation of what Victoria De Grazia (2006) has called an "informal empire/emporium" containing diverse influences and cultural products from which American consumers could (and can) selectively appropriate "other" consumer goods and cultural paradigms. This recognition helps reframe the history of Western European-United States relations in the twentieth century as predominantly a history of exchanges conducted on a basis of reciprocity and mutual interest (Vaudagna 2015). In this respect, the overall conceptual frame of this special issue is indebted to the work of Kristin Hoganson (2007) on the global cultural inputs that between the nineteenth and the twentieth century contributed to shaping modern American consumer culture and domesticity. Following Hoganson, we analyze the contribution of models and products imported from Italy to the shaping of American consumer culture, everyday life, and vision of the world in the early decades of the Cold War. In mobilizing this framework, this special issue shows that Italian products, lifestyles, and cultural models not only gradually became objects of American consumption but also went as far as influencing the taste, culture, and everyday life of US society. This does not mean that the issue attributes to Made in Italy an impact on and presence in the US market quantitatively comparable to that of US products and cultural models on and in Europe; rather, it sheds light on a qualitative reality: Made in Italy was born out of and grew up in a transatlantic context, and its influence was both domestic and international—the first helping reunite, lift up, and motivate an Italy exhausted by the war, and the second nourishing and championing a US and—via that nation—global taste for Italy.The contributors to this special issue explore the politics of desire and taste for Made in Italy in different US markets and among various gendered, racialized, classed, and intersectional consumer groups. This is a dimension very rarely addressed in the existing literature.The multidisciplinary approach to studying the impact of Made in Italy in the United States is evident in not only the disparate points of view presented in the articles but also the authors' use of various sources, archives, documents, languages, and objects of study. As a collaboration involving scholars from different fields and specializations, the issue offers articles that discuss and make connections between individual producers, commodities and consumer paradigms, imaginaries and symbols, and public and private infrastructures for the commercialization of Italian products and styles. Consumer subjects, objects, and institutions ranging from US importers and distributors for Italian companies to the Italian chambers of commerce in the United States and the National Institute for International Trade; prominent figures like Gio Ponti, Giovanni Battista Giorgini, and Sophia Loren; the ships on which commodities and people traveled across the Atlantic, including the Andrea Doria and Cristoforo Colombo; exhibits dedicated to Italian design and arts; magazines, TV and live shows, and other media—all these elements contributed to the making and popularity of Made in Italy in postwar America. Even more originally, the authors in this special issue interrogate neglected aspects of Made in Italy, including the consumers and contexts of consumption in the United States. The special issue aims at providing new evidence and understanding of who the principal consumers of Italian products, styles, and models were as well as their motivations, circumstances, and environments of consumption.The articles collected here offer a picture of transatlantic modern consumerism that is much larger and more diversified in terms of players and vectors than has conventionally been understood. The role that Italian Americans—the several-million-strong community of US residents of Italian ancestry—played as coproducers, importers, marketers, and endorsers of Made in Italy remains to be fully assessed. The research work featured in this special issue addresses the instrumentality of Italian American culture in the spread of "Italianness" in the United States.Turn-of-the-twentieth-century Italian immigrants to the United States had already familiarized American consumers with the value of the traditional skills, sartorial expertise, craftsmanship, and taste that Made in Italy would boost after World War II: they were well-respected tailors, shoemakers, stone carvers, mosaicists, and musical-instrument makers (Ruberto and Sciorra 2021–2022; Dobney 2011). In postwar America, the renewed interest in Italy, Italian culture, and Italian products affected not only US urban culture but also the Italian American community's self-perception, self-representation, and consumer life. Italian Americans, however, also critically acted as tastemakers, mediating between Italian products, styles, and cultures traveling across the Atlantic and broader US markets. On this point, the arguments found in this special issue draw on existing studies focusing on the construction of a specific transnational Italian American identity (Cinotto 2014, 2017). These studies acknowledge the agency of Italian Americans as simultaneously producers and consumers of an Italian identity and culture in the United States. They highlight how the choice of many immigrants to consume "Italian" represented a means to express and claim affiliation with a common cultural belonging and, therefore, to define a precise idea of italianità (Sciorra and Ruberto 2017).This special issue relates to Italian American studies on different levels. First, it affirms that the promotion of Made in Italy in the postwar United States went hand in hand with the "rediscovery" of an "authentic" Italian identity on the part of second- and third-generation Italian Americans. The new and modern idea of Italy that Made in Italy products and styles exemplified turned out to be highly usable by those Italian Americans striving to redefine their diasporic identity as valuable, advanced, and stylish, even before the "ethnic revival" of the 1970s and 1980s. This cultural work of consumption turned them into ideal cultural ambassadors for Made in Italy, helping to associate it with a lifestyle that was at the same time modern and authentic, fresh and yet rooted in tradition. This collection of articles details Italian Americans' material contribution to the import, distribution, commercialization, production, and consumption of Italian products and style as well as their participation in creating an imaginary capable of fascinating and influencing US popular