Senso and Their Power of Divulgation As Historiophoty

Home , Camillo Boito, Giuseppe Sciuti, Paletot, Piero Tosi, Tirelli Costumi, Umberto Tirelli

Translating History of Fashion on Screen

A study of Piero Tosi’s costumes in Senso and their power of divulgation as historiophoty

Department of Media Studies 30 hp Fashion Studies Master’s Thesis Spring semester 2020 Supervisor: Paula Von Wachenfeldt

Translating History of Fashion on Screen: A study of Piero Tosi’s costumes in Senso and their power of divulgation as historiophoty

The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that historical costumes can be a valid tool to crystallize and disseminate visual knowledge about fashion and dress history. In the specific, this thesis argues that the screen representation of dress and fashion of the 1860s in the adaptation Senso (1954) provides an evocative contextualization of their past use and meaning for modern viewers. It also discusses the historical accuracy attained by one of the film’s costume designers, Piero Tosi, and his mediation between on-page story and reality. To do this, it visually and textually compares the film costumes, diverse historical documentation and the original novel the film is based on. This analysis is supported by an interdisciplinary theoretical framework: by postmodern history with the concept of historiophoty; by literature and adaptation studies with Genette’s palimpsests and Eco’s reflections on intersemiotic translation; and by costume studies and practitioners with the idea of historical accuracy as a progressive scale and costume as supporting the narrative and balancing the frame.

Keywords: History of fashion; costume; film; adaptation; historiophoty; Piero Tosi; historical accuracy; 1860s; literature; intersemiotic translation.

A big thank you to my family and friends whose support throughout this peculiar period of writing and isolating was crucial to see the light at the end of the tunnel

List of contents

Introduction ...... 1

Research aims and questions ...... 2

Materials ...... 3

A note on terminology ...... 5

Literature Review ...... 5

Costumes, historical accuracy and bodily practice ...... 6 Italian cinema and literature: Piero Tosi, Tirelli, Visconti and Senso ...... 7 Nineteenth-century culture: fashion, art, opera, politics ...... 9

Theoretical framework ...... 11

Methodology ...... 12

Outline ...... 13

Chapter 1. On Theory ...... 12

Costumes and Historical Accuracy ...... 12

Literature and Adaptation: Genette’s hypertextuality and intersemiotic translation ...... 19

Historiophoty: history on film ...... 25

Chapter 2. ‘Magical’ realism: Piero Tosi’s approach and the adaptation of Senso ...... 33

Piero Tosi and Sartoria Tirelli ...... 34

Piero Tosi’s method ...... 37

Senso on page and on screen ...... 41

Chapter 3. The costumes of Senso: Forgery of 19th century fashion ...... 46

The crinoline and state of undress ...... 47

Revolution at the opera and practical wear ...... 49

The Garibaldi shirt...... 50 Dressing for the opera and ‘variations’ on the theme of the mantle ...... 58

What then? ...... 75

Conclusions ...... 79

Appendixes ...... 81

List of Illustrations ...... 90

Bibliography ...... 92

“A costume designer should be completely culturally literate…Painting, architecture, dress making. They should understand fabric, literature…Because we’re interpreters” Deborah Nadoolman Landis

Introduction

This thesis deals with the representation of historical fashion on screen, that is how costume design for film translates and mediates historical dress for modern viewers. The aim is to demonstrate how historical costumes can influence the public divulgation of history of dress and fashion, also considering their historical accuracy or inaccuracy. This aspect is quite divisive as practitioners have different views: some costume designers would rather capture the spirit of the times with a more expressionist tone or anachronistic elements, like Milena Canonero in Marie Antoinette (2006) or Alexandra Byrne in Mary Queen of Scots (2018), while others would strive for philological detail by using authentic pieces of clothing or by creating almost perfect forgeries/copies, like Italian costume designer Piero Tosi. Besides these thought-provoking stances, this study is motivated also by the far- reaching and popular nature of the moving image which makes it important to comprehend how it can affect the knowledge and the heritage of dress history. In fact, considering that historical films and adaptations are an influential medium for knowing about past events and times and that in general the release of a movie always creates some buzz around it - attracting both popular and critical attention - then one could expect an increased focus on historical dress as well. Regardless of their previous knowledge about history of fashion, viewers most likely would at least think about the images seen on the screen, which also comprehend costumes. Otherwise, an absorption of visual portrayals of the past through cinema could also determine a historical consciousness of fashion based on costumes. In other words, historical costumes could initiate and cultivate the audience’s “visual literacy and familiarity” with fashion and dress history.1 Depending on how designers fashion the costumes, the visualization of the costumes by modern viewers could mean mentally linking them to a certain period in time, becoming more aware of history of fashion, but also, possibly, distorting it. Historical films and adaptation have always attracted my attention since an early age and I think that this was nurtured by my love for reading, narratives and the art of story-telling. This enthusiasm for this genre of films awakened an interest in historical dress at first and more generally in fashion later. Only when starting to research for this thesis I became aware that my increasing approach to Fashion Studies had actually been filtered by costume. I believe that this early curiosity and awareness have thus influenced me greatly in my academic career both at undergraduate (I graduated with a thesis about analysing fashion in fiction) and graduate levels.2 Besides my personal responsiveness, the topic really deserves general attention. Costumes can be considered a hybrid field

1 J. Petrov, “Tableaux vivants: Influence of Theatre” in Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the display of dress, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, London, 2019, p. 115, referring to Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984, p. 58. 2 F. Ferrara, “The Profitable Reading of Clothes: Functions of Dress in three novels”, Bachelor’s thesis, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, 2016/2017, Academia. 1 of study. They sit at the crisscrossing of fashion and cinema studies which, in my view, has both positive and negative effects. The positive one is that costumes lend themselves to an enormous variety of critical connections, in relation to cultural, artistic and social trends in cinema and inevitably dialoguing with those in fashion. Thus, it constitutes such a fertile subcategory in this interdisciplinary field of study. The negative one is that often the two bigger sectors can importantly hinder an independent and specialised focus on costumes. Schools of thought and important themes ‘borrowed’ from cinema and fashion flood costumes studies. This can lead to their overlooking or decontextualization thus losing their sense of connection to their specific function in the story. They are seldom analysed per se and are often used to advance wider arguments within the fields that are not specifically tied to them as a primary material. Therefore, in this thesis I will try to customise relevant theories from different disciplines to help me staying grounded and advance arguments that are intrinsically rooted in their nature. Considering historical accuracy in film costume is even more sectorial as I study a sub-genre of costumes and a precise approach to it. Moreover, I consider costume in terms of what it can convey about its historical and narrative referents. Therefore, my topic connects the field of costume studies to that of history of fashion. The latter is well established while the former is somewhat younger as an autonomous and self-sufficient discipline. In fact, it is only from the mid-2010s that new journals on the topic have started to be published and cycles of conferences being devoted specifically to approaching costume as a varied practice.3 (In)Accuracy and the relation to history of fashion might not seem a progressive and updated perspective in such a young discipline as costume studies. Still, I argue that the perspective of this study will expand notions of costumes’ communicative potential, and at the same time propose an alternative approach to the study fashion history as well.

Research aims and questions In the specific, the aims of this study are, on one hand, to disclose how feminine costumes in the historical film and adaptation Senso (1954) can relate to history of dress and fashion, and on the other to reflect on the effects of their historical accuracy or inaccuracy. This study also intends to consider costumes as a product of a shared process of the construction of the mise-en-scène. Consequently, it also aims at understanding the work of the costume designer Piero Tosi that led to the final result seen in the frame and his relevant personal stance towards historical philology. The questions guiding my analysis thus are:

3 For instance, the Ingenta journals, Film, Fashion & Consumption from 2012, and the more specialised Studies in Costume & Performance, from 2016, and Critical Costume, a biennial cycle of conferences and exhibition not limited only to scholarly contributions nor film costumes, founded in 2013. 2

▪ What can historical costumes in Senso do for the understanding of dress and fashion history of the 1860s? ▪ Why should or should not historical accuracy of film costume design matter? ▪ What are the implications of the mediation materialised by Piero Tosi between history and fiction?

