The image of a southern widow in mourning and its evolution in modern aesthetics

Who has ever seen the mandolin, if not Captain Corelli on Kefalonia in the 1940s, a very dubious and controversial thing, but the fabulous images built by cinema, mainly Hollywood, and the media accept it as a paradigmatic part of the Italian way of life. Second season White LotusProduced by Mike White for HBO, the award-winning television series, featuring impeccable photographs of our country, follows the tourist protagonists as they try to live the cliche of the sweet life ridiculously, through use space for generalizations and stereotypes. The Italy represented in the series is aesthetically beautiful but morally corrupt, and the Italian characters are just prostitutes, swindlers, contract killers, or an unresolved and caricatured lesbian: a somewhat outdated and falsifying idea, which is, however, greatly appreciated by Americans. who like to simplify.

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Dolce & Gabbana

This imagination is also often fueled by fashion, which, in order to reach an international audience, produces collections and invests in presentations aimed at highlight common areas a huge culture, ours, which, however, is no longer the same as it was 70 years ago.

On the other hand, some brands, closely associated with the traditions and folklore of certain places, invest in good faith in the dissemination and discovery of ways and customs known to the few.

This is the case Dolce & Gabbana, which at the beginning of July, on the occasion of the presentation of the Alta Moda collection, received an international audience in the narrow streets of Alberobello. Luxurious handmade dresses paraded through the picturesque narrow streets of the place, greeted by men and women specially hired to wear the typical costumes of the place to reenact the past daily life, where peasant women with handkerchiefs on their heads were called to gather olives in the fields or drag goats on leash; men with typical coppolas on their heads roam the city with inquisitive eyes, and women in mourning, dressed in black, guard their homes, standing on the doorstep.

Celebrating Sicilian Traditions

Dolce & Gabbana have always been one. just a holiday traditional southern Italian style, or rather Sicilian style and its variations.

Between craftsmanship and tradition, between sacred and profaneThe duo’s collections celebrate the features that have become the hallmarks of their personalities over the years. signature. black, lace, sensuality and colors of the mediterranean woman they are part of a stylistic code closely associated with the customs of these lands.

From the start, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, fascinated by the details and dressings of southern women, their textile skills and properties, sought to decontextualize their role, relegated to the domestic and religious environment, and invest in a new imaginary. widows dressed in mourning, deprived of domestic male presence, could be freed from pain and experience their condition not as condemnation, but as rebirth, with the help of disturbing sensuality and seduction.

Sicily and Ferdinando Schianna

There southern widow was the protagonist of one of the duo’s first advertising campaigns back in 1987, who, still little known, asked Ferdinand Shianna to photograph them. The first Italian photographer who, in 1982, joined a journalistic agency. Magnum PhotosScianna had never worked in fashion before: it was a reportage photography focused on local traditions and religious beliefs in search of the collective identity of her homeland, Sicily.

The photographs taken for the Dolce & Gabbana advertisement show the model. Marpessa Hennink in an unusual photo shoot: the budget was very small and contrary to Bresson’s teachings”Never put the world in a poseShianna placed the model in the same places and in the same simple and dense atmosphere of her Sicily, achieving unexpected success and helping to createiconography typical of the D&G brand. The images of Ferdinando Shanna in “Marpessa” were transformed living characterV mixture of reality and fictionreferences and exchange of styles and ways of being: the author tried not to erase the presence of what surrounded the model, combining beautiful designer clothes with clothes of villagers, the poses of the protagonist with the gestures of street people.

Shianna placed himself in the role of the demiurge: next to the seductive Mediterranean physiognomy embodied by the faces known as Maria Grazia Cucinotta and Monica Bellucci he chose the anonymously spontaneous views of children and the elderly, who, thanks to the elimination of superstructures and prejudices, became co-heroes of the cadres.

Monica Bellucci and full black sensuality

To further legitimize the D&G woman’s aesthetic, there was a partnership between Monica Bellucci and brand. Her thick dark hair, her seductive look, the black lace that is often worn on the catwalk or in advertising and which we still almost automatically associate with her image, along with the role Malenastarring in the film of the same name Giuseppe Tornatorein which she was initiated into a very sensual widow, victim and executioner of her own indefatigable corporeality, further fueled this mediterranean dream who saw in a woman dressed in black and lace an immeasurable and disturbing sensuality.

In 2003, a commercial for D&G perfume directed by Giuseppe Tornatore was shot: during the Sicilian funeral, the actress mourned her dead wife, but even in such a state, her sensuality was emphasized by those characteristic features of the brand: black, lace, transparent film, veil: playing between the sacred and the profane, Dolce & Gabbana managed to combine the unsurpassed aesthetics of that historical period. Today, in constant reference to the brand’s archives and its golden age, the path to a more modern and free and, above all, less objective femininity seems like a viable solution.

Elegance Made in Italy

The post-war Sicilian widow, with her all-black dress code and sensuality hinted at by lace inserts, fueled and often still fuelsthe image of an Italianwhose elegance can be embodied in black and fitted dresses that accentuate the curves and at the same time hide them.

Like the brand so much Saint Laurent, Gareth Pugh, Dior and Alexander McQueen they strive for a shy and sensual elegance that combines 1950s lingerie with tulle; where transparent details are combined with velvet or a veil on the head turns into a stylish accessory and does not rise to a representative mourning function.

The challenge for today’s creatives is to find new roles for actresses and models, new stories to tell that are not just safe and repetitive stereotypical narratives: in a culturally and artistically rich country like ours, this will mean opening up new perspectives and about a beauty that has so far remained unpublished.