The Embodied Elegance of a Nation: Italian Society Ladies in Vogue , 1937–1956

This article considers Vogue magazine as a gateway to explore the role of the American fashion press in shaping Italy’s presence in the transatlantic fashion trade through its society ladies, from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s. It demonstrates that, through curated visual and textual portrayals, Vogue supported both the promotion of the technical innovations of Italy’s textile industry under Fascism and a moral reconfiguration of Italy after the Second World War, as a source of refined, original fashion, aligned with American taste. Central to this transformation was a distinctive narrative style that celebrated Italian women’s elegance and supposedly innate flair, qualities that, in turn, symbolically rehabilitated the Italian national character in the post-Fascist era. Since Italian socialites had appeared in Vogue well before the war, the article argues that their visual and textual portrayals carried a residual political charge, one that Vogue recast to serve new diplomatic and commercial purposes. Through a series of case studies, the article shows how the representation of Italian aristocratic women in Vogue functioned as a sustained strategy of cultural diplomacy, maintained by the broad Italian fashion-industrial complex and its network of intermediaries.