These questions exceptionally and critically put costumes and their costume designer ’in the limelight’ and at a multi-layered crossroad which has not been solidly explored yet. This develops a research which is not conducted around or beyond costumes but on and for costumes. Questions are posed in such a way to accept open answers inspired by the materials. Thus, not a simple and unilateral reply based on a pre-conceived thesis or argument forcing a certain theme or meaning through scholarly interpretation of costumes, as it can often occur.

Materials The empirical sources that will be investigated comprehend three parts: the film selected for the analysis, the original text adapted for the screen, and the historical documentation that can be drawn from both visual and textual media (art, photography, fashion magazines, fashion history encyclopaedias etcetera). In relation to the first and third part, I will also use personal statements and comments by and on the costume designer Piero Tosi, available in catalogues, newspapers, interviews, academic papers. The film selected is Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954), freely based on Camillo Boito’s homonymous novella written in 1883 and set in Venice in the 1860s. The contextualisation of its production will be discussed as it influences the style and the outcome. With regards to the historical documentation on fashion, for precise information about specific sartorial elements, two collections of illustrations from fashion plates and photographs are used. One is W.C. Cunnington’s English Women Clothing in the Nineteenth Century.4 Despite the title, as Cunnington himself points out, fashion plates were often reprints from French magazines which have historically set the fashion trends in Europe and United States. This collection is very useful for it gathers both the descriptions and images from the fashion magazines and groups them on a yearly basis thus trends are easily dated and can be followed throughout the century. In this way, it is possible to find out when a particular garment started to be publicised. Descriptions indicate fabrics, common combinations of models, colours, occasions of wear, prices, hairstyles and headgear, understructures, other accessories. A glossary supports the reading of obsolete fashion terms. The magazines that cover the time frame under focus, the 1860s and the year 1866 in the specific, present

4 C. W. Cunnington, English Women's Clothing in the Nineteenth Century: A Comprehensive Guide with 1,117 Illustrations, Dover Publications Inc, New York, 2013. 3 in this collection are: La Belle Assemblée (1806-1863), The World of Fashion (1828-1871), Punch (1841-1899), Illustrated London News (1844-1899), London & Paris Ladies’ Magazine of Fashion (1847, 1866-1871), Godey’s Lady’s Book (1865), Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1854-1879), The Ladies’ Treasury (1858-1894), La Mode Illustrée (1862-1872), The Young Englishwoman (1864- 1876), Fun (1866-1876). The other collection is Victorian and Edwardian Fashions from ‘La Mode Illustrée’ by Curator Emeritus of the Costume Collection of the Museum of the City of New York, Joanne Olian.5 She selected a wide range of illustrations from the pages of the French magazine La Mode Illustrée covering the years 1860 to 1914. The organisation of this collection is similar to Cunnington’s with plates ordered per year and with a glossary defining terms present in the descriptions. Her helpful “Introduction” to the plates links together comments from contemporary artists, authors, poets, fashion leaders and journalists and important events and cultural influences to demonstrate that 19th century was for fashion a time of intense borrowings. From art, from the past, from theatre, from other countries, from politics. It thus functions also as secondary source. Other documentation was sourced from the digital collections and archives of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum and Palais Galliera Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris where I could research specific kinds of authentic garments and see how they looked in ‘real life’ and not only in the graphic reproductions of fashion plates. More information was found in specialized encyclopaedias and dictionaries like The Dictionary of Fashion History.6 Regarding costumes, I heavily rely on stills from a restored DVD edition of the film.7 I could find only one published sketch by Tosi for Senso and three pictures of an extant costume were gently shared with me digitally by the Florentine costume workshop Costumi d’Arte Peruzzi. Important information about his approach to historical costumes, his method, his experience working on Senso is provided by various other sources. These are: the interview “Hide in Plain Sight” published on the academic journal Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media and conducted by film and fashion scholar Drake Stutesman in 2003; a video-interview to him and to other colleagues and film experts about Senso included in the DVD bonus materials conducted in the same year; the 2009 documentary “L’abito e il volto – Incontro con Piero Tosi” (The dress and the face-Meeting with Piero Tosi) directed by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC) which interviews him and his collaborators and follows him in the classrooms of the CSC where he taught Costume for a long time;

5 J. Olian (ed. by), Victorian and Edwardian Fashions from "La Mode Illustrée", Dover Publications Inc, New York, 1998. 6 V. Cumming, C. W. Cunnington, P. E. Cunnington, The Dictionary of Fashion History, Berg, Oxford and New York, 2010. 7 Senso, directed by L. Visconti, Lux Film, 1954, Collector’s Edition distributed by Cristaldi Film, 2007, DVD. 4 the catalogue Esercizi sulla Bellezza (Exercises on Beauty) with interviews to him and his students and presenting the pictures of the photo shootings, examinations for his seminars.8

A note on terminology In this thesis, the term costume will be used to indicate the appearance of the actors on screen, thus encompassing garments, accessories, hair and make-up worn for their performance as characters of a story. Here, the term does not stand for ancient or folk garments. In terms of its function, it is independent and “antithetical” to fashion which is mainly created for public consumption, glamour and desirability.9 Moreover, I argue that costume is relevant for both history of fashion and history of dress and it may be the case that at some points I will mention one instead of the other for questions of brevity but this does not mean that I consider them interchangeable, though intertwined. Costume can be relevant for both histories because it can tell something, accurate or inaccurate, about the stylistic, sartorial characteristics of past ways of dressing, how dressed bodies looked in the past (history of dress) and also how dress was related to social behaviour in the past (history of fashion).10 Personally, I also distinguish accuracy from authenticity, as properties characterising two different types of objects, respectively, a contemporary-made article more or less resembling an antique one and a surviving historical artifact. With regards to the different labels of historical film, period film, costume drama and so on which I have found distinguished in the literature, for the aims of this thesis the distinction is not relevant. Any type of film recreating a past world has implications on how we can potentially understand the use, look and context of fashion. Regardless of whether the film portrays a romantic story or focuses on ideological or political revolutions, still actors are dressed as their characters would in the given period.

Literature Review The secondary literature used for this study ranges a variety of fields. Articles about costumes, historical accuracy and bodily experiences of fashion help me tackle the analysis of the film reflecting on how the different agents can relate to them (costume designers, actors, viewers). For background

8 D. Stutesman, P. Tosi, “Hide in Plain Sight: Interview with Piero Tosi”, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, vol. 47, n. 1, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2006, pp. 106-121, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/frm.2006.0009; “Speciale Interviste”, Senso, Cristaldi Film, 2007, DVD; CSC, L’abito e il volto - Incontro con Piero Tosi, CSC Productions, 2007, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y2Lr7EbqGA, accessed on 18/05/20; S. Iachetti, A. Baldi (eds.), Esercizi sulla Bellezza: Piero Tosi e i seminari di acconciatura e trucco al CSC (Exercises on Beauty: Piero Tosi and his seminars on hairstyle and make-up at CSC), Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Roma, and Electa, Milano, 2008. 9 D. Nadoolman Landis, J. Kurland (eds.), “Fashion vs. Costume” in 50 designers 50 costumes: Concept to Character, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, 2004 and “Scene and Not Heard”, PhD diss., Royal College of Art, 2003, p. 31. 10 G. Riello, “The object of fashion: methodological approaches to the history of fashion”, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, vol. 3, n. 1, 2011, DOI: 10.3402/jac.v3i0.8865. 5 information about the film, like the situation of the film industry in Italy in the 1950s, the circumstances around the production of Senso and its makers in the specific, I rely on studies of visual, fashion and film cultures and, for its relation to the original text, on literary articles. Critical studies about 19th century fashion, society, politics, popular trends, art support me in drawing my critical arguments on the eloquence of costumes with regard to history of dress and fashion.