culture and urban society (Cinotto 2013; Diner 2003; Gennari 2017; Ruberto 2015).More broadly, this issue engages historical studies on modern Italian migrations, offering further evidence of the influence of Italian migrations on both US history and Italian history. Historian Mark Choate (2008) used the term "migrant colonialism" for the ways in which the mass international mobility of Italians between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century (and, through them, of Italian products and styles) contributed to the creation of a "global Italy" and global Italian diasporic identities (see also Gabaccia 2000). The collection frames the shaping of a Made in Italy discourse and style after World War II within these broader diasporic processes and flows.In the issue's first article, "Fashion Films in the Newsreels of the Settimana INCOM, 1946–1953: Culture and Politics in the Transatlantic Context," Eugenia Paulicelli examines the newsreels that showcased Italian fashion in movie theaters between 1946 and 1953. The author argues that these films played a significant role in creating a discourse on a new image of Italy and Italian culture. By examining this previously unexplored material and placing it in the context of US-Italy exchanges, Paulicelli establishes a connection between Italian and Italian American designers, such as Anthony Blotta and Ferdinando Sarmi, who built their careers in the New York fashion industry. These designers frequently participated in the "Press Weeks" organized by Eleanor Lambert (known as the "godmother of American fashion") that later became New York Fashion Week. Through a detailed analysis of the catwalk, models, and cultural mediators of the Italian fashion industry abroad, Paulicelli critiques the narratives of a modern Italian identity within the political, cultural, and diplomatic exchanges between the United States and Italy during Italy's reconstruction. The article demonstrates how these exchanges had an impact on both sides of the Atlantic.In "Consuming Italian: Transatlantic Actors and Infrastructures of Italian Exports to Postwar America, 1957–1962," Giulia Crisanti looks at the main networks, drivers, and consumers of Italian exports to postwar America, including governmental and nongovernmental agencies. Crisanti focuses on the period that marked Italy's economic boom and adopts a circulatory perspective. By analyzing the Italian products that entered the US market and their advertising and consumption patterns, Crisanti argues that the growing influence of Made in Italy in the United States was linked to the Americanization process happening in Italy. Thus, Italian and American dynamics intertwined, contributing to the development of Made in Italy as both a successful commercial label and a means of cultural discourse on Italian identity. This mutual exchange significantly influenced both countries.Paola Cordera, in "From Museum to Marketplace: Displaying the Italian Lifestyle," takes an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of the itinerant exhibition Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today (1950–1953). The event, organized under the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan) and sponsored by the Compagnia Nazionale Artigiana, provided a platform for promoting new Italian crafts and designs, from furniture to jewelry, textiles, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and small appliances. It showcased the artistic, historical, and cultural values embedded in those items. The exhibition toured several museums and department stores across the United States where newly designed products were displayed alongside contemporary artworks, merging industrial and traditional Italian craftsmanship. Cordera explores the exhibition's commercial and promotional success at marketing the Made in Italy brand along with its cultural and aesthetic values. It examines how museum display strategies influenced department stores, combining the commercial and the aesthetic to showcase Italian industrial design and decorative-arts production.Marta Averna's article "Ambassadors of Italy: Italian Transatlantic Ocean Liners to the United States, 1946–1958" offers a study of the ways in which national identity is conveyed through a nation's production and the environments it creates, using post–World War II Italy as a case study and focusing on transatlantic passenger ships to the United States. Averna analyzes how various decor items and materials created for a unified project—such as furnishings, works of art, and new technologies—combined with historical references to stage carefully designed arrangements that were employed in the rooms of ocean liners. Given the fact that large liners were one of the few modes of transportation across the Atlantic until 1958, these ships maintained a crucial connection between Italy and the United States.Finally, in "Before 1951: Setting up the Network of G. B. Giorgini and the Launch of Made in Italy," Chiara Faggella identifies Giovanni Battista Giorgini as a crucial figure in the promotion of Italian fashion in postwar United States. Faggella situates Giorgini's professional experiences and personal relationships before 1951 to provide a more comprehensive understanding of his later accomplishments, moving beyond his role in fashion history. The article places Giorgini's business culture within a transdisciplinary framework that sheds light on the work of the intermediaries who contributed to the fame of Italian products in the United States and thereby enabled their international success.Altogether, the five articles support and confirm our initial argument that the "invention" of Made in Italy in the decades following World War II was an eminently US-Italy transnational process originating in the specific context of the Cold War and economic development based on mass production and consumption. From its beginnings, Made in Italy was structured in different languages and product lines and organized within a political-commercial system and a grand narrative of style, taste, desirability, and consumability. The ultimate aim of this special issue is to stimulate further multidisciplinary and collective studies on the dynamics of the production and consumption of Made in Italy in postwar America, retracing in its origins and developments a key passage in the formation of a transatlantic taste and consumer culture.Research leading to this publication has been funded by the Italian Ministry of University Research (MIUR) under the program PRIN 2017 "Transatlantic Transfers: The Place of Italy in American Culture, 1949–1972."