Costumes, historical accuracy and bodily practice In general, the majority of scholarly papers discussing costumes is often in relation to other widespread themes discussed in costume and film studies such as fetishism, or to the interrelationship between fashion and cinema. This means that there is not a wide-researched scholarly and metacritical focus on the practice of costume, and what the costume designers mean to convey, or even more specifically, on their personal approach to historical accuracy – which obviously has relevance to the final outlook of costumes. I could find few exceptions and I will mention here those which more practically backed my research. Two of them partially form my theoretical framework and will be more deeply and extensively discussed in the corresponding chapter. Another exception is a short article by dress and textile historian Doretta Davanzo Poli which shows a way of addressing historical accuracy by carrying out a “purely technical exercise” by meticulously reviewing the costumes from Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975).11 She examines many details from various characters’ costumes and stresses their philological adherence to historical sartorial elements, their anachronisms and extravagant deviations, their inspiration from works of art. Her review is also based on contemporary literature (she inserts excerpts from Casanova’s memoirs) and on interviews to costume designer Milena Canonero retrieved from Internet. This article shows a profound knowledge of the history of fashion of 18th century and it states from the start its independence from the artistic results of the costumes, which received public recognition being awarded with an Oscar.12 Although it discusses a different time frame and thus it does not support me content-wise, this article provided some methodological grounds for my own analysis on historical accuracy based on the interplay of diverse sources and also helped me pin down the aims of the research. In fact, my intention is to investigate more in depth the relation between costume and history of fashion which in Davanzo Poli’s article is only briefly suggested, not being her main goal. Moreover, through this article I could find the interesting reflections on costumes by Polish-born Italian director Alessandro Fersen, which form an important part of my theoretical framework.13

11 D. Davanzo Poli, “Les costumes de Barry Lyndon: Entre invention fantastique et réalité historique”, Arts and Artifacts in Movie, Technology, Aesthetics, Communication, vol. 7, Fabrizio Serra Editore, Pisa and Rome, 2010, pp. 95-102. My translation from French. 12 Id., p. 95. 13 Id., pp. 96 and 101. 6

Not directly related to the topic of costume, Joanne Entwistle’s encouragement to approach fashion and dress as bodily experiences in her The Fashioned Body triggered some reflections that help me answer my research questions.14 Entwistle argues that the study of dress should consider its subject as a “as situated bodily practice as a theoretical and methodological framework for understanding the complex dynamic relationship between the body, dress and culture”.15 The situatedness of sartorial behaviour and experiences means acknowledging their “historical and social constraints”.16 Each historical period had its own general bodily experiences determined by the “structure” of the fashion system of the time, establishing what silhouette should be attained for fashionability, and each individual interpreted it with their “agency” through “dress”.17 Characters of a story portrayed in a realist style, as individual human beings, have their own bodily experiences of the past fashions and interpret it according their gender, class, culture etcetera. As it will be explained, Tosi was quite careful about this bodily and material quality in his creations as it fundamentally affected actors’ way of moving or even just ‘appearing’ in front of the camera. Therefore, I consider it valid to discuss his costumes acknowledging Entwistle’s notions of fashion and dress. Quite important for finalising my own arguments is the chapter “Tableaux Vivants: The Influence of Theatre” in Julia Petrov’s Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress.18 Petrov discusses the theatricalization of historical fashion in exhibitions, also drawing comparison between their effects on visitors with those of historical films on spectators. I do not essentially disagree with her critical views on the inhibition of the viewer’s critical engagement with history of fashion in hyper-realistically staged exhibitions. Nonetheless, in my analysis, I will readjust and compensate, if not really contrast, this argument by opposing to it the cases of Tosi’s costumes.

Italian cinema and literature: Piero Tosi, Tirelli, Visconti and Senso Despite the lack of academic research studies on historical accuracy in costume design, many sources can be found on well-known costume designers because closely linked to the film and fashion industries. In fact, many sources about the interrelationships of these fields mention costume designer Piero Tosi. Plus, to the book and film Senso were dedicated articles and chapters that focused on a variety of themes and on the direction of Luchino Visconti. Very useful are Eugenia Paulicelli’s comprehensive chapters on film and fashion cultures and industries in Rome in the period between 1950s and 1960s termed Hollywood on the Tiber, in the volumes Film, Fashion, and the 1960s and Italian Style: Fashion & Film from Early Cinema to the

14 J. Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Social Theory, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central. 15 Entwistle, p. 34. 16 Ibid. 17 Id., p. 57. 18 J. Petrov, "Tableaux Vivants: The Influence of Theater" in Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress, London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019, pp. 113–136, DOI: 10.5040/9781350049024.ch-006. 7

Digital Age.19 She explains how the combination of post-war foreign investments and Italian artisanal expertise led to a cultural and industrial boom, enabling young figures and enterprises such as costume designer Piero Tosi and costume workshops like Tirelli Costumi to emerge. She also interviews Tirelli’s associate Dino Trappetti, helpful for his insights on Tosi and Tirelli’s archive of historical dresses and costumes.20 More evidence about the significance of Tosi and Tirelli’s contribution to the legacy of dress history is found in the catalogue Donazione Tirelli: La vita nel costume, il costume nella vita (Tirelli Donation: life in costume, costume in life). It is a photographical presentation of the donation of authentic pieces of clothing from 18th century to 20th century and historical costumes by Tirelli to the Galleria del Costume di Palazzo Pitti in Florence introduced by comments by Umberto Tirelli himself, museum art directors and fashion historians.21 Analogous is fashion historian and scholar Sofia Gnoli’s chapter on Tirelli’s fashion collectionism which explains origins and sources of his acquisitions showing the distinctiveness of his archive, one of the biggest in Europe.22 Very important was film and media scholar Ivo Blom’s worthy monography on Luchino Visconti’s cinema, Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art.23 Especially his chapter “Costume and Painting in Senso” is fundamental for two reasons: thanks to his thorough interviews to Tosi he provides detailed information on the whole production process of the film which would have been hard to retrieve otherwise; and for his study on costume through the perspective of art history and media, drawing new comparisons between costumes and paintings and commenting on art as Visconti’s source for his film. Blom does provide comments on the materiality and artistic influences of the costumes which have importantly informed my research, but in the context of his study these are aimed to discuss Visconti’s use of 19th-century European art as visual schema for all sectors of the mise-en-scène. Therefore, his is a starting point for my own analysis. The originality and independence of my own study from his take on costumes is granted by the two different approaches and aims. I focus more specifically on sartorial details and elaborate more extensively on costume’s relation to history of fashion. Moreover, he is less interested in the original novel which he mentions briefly while I analyse costumes also against Boito’s sartorial descriptions.

19 E. Paulicelli, "Fashion, Film, and Rome" in E. Paulicelli, D. Stutesman, L. Wallenberg (eds.), Film, Fashion, and the 1960s, Indiana University Press Bloomington, 2017, pp. 91-111, DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt2005rf6.10; and “Rome, Fashion, Film” in Italian Style: Fashion & Film From Early Cinema to the Digital Age. Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2016, pp. 157-184. 20 Paulicelli, “Appendices: Dressing the Dreams: Interview with Dino Trappetti—Tirelli Costumi Rome, December 2015”, Italian Style, pp. 207-214. 21 U. Tirelli, M.C. Poma (ed. by), Donazione Tirelli: la vita nel costume, il costume nella vita, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano, 1986. 22 S. Gnoli, “Il collezionismo di moda di Umberto Tirelli” in P. Colaiacomo (ed. by), Fatto in Italia: la cultura del made in Italy (1960-2000) (Made in Italy: the culture of the made-in-Italy 1960-200), Meltemi, Rome, 2006, pp. 121-132. 23 I. Blom, Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art, Sidestone Press, Leiden, 2017. 8

The chapter “One Senso for two countesses” by film specialist Caterina D’Amico de Carvalho’s in Fashioning Cinema: Women and Style at the Venice Film Festival also focuses specifically on this film.24 It very briefly provides an overview of its cultural and historical context, its artistic influences and themes, its relation to the original text, and to a certain extent the costume designers’ work. The volume is the catalogue of an exhibition about the relation of Venice and fashion, in film and on the red carpet. It is the only record I have found of the display of costumes from Senso, and information about two costumes and a sketch by Piero Tosi are provided.25

Finally, the article “Senso da Camillo Boito a Luchino Visconti: storie di un’Italia mancata” (Senso from Camillo Boito to Luchino Visconti: stories of a missed Italy) elaborates on how the story of Senso is treated by Boito and Visconti, especially focusing on their difference and similarities approaching the historical and political subplot, and considering the reception of the film in this regard.26 This enabled me to be informed about external circumstances to the writing of the book and the production and reception of the film which I would not have been able to detect only from the reading of the original story or from the vision of the film, and it greatly informs the analysis of the costumes as well, as they also are affected by and reflect this theme.

Nineteenth-century culture: fashion, art, opera, politics With regards to critical approaches to fashion, my analysis is stimulated, enhanced and informed by different specialised studies. One of these is the catalogue of the Met exhibition Impressionism, Fashion & Modernism.27 Apart from presenting fashionable Impressionist portraits and paintings of scenes from 19th century society, it conducts critical analyses of the paintings in relation to dress and contextualises fashion with media other than art like contemporary critical essays and articles about social mores and events, the sartorial behaviour of the models. This is another example, like the afore-mentioned article by Davanzo Poli, of how the study of fashion is fundamentally based on mixed sources and my study gained many insights on fashion like those on the varied use of crinoline. In relation to the Metropolitan Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum, their websites are important sources where to find specific articles on artifacts in their public collections. For example, I accessed the articles on the photographs of Countess Castiglione and on the commissioned painting

24 C. D’Amico de Carvalho, “One Senso for two countesses” in F. Giacomotti (ed. by), Fashioning Cinema: Women and Style at the Venice Film Festival (Venice, Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo, 1 September – 6 January 2013), Silvana Editoriale, Milano, 2012, pp. 36-39. 25 “Senso”, Fashioning Cinema, pp. 54-67. 26 A. Iacoacci, “Senso da Camillo Boito a Luchino Visconti: storie di un’Italia mancata” in M. Spedicato, F. Danieli (eds.), Si quaeris caelum, Edizioni Universitarie Romane, Rome, 2017, pp. 119-149. 27 G. Groom (ed. by), Impressionism, Fashion & Modernism (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 26 February – 27 May, 2013), The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 2012. 9 of Napoleon III’s visit to Algeria from the Metropolitan website, and those on understructures, mantles, jewels from the Victoria & Albert’s.28 On the specific topic of the Garibaldi blouse I found Mischa Honeck’s article “Garibaldi’s Shirt: Fashion and the Making and Unmaking of Revolutionary Bodies” in Transatlantic Revolutionary Cultures, 1789-1861 clarifying the process of popularization of clothes such this ‘niche’ garment.29 This was possible only in the context of 19th century when geographical and cultural distance no longer mattered for the global spread of fashion thanks to the modernization of mass media, enabling more conspicuous appropriations. On the note of appropriation, I mention Adam Gezcy’s volume Fashion and Orientalism: Dress, Textiles and Culture From the 17th to the 21st Century supporting me in the research on the mantles and shawls. It effectively explains the complex and contradictory influences of extravagant Orientalism on fashion and rise of standardization for ready-made industry on fashion.30 Nancy Green’s Ready-to-Wear Ready-to-Work and Lou Taylor’ section on outerwear in de La Haye and Wilson’s Defining Dress are also useful for the research on mantles being the first category of female garment entering serialised production.31 Concerning the social significance of opera in 19th century, where the first important scene of the film is set, I could draw important information about class differences and conventions mainly in the volume The Operatic State: Cultural Policy and the Opera House by Ruth Bereson.32 To conclude, information about the groups of women active in the circles of freedom fighters in the Veneto region during the last period of Austrian occupation was most principally derived from the Venice national library Biblioteca Marciana. On their website, they published an article and a

28 M. Daniel, “The Countess da Castiglione”, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/coca/hd_coca.htm, accessed on 01/06/20, “Study for "Visit of the Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress to Algeria", https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/441375, L. Johnston, “Corsets & Crinolines in Victorian Fashion”, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/c/corsets-and-crinolines-in-victorian-fashion/, accessed on 30/05/20, Victoria and Albert Museum, “A history of jewellery”, https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/a-history-of-jewellery, accessed on 01/06/20, and “Brooch”, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O298989/brooch-unknown/, accessed on 01/06/20, “Mantle”, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O74556/mantle-unknown/, accessed on 07/06/20. 29 M. Honeck, “Garibaldi’s Shirt: Fashion and the Making and Unmaking” in C. A. Lerg, H. Tóth (eds.), Transatlantic Revolutionary Cultures, 1789-1861, Koninklijke Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2018, pp. 140-165, DOI: 10.1163/9789004351561_007. 30 A. Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism: Dress, Textiles and Culture From the 17th to the 21st Century, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2013. 31 N. Green, Ready-to-Wear Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1997 and L. Taylor, “Wool, cloth, gender and women’s dress” in A. de La Haye, E. Wilson (ed. by), Defining Dress: Dress as Object, Meaning, and Identity, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1999, pp. 30-47. 32 R. Berenson, The Operatic State: Cultural Policy and the Opera House, Routledge, London and New York, 2002. 10 series of original documentation and commentaries recording women’s inclusion and fundamental support in occasion of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification in 2011.33

Theoretical framework The theoretical framework draws from a variety of disciplines: costume studies, adaptation studies crossing the fields of semiotics and literature, and history. The first chapter extensively discusses the theory which guided the analysis and here I will only very briefly present it. In consideration of the aim of acknowledging costumes as a result of a shared construction of the mise-en-scène, I feel the necessity to rely partially on the often-overlooked perspective of practitioners. These are the director Alessandro Fersen, active in the second half of 20th century, Deborah Nadoolman Landis and Sarah Jablon-Roberts, two costume designers who have dedicated also to a scholarly approach to costume with their PhDs. Fersen considers the characters’ costumes as turning ordinary, everyday and temporary ways of dressing into a “lasting artistic document”, and I use this concept for arguing the capacity of costumes to ‘crystallize’ history of fashion.34 Nadoolman Landis defines costume with a two-fold function: to support the narrative and to balance the frame through colour, silhouette and texture.35 In the context of period movies, these purposes can extensively but not exclusively involve researching historical sartorial conventions. Jablon-Roberts outlines a definition of historical accuracy encompassing all elements of bodily appearance, including gestures, movements, textures, accessories, materials, colours and so on.36 Her conclusion is that it is a luxury and more often an ideal that of making all elements accurate.37 Genette’s metaphor of palimpsests for the various relations that recent literary texts establish with older ones is used to propose an analogous relation between costumes and historical dresses. Moreover, I argue that categories of texts he identified - like parodies, travesties, pastiches and, most specifically for this thesis, forgeries – could be easily envisaged being applied to different approaches to historical costume design. Eco and Dusi’s works on adaptation provide the grounds to tackle important aspects of this kind of transposition, like the inevitable differences between the original text, Boito’s novella, and the filmic interpretation.

33 Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, “8. La resistenza degli uomini e quella delle donne” (The Resistence of men and women), https://marciana.venezia.sbn.it/la-biblioteca/il-patrimonio/patrimonio-librario/i-libri-raccontano/percorso- didattico-aspettando/la-resistenza-degli-uomini, accessed on 02/06/20.

34 A. Fersen, “Relazione di Alessandro Fersen” (Alessandro Fersen’s report) in Atti del Convegno Internazionale della moda del cinema e del teatro (Proceedings of the International Conference of Fashion, Cinema and Theatre), Venezia, 8-9 settembre 1951, Centro Internazionale delle Arti e del Costume Palazzo Grassi. Page numbers not given. 35 D. Nadoolman Landis, “Scene and Not Heard: The Role of Costume in the Cinematic Storytelling Process”, PhD diss., The Royal College of Art, 2003, p. 2 and 50 designers/50 Costumes: From Concept to Character, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, 2004. 36 S. Jablon-Roberts and E. Sanders, “The Underlying Definition of Historical Accuracy, Dress, vol. 45, n. 2, 2019, pp. 107-125, DOI: 10.1080/03612112.2018.1537647 37 Ibid. 11

From history, I drew the crucial notion of historiophoty, the visual parallel of historiography, and the idea that cinema is a valid way of commenting history by post-modernist historians Hayden White and Robert Rosenstone. This in order to validate costumes as a visual (and material) representation of historical fashion and dress.

Methodology The method adopted is qualitative and mixed given the varied nature of the primary sources. A comparative analysis of the materials will be carried out considering the theoretical framework and research questions. This entails also visual and textual analysis because primary sources comprehend both images – film stills, fashion representation in the press and art - and texts – the short novel and Tosi’s interviews. Comparison is not uncommon in translation studies where the original and destination texts are aligned and their differences and similarities observed.38 In this way, a “descriptively deduced comparative scheme” establishes if there is any recurrence of analogous situations and elements in the story.39 This leads to the “selection” of the features considered “appropriate to the communicative aim”.40 The selective passage happens in both the action of translation itself and in the analysis of translation.41 The adaptation practices transforming the original text on screen will be discussed as they influence the mise-en-scène, thus costumes as well. A pre-determination narrowing the scope of my research was the decision to mainly focus on Piero Tosi’s costumes – those of secondary characters and extras – even though in two instances I will also focus on two of the protagonist’s dresses, because of their significance for aspects of historical fashion, dramatic effect and because one of these was in reality created by Tosi, and not by his collaborator Marcel Escoffier. Therefore, a first viewing of the film led to a noticing of certain recurring or highly expressive sartorial elements that I consider worth elaborate on. This means that I do not cover all the costumes present in each scene, but that only after a first examination of this primary source I observed certain units of the filmic image that, personally, are remarkable for their recurrence or effect and thus selected them for the analysis. By this, I do not mean that other aspects or elements that I overlook are not relevant or worth analysing, but that I inevitably have a subjective point of view which makes me notice something different from anyone else. Thus, the pertinence of these aspects of costumes and history of fashion that I choose to discuss is not only in relation to the scope and aims of the research but also determined by my individual, limited perspective.

38 N. Dusi, “1. Teorie dell’adattamento” (Adaptation theories) in Il cinema come traduzione: Da un medium all’altro: letteratura, cinema, pittura (Cinema as translation: from a medium to another one: literature, cinema, art), UTET Libreria, Torino, 2003, p. 27. 39 Dusi, p. 27, his emphasis. 40 Id, p. 47. 41 Ibid. 12

These elements are compared to ‘analogous’ ones in the original text, when it describes sartorial behaviours, and to primary sources of fashion. This comparison is informed and framed by the costume designer’s own approach. My identification and selection resulted in a focus on important aspects of historical dress and fashion, like class differences and transnational cultural influences. Thinking how costumes represent these aspects is done without a prescriptive agenda in mind – how it should or could have conveyed history of fashion – but with the intention to understand the process that led to their specific relation in the movie and what can costumes tell about past fashion phenomena.

Outline In the first chapter, I present and summarize the relevant theories framing my study and critically discuss them in relation to my own subject. I start by the theoretical arguments of authoritative practitioners in the field of cinema, theatre and costume with Fersen, Landis and Jablon-Roberts. Then, I present literary, semiotic and adaptation studies by Genette with his Palimpsests and Eco’s study intersemiotic translations with supplementary notions by Dusi. I finish with the concept of historiophoty and Rosenstone’s arguments validating the study of history through cinema, or better, the study of historical representation according to cinema’s unique conventions. In the second chapter, I present the figure of Piero Tosi, his significance for both costume design and fashion history and frame his approach with my own theoretical framework. I very briefly describe the situation of the film industry in Italy in the 1950s and Visconti’s vision conditioning the production of Senso. Then, I outline the characteristics, plot and setting of the two different versions of the story, and explain how these differ from each other using Genette’s categories of transposition practices. In the third chapter, I carry out the analysis of the costumes focusing on elements of structure with crinoline, practical wear with the female shirtwaist being influenced by male and military clothing, formal wear for the opera, and the eclectic use of mantles, a garment which can be associated to the interplay of an early serialization and standardization in feminine wear with an extravagant Orientalist taste. In the Conclusions, I wrap up the study by commenting the limitations of this research and inviting potential continuations and widenings of its scope.

In the APPENDIX, I insert supplementary material and visual sources mentioned in the text but less strictly relevant for the analysis, and also few pictures of the extant costumes.

Chapter 1. On Theory The subject of costumes in historical films and adaptations presents manifold aspects to consider, which invite to study and to be inspired by theories and reflections coming from different disciplines and thinkers. My theoretical perspective is built not only on older and more recent views on costumes, from the well-established Theatre Studies to the younger independent Costume Studies, but also on concepts and relations described in Literature and interlingual and intersemiotic Translation. In fact, costumes are inserted in the highly communicative systems of fictional texts, which rely on non- verbal tools as well, plus I consider them analogous to translations in terms of, invisibility of their producers, necessary compromises and (un)faithfulness to the original source. Moreover, discussions between historians help me establishing the validity that films can have in terms of expanding and conveying knowledge about history which I consider being relevant to costumes in relation to history of fashion as well.

Costumes and Historical Accuracy One of the viewpoints on costumes which has strengthened my intuitions and had a great impact on my own interpretation is that of Polish-born Italian dramatist, actor and director, Alessandro Fersen, active from the 1940s to the 1980s. I was able to read his reflections on costume thanks to the prompt helpfulness of the library of the Center of Studies of History of Fashion, Textiles and Costume in Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice, which could forward me the proceedings of his speech. In 1951, the then-existing International Centre of Arts and Costumes of Palazzo Grassi in Venice held a congress on fashion in cinema and theatre and invited known directors, production designers, actors, journalists etcetera; some of them directly addressed the issue of costumes and their relation to fashion.1 Fersen built his reflections on a now popular passage from Charles Baudelaire’s Painter of Modern Life (1863). It is an excerpt from the section “Modernity” where the poet asserts that art should not overlook and scorn the transitory because, together with the eternal, it makes up beauty which would be abstract and undefinable without the ephemerality of fashion. The aim of modern art, according to Baudelaire, is to find the poetic, the beautiful, the eternal in the transitory. Therefore, he reproaches contemporary artists for copying gesture, costume and look of the past to insert them in a modern painting. He is quite clear when he declares “[w]oe to him who studies the antique for anything else but pure art, logic and general method!” since being too acquainted with the past makes lose contact with one’s own current “circumstance”.2 This statement would incontestably make any

1 A. Fersen, “Relazione di Alessandro Fersen” (Alessandro Fersen’s report) in Atti del Convegno Internazionale della moda del cinema e del teatro (Proceedings of the International Conference of Fashion, Cinema and Theatre), Venezia, 8-9 settembre 1951, Centro Internazionale delle Arti e del Costume Palazzo Grassi. Page numbers not given. Contextual information on the conference was available thanks to the article by Davanzo Poli, pp. 95-96. 2 C. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. by Jonathan Maine, Phaidon Press, London, 1995, p. 14. 12 historical representation inadequate for the present and its contemporary artistic endeavours. It would be worth noting, though, that only few decades later the most technologically advanced artistic medium of that time, the cinematographer, would have been extensively used exactly for the portrayal of historical figures and events.3 Nonetheless, Baudelaire himself is not so blunt throughout his essay. His critical views towards historicity are found in “Modernity”, which is an advocacy for the rise of an artistic taste closer to the sensibility of his times, but in the previous section “Beauty, Fashion and Happiness” he seems more ambivalent when mentioning historical costumes. A rhetorical examination of 18th century fashion plates triggers Baudelaire in imagining the dresses beyond their current stiffness given by the engravings.4 He fantasizes about a hypothetical play set in the past and describes how past fashion, thanks to this historical dramatization, can come alive in front of the spectator.5 This “resurrection” is possible when “intelligent” actors and actresses wear historical costumes thus fill the stiff and apparently “laughable” garments with their “living flesh” for the spectator to witness them in action.6 Baudelaire concludes this vision explaining that then “[w]ithout losing anything of its ghostly attraction, the past will recover the light and movement of life and will become present”.7 It would seem that the use of historical dresses is unacceptable when the artist exploits it for “subjects of a general nature and applicable to all ages” as he objects in “Modernity”, but if the subject specifically comes from the past, it serves the purpose of making spectators understand an old ideal of beauty, that is as interesting as the present.8 Fersen agrees with Baudelaire’s ideas as he explains that art, showing what is eternal through ordinary appearances, then attributes to the latter a sense of “universality” and “consistent and intense truth” which did not have beforehand.9 This view, inspired by Baudelaire’s words, frames his perspective on costumes which can be considered acting in a similar way towards history of fashion because:

If characters, who move on stage and on screen, must document in the most profound way the sensibility of an epoch, then their clothing – in its cut, colour and design – needs to express the human nature which had been forming in that particular historical period. Only by commenting and almost accentuating gestures, contingent attitudes and the variable mimicry of the human body, in what they have of most intimately specific, the character’s dress becomes ‘costume’, shifts from momentary fashion to lasting artistic document. And thanks to this subtle and often

3 R. Rosenstone, “Chapter 2: To see the past” in History on Film/Film on History, Routledge, 2012, p. 13. 4 Baudelaire, pp. 1-2. 5 Baudelaire, p. 2. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Id., p. 12. 9 Fersen, my translation from Italian. 13

elusive surpassing of daily life it contributes to complete the essential and indelible portrait of a certain society.10

In these terms, it seems right to imagine that the work of costume designers in creating the sartorial context to the emotions and actions of characters fitting a given historical period should have effect on how history of fashion can be absorbed. Costume perpetuates it but, in order to do this, must also be different. The actions of “commenting” and “almost accentuating” that Fersen mentions are the practices he believes make it possible for fashion and everyday day dress to be recognised through time. His words support me in preparing the grounds for the discourse about a mediation between the two elements which is necessary for their intrinsic differentiation but also for the unique crystallization of history of fashion and dress.11 He explains further the artistic nature of costumes and what makes them differ from fashion:12

[Costume] becomes a true creation of art in fact only as long as the characters’ clothing transcends common realism to reach […] a more profound and poetic truth. Then dress […] ceases to be the chronicle of a style of clothing and comes to be its symbol and legend. Thanks to this transfiguring action, to this mysterious alchemy, which transforms, often with minimal tweaks, a turmoil of fleeting fashions into a constant image of a form of life, there is a metamorphosis of daily dress into historical costume, of an occasional and anonymous way of dressing into a model gifted with a vigorous and original vitality.13

It is a widely held opinion that costumes should not simply copy historical dresses and Fersen aligns with this idea with which I agree but that I also intend to problematize. In fact, on one hand this view wants to challenge the idea that historically accurate costumes are more brilliant than imaginative ones, on the other, it stigmatises historically accurate costumes as either inappropriate, banal or limiting for the narrative context.14 Nonetheless, Fersen offers a nuanced position as a jumping-off point: the mediation of costume as “transfiguring action” can be “subtle and elusive”, executed through “minimal tweaks”. The concept of costumes crystallizing history of fashion importantly

10 Fersen, my translation of the text from Italian, his emphasis. 11 This statement does not intend to exclude other ways in which history of fashion can be diffused (art, exhibitions, etc.). Moreover, also contemporary artworks like portraits can distort the reality of sartorial norms and still be taken as accurate representations. P. Bignami, “Il costume storico? Un abito fantastico” (The historical costume? A fantastic dress) in Bignami and Ossicini (eds.), Il quadrimensionale instabile: Manuale per lo studio del costume teatrale (The unstable quadrimensional: Handbook for the study of theatrical costume), UTET Università, Torino, 2010, p. 6. 12 Fersen also explains how fashion has an artistic nature, always leaning on Beaudelaire’s concepts, when its models represent the exemplary and stylised essence of a particular taste and psychology. 13 Id., my emphasis. 14 Bignami, pp. 4-6; M. Canonero’s interview on http://www.archiviokubrick.it/testimonianze/persone/canonero.html, cited by Davanzo Poli, p. 95, and interviews conducted by S. Jablon-Roberts and E. Sanders, “The Underlying Definition of Historical Accuracy, Dress, vol. 45, n. 2, 2019, pp. 107-125, DOI: 10.1080/03612112.2018.1537647, p. 123. 14 underlies this thesis, and it is with these premises that I am going to approach this mediation in the analysis.15 Alongside Fersen’s more philosophical view on historical costumes, a more concrete outlook at costume by another practitioner contributes to form its definition for this study. Costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis is a well-established figure in both the professional field (she designed for iconic movies such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Blues Brothers) and the educational one (she is the founding director of the David C. Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design at UCLA and an advocate of her sector calling for full recognition of the role of costume designer); she wrote her PhD dissertation and many volumes on costume design eagerly explaining her profession and what costumes are and are not.16 Her works are a valuable source for researchers as an academic study can thus benefit from the perspective of an experienced practitioner. In fact, she is firmly critical towards scholars who attribute sense to costumes solely depending on their discipline and personal connotations, completely disregarding the perspectives of those who designed and imbued costumes with meaning in the first place.17 She vindicates a focus on costumes that does not decontextualize them from the story they serve and from the creative background from which they emerged, which is determined most importantly by the director’s stylistic choices.18 It is the purpose of this study to try to analyse costumes respecting and recognizing the operations of the costume designer, which are also one of the focuses of the thesis, and without disregarding the original intentions of the film. According to Nadoolman Landis, costumes are “tools” to paint the “portrait” of characters whose “voice” already exists on the script.19 Their purpose is two-fold: to support the narrative and to balance the frame through colour, silhouette and texture.20 They serve the story by clearly “reveal[ing]” the characters to the audience; they show a “heightened reality” since they are designed in a “magnified theatrical scale” - as Fersen also explained when saying that they surpass daily life - and carefully enhanced by the choice of fabrics and cuts considering that they will be distorted and flattened by the two-dimensional array.21 Nonetheless, Nadoolman Landis also states that successful costumes should be “invisible”, “unnoticed” and “accepted…as truthful” by the audience (this applies

15 The term ‘crystallization’ is not uncommon in the field of cinema. Gilles Deleuze uses the “crystal-image” based on Bergson’s philosophy about time in his Cinema II: Time-Image [1985], Bloomsbury Academic, London & New York, 2013, pp. 82-86. 16 D. Nadoolman Landis, “Scene and Not Heard: The Role of Costume in the Cinematic Storytelling Process”, PhD diss., The Royal College of Art, 2003; 50 designers/50 Costumes: From Concept to Character, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, 2004; Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume Design, 2007; Hollywood Sketchbook: A Century of Costume Illustration, 2012; Hollywood Costume, 2012, the catalogue of the Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition, which she curated and opened in 2012. 17 Nadoolman Landis, “Scene and Not Heard”, pp. 28-29 and 33-34. 18 Ibid. 19 Nadoolman Landis, “Scene and Not Heard”, p. 199. 20 Nadoolman Landis, “Scene and Not Heard”, p. 2 and “Costume Design is Story-telling” in 50 Designers/50 Costumes. 21 Id., “Scene and Not Heard”, p. 3 and “Fashion vs. Costume” in 50 Designers/50 Costumes. 15 especially for contemporary movies but it concerns period ones too) which means that they should blend in with the character and the setting and not look incongruous or distracting.22 The first goal is that costume should be credible, believable for the “dramatic situation” in which the character is inserted that involves period as well.23 Costumes materialize “the psychological, social, emotional” state of characters and, in order to do this, designers must study them in depth and research extensively in a phase of “serious, painstaking documentation”.24 This is an important point of divergence from fashion designers who design for glamour without knowing the most intimate aspects of those wearing their creations and how they will use them, while costumes are originally designed to appear in a most specific way.25 They should not be glamourous or actually be comfortable or expensive, they only “have to look” as such, if necessary for the script.26 Costumes enable a “recognition” of characters at a “pre-verbal state” and thus function also as a “visual shorthand”.27 Every detail is studied and the smaller sartorial element that might appear in a close-up is meaningful; the costume designer co-works with other departments to “fill” the frame as a painter.28 In fact, all the aspects of the costumes – colour, silhouette and texture – apart from helping actors in their commitment to character, “provide balance and symmetry to the frame” and convey the mood of the scene.29 No matter in what period the film is set and to which genre it belongs, a dense research process is the basis for attaining a conceptualization of the costumes: it entails “astute observation, analysis and imagination” in dealing with the information given by the script and the film director and in drawing any useful reference from other visual arts and literature, nature and memories, other movies and so on.30 Limited time for research and variable resources often lead costume designers to find compromises and “unconventional solutions” to meet the goals and demands set out by the director and the contextual conditions.31 Nadoolman Landis does not focus specifically and extensively on historical costumes but effectively explains her stance towards this topic in few instances and addresses it when analysing her colleague’s Milena Canonero’s work in Tucker (1988), a film by Francis Ford Coppola set in the 1940s. In her literature review, she reproachfully presents a variety of ‘types’ of books on costume (the glossy picture books, the studies of culture historians, the biographies of costume designers and some periodicals). She addressed the topic in her critique of one of these, Maeder’s Hollywood and

22 Nadoolman Landis, “Scene and Noth Heard”, pp. 23 and 34, and “Period vs. Modern: What defines costume design?” in 50 Designers/50 Costumes. 23 Id., Scene and Not Heard”, pp. 199-200. 24 Id., “Scene and Not Heard”, pp. 22 and 46: and “Introduction” in 50 designers/50 Costumes. 25 Id., “Scene and Not Heard”, p. 23-24, quoting Hollywood costume designer Adrian. 26 Id., “Fashion vs. Costume” in 50 Designers/50 Costumes. 27 Id., “Costume Design is Story-telling” in 50 Designers/50 Costumes. 28 Id., “Scene and Not Heard”, p. 2 and “Painting the frame” in 50 Designers/50 Costumes. 29 Id., “Scene and Not Heard”, p. 2. 30 Id., “The research process” in 50 Designers/50 Costumes. 31 Ibid. 16

History: Costume Design in Film (1987), which presents a “theoretical notion of historical realism” ignoring the overarching director’s vision and how designers comply with it in the costumes.32 She does agree with Maeder’s definition of historical costume as “more than a work of art” helping the film to “tell its story, enhance the character, and contribute to the setting”.33 Nevertheless, she remarks the fact that he does not apply it to the practical level and believes that the costume designer “mixes and matches the past and the present” because unable to “take a distance from contemporary styles”.34 She explains that historical accuracy - she actually uses the term “authenticity” – can be moderated or exaggerated to reach the desired effect.35 The narrative purpose rules over it and determines its extent. She states that “accuracy for the sake of accuracy does not necessarily make for good storytelling, or good costume design” as it could be too “intrusive” or too “bland” and undermine the narrative and the “most persuasive” costume is “not necessarily the most realistic one”.36 Thus, the costume designer, guided by the director’s style and preferences, accordingly mediates through creativity the historical research conducted in the documentation phase. Nadoolman Landis affirms that for the audience it is easier to feel costumes “aren’t right” when they are modern compared to when they are historical as they “have no idea”.37 This means that inaccuracies are less noticed because spectators have no experience or familiarity of the past that puts them in the position of judging a garment in, say, socio-economic terms. Studying Canonero’s process for the historical film Tucker, Nadoolman Landis reports that studying the period is not sufficient, one should avoid academicism by expanding research beyond more obvious sources from that time.38 It emerges that only when the costume designer digged in the research and understood the period, then it is possible to “be unfaithful, with confidence”, to “break the rules” and to move forward; even though the process of gathering and cataloguing of material is similar to that of an academic research.39 A more recent and focused study on historical accuracy and the process of designing historical costumes is that by Broadway costume designer Sarah Jablon Roberts. She is another practitioner who embarked in an academic career earning a PhD, specializing exactly on this topic. Few important articles derived from her dissertation, here I will mostly draw inspiration from “The Underlying Definition of Historical Accuracy”, published in 2019.40 As it can be guessed by the title, the article

32 Nadolman Landis, “Scene and Not Heard”, p. 27. 33 Id, p. 52n74, quoting Maeder, Hollywood and History: Costume Design in Film, Thames and Hudson, London, 1987, p. 12. 34 Id., pp. 27, 50n50 quoting Maeder, p. 9. 35 Id., p. 27. 36 Ibid. 37 Id., p. 218. 38 Id., p. 192-193n. 39 Id., pp. 210-211. 40 S. Jablon-Roberts, E. Sanders, “The Underlying Definition of Historical Accuracy”, Dress, vol. 45, n. 2, 2019, pp. 107- 125, DOI: 10.1080/03612112.2018.1537647. 17 proposes a definition of historical accuracy and is a very rare example of metacritical attention dedicated to historical accuracy in the specific, and to costumes in general. This thesis adopts the definition proposed for theatrical costumes. The authors do focus on stage costume design, but invite researchers to explore also in other “frames of reference”.41 The defined concept could be considered as the ideal and most complete level of historical accuracy that a costume can reach: a “historically accurate costume is one in which historically accurate articles made using historically accurate materials and processes are assembled on or around a historically accurate body”.42 It is based on the classification of appearance made by fibre artist and Professor Emeritus of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design, Robert Hillstead.43 He divides appearance into several units. Two main parts – Dress and Body – are constituted by sub-units. Dress is divided into Clothing and Adornment, or accessories like hats, shoes and jewels, which comprise Materials, Processes and Techniques of construction.44 Body instead comprehends Body Forms, that is Size and Shape, Body Surfaces, such as Skin and Hair Colour and Texture, and Body Motions.45 With its definition, the article establishes that all these factors must be truthful to the given era to constitute a fully historically accurate costume. Interviews to other Broadway costume designers revealed that they would unconsciously express similar ways of categorization in the description of their work.46 The articles felt it necessary to isolate a definition because the extant literature and the results of the interviews showed ambivalent attitudes towards historical accuracy but nobody pinned it down with exact characteristics.47 Most interviewees agree on the impossibility of achieving accuracy and some believe that “the purpose of costume design is not to reproduce historical artefacts but to present the production’s narrative”.48 Some would strive to achieve it but only as an ideal because a 100% accurate costume does not exist and also because not all productions have the resources and the time for this attempt.49 While others would consider accuracy as “limiting” or, in Canonero’s words, “pedantry…mediocre”.50 Nonetheless, I would argue that neither historical pedantry is clearly defined and I cannot fully understand what is meant by this. In fact, extremely accurate designers, such as Piero Tosi or former

41 Id., “The Underlying Definition of Historical Accuracy”, p. 125. 42 Id., p. 123. 43 “The Robert Hillestead Textiles Gallery”, College of Education and Human Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, https://cehs.unl.edu/textilegallery/, accessed on 23/04/2020. 44 Id., p. 114. Quoting Robert Hillstead, “Taxonomy for Identifying the Various Units Involved in the Structure of Appearance” in “The Underlying Structure of Appearance”, Dress, vol. 6, n. 1, 1980, p. 118. 45 Jablon-Roberts, Sanders, “The Underlying Definition of Historical Accuracy”, p. 114. 46 Id., p. 123. “A historically accurate costume is one in which historically accurate articles made using historically accurate materials and processes are assembled on or around a historically accurate body”. 47 Id., p. 112. 48 Id., p. 123. 49 Id., pp. 123-124. 50 Ibid., and Nadoolman Landis, “Scene and Not Heard”, p. 198. 18

Director of Theatre Design at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Jenny Tiramani mentioned in the article, are not scorned but praised by their colleagues and held as “the goddess”, “the master” or “the best”.51 Because of this ambivalence, I would consider this definition as positioned at one end of a continuum, similarly to how translator consider equivalence/similarity to the text in a translation, as it will be discussed in the next section.52

Literature and Adaptation: Genette’s hypertextuality and intersemiotic translation One notion important for this study is Gérard Genette’s hypertextuality. It was coined in the context of his book Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982) which studies the various kinds of relations that there can be between different literary texts.53 According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, palimpsests are “manuscripts in which the original text has been scraped or washed away, in order that another text may be inscribed in its place” and because “the removal of the original writing was seldom complete, valuable texts […] have been recovered” thanks to later examination of the documents.54 Considering the reflections by Fersen presented in the previous section and building on Genette’s metaphor between hypertextuality and palimpsests, I will consider history of fashion and period costume in a ‘palimpsestuous’ relation which I will justify after presenting Genette’s literary degrees. The umbrella term transtextuality, covers five categories which can overlap and are considered aspects one text can have (intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, hypertextuality, architextuality).55 Genette focuses on the fourth type, hypertextuality, which defines the derivation of a text B, called hypertext, from a text A, called hypotext; this derivation entails a process of transformation which can be more or less evident and of varied nature.56 To explain this relation, Genette uses the example of Homer’s Odyssey being the hypotext of both Virgil’s Aeneid and Joyce’s Ulysses. These two hypertexts are the result of two different kinds of transformation:

51 Jablon-Roberrts, Sanders, p. 118, and M. Canonero quoted in A. Finos, “Milena Canonero, Orso d'oro: "Sono onorata ma qui ci dovrebbe essere Piero Tosi" (Milena Canonero, Golden Bear: “I’m honoured but here there should be Piero Tosi), La Repubblica, 16/02/2017, https://www.repubblica.it/spettacoli/cinema/2017/02/16/news/milena_canonero_orso_d_oro-158476680/, accessed on 22/04/2020. 52 N. Dusi, “2. Equivalenza e teorie della traduzione” (Equivalence and theorie on translation) in Cinema come traduzione (Cinema as Translation), UTET, Torino, 2003, p. 34. 53 G. Genette, Palimpsests: Literature In the Second Degree, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1997, E-book, https://hdl-handle-net.ezp.sub.su.se/2027/heb.09358. 54 F. G. Kenyon, and N. Wilson, "palimpsest", Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2015, https://oxfordre.com/classics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.001.0001/acrefore-9780199381135-e-4668, accessed 07/03/2020, 55 Genette orders them according to their degree of “abstraction, implication and comprehensiveness”, Palimpsests, p. 1. Intertextuality is the relation of co-presence of the two texts (i.e. quotes, allusions, plagiarism); Paratextuality is the relation between a main text and another framing it (i.e. title, headings, footnotes, preface); Metatextuality happens when a text comments on another (i.e. literary criticism); Architextuality is the relation between a text and many other texts in terms of the reader’s expectations regarding discourses, themes, etc., thus the relation of a text to a certain genre. 56 Id., p. 5. 19

• the direct transformation of the hypotext can occur through a “simple and mechanical gesture” affecting “any one of its components”, for example moving the same action of the hypotext to a different setting, like Joyce’s Ulysses, or eliminating, substituting or adding a letter in a sentence.57 • imitation is an “indirect and more complex” transformative practice because it necessitates a “mastery of that specific quality which one has chosen to imitate”, that is selecting certain characteristics of the hypotext and being “capable of generating an indefinite number of mimetic performances” applying them.58 In this case, there is a mediation between the two texts where the hypertext uses the same style or manner of the hypotext to express a new idea.59 Genette uses the example of Virgil adopting the same epic style and model as Homer’s for narrating a different content, Aeneas’ story instead of Ulysses’.60

Despite this differentiation, Genette does not mean to imply that one work of fiction is more complex than the other, but simply that they use and adapt different features. Apart from the way the transformation is achieved, Genette finds that also the “function” or the “mood” of the text bears some relevance for his new taxonomy, thus distinguishes between satirical, ludic and serious hypertextualities.61 Genette creates a chart that shows all the possible combinations of mood/function and types of transformation (see the APPENDIX). The combinations relevant for this thesis are:

• transpositions, or the texts that are produced through direct transformation and have a serious function. It is an extensive term which subsumes numerous practices affecting formal and thematic aspects of the hypotext.62 Within this thesis, the term is used for the operation that the film as a whole executes and this involves the transposition of both literary texts and historical reality. • forgeries, the texts produced through imitation with a serious mood. They are a “perfect imitation” which cannot be “distinguished from its model” and whose author’s “goal is to disappear”. The author’s desire to remain hidden is an element in common to costume designers and translators as already mentioned and as it will emerge also in the following paragraph on translation and adaptation.63

57 Genette, pp. 5-7. 58 Id., p. 6, my emphasis. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Id., pp. 27-28. 62 Id., pp. 212-214. 63 Id., p. 161. 20

• pastiches are produced through imitation and have a ludic function.64 This term could define both costumes and films as a whole playfully imitating and mixing aesthetics and cultural elements from different time periods and parts of the world.

Genette’s categorization in no ways must be taken as unconnectedly fixing these categories and practices which are, in reality, blurred and can be mixed.65 These hypertextual relations are intrinsic to a work of fiction but are not necessarily tied to literature: they can be found in other media and contexts as well.66 I would consider Senso as a transposition, carrying out various practices enlisted by Genette which I mention, here in the Introduction, in the footnotes, but will touch upon more in depth in the analytical chapters.67 Making these notions relevant for the main subject of this thesis, I identify the costumes found within the audio-visual transformative context as performing Genette’s imitation. In fact, costume designers, through the phase of “documentation” on a certain historical fashion, come to master, to be competent in the sartorial norms and behaviours of a given time which enables them to mediate the ‘hypodress’ and produce something new.68 The result might realistically adopt the same style as their models’ and be confounded with an authentic dress, as in the case of forgery, or stray from historical accuracy playing around with formal elements, with a pastiche. Thus, I can think of a palimpsestuous relation between history of fashion and costume: with its possible positive and negative effects on fashion history, historical costume can be for viewers its palimpsest, being the more recent version ‘grafted’ on screen - on a filmic document that will last through time - as a comment and reinterpretation of a past reality which is recreated. As with ancient manuscripts being erased and recovered because of and thanks to a more recent text, historical fashion might be obfuscated by possible inaccuracies or the inevitable modern perspective costume designers have, but it might also be disseminated, be made visible to more people and thus not lost. In hypertextual terms, any text can be considered as more or less imitating and transforming a previous one and if this affects literature and cinema, it can affect also costume.69 Indeed, costume designer do take inspiration from other designer and other movies for their creations.70 This means that what the viewer sees on the screen is already englobing a considerable corpus of images. For the viewer, noticing or not, this means a continuous summing up to a visual memory of history of fashion.

64 Genette, p. 25. 65 Id., p. 28. 66 Id., p. 5. He even uses the same paradigm for hyperfilm/hypofilm when dealing with the example of Play it again, Sam. 67 Among transposition practices Genettes lists: condensation, extension, expansion, dramatization and narrativization, diegetic and pragmatic transportation, transmotivation, revaluation of characters. 68 Davanzo Poli, “Les costumes de Barry Lyndon”, p. 101, and D. Nadoolman Landis and J. Kurland (eds.), 50 costumes, 50 designers: concept to character, Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, Beverly Hills, 2004. 69 G. Prince,” Foreword” to Palimpsests, p. ix. 70 Nadoolman Lanids, “The research process” in 50 Designers/50 Costumes. 21

Genette only touches upon the transfer of a story from its original literary medium to the audio-visual one. It is necessary to gain insights from studies specifically focused on adaptation approaching it with a semiotic perspective, that is how the new text reproduces the meaning of the source text. Historical films and screen adaptations treat their sources in a similar way. For the former, the source is historical reality, and for the latter the original fictional texts. Senso can be considered as falling in both categories. There are indeed certain analogies between the two which go beyond the formal elements of the mise-en-scène. An article published recently on the academic journal Adaptation by Jeremy Strong, professor of Literature and Film, highlights the “many ways in which they abut, overlap, and share preoccupations” and discourses.71 These encompass their similar relation to previous works, terminology and labels assigned to them, notions of accuracy and fidelity, dichotomy “spirit-vs.-letter” in the kind of interpretation film-makers can do of the story/history, their re-visioning of history.72 Therefore, theories from both disciplines of adaptation studies and history are mutually relevant. The point of departure for many studies on adaptation is Roman Jakobson’s division of translation into three categories: intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic.73 It is the third type which is mostly relevant to the subject of this thesis. Intersemiotic translation means the transferral and interpretation of meaning from a medium of origin to a medium of destination which rely on different semiotic systems, on different modes of expression.74 Therefore, book-to-film or film-to- book adaptations are a kind of intersemiotic translation. In this case, it is Visconti’s Senso adapting Boito’s homonymous novella, because a verbal language is transmuted into a visual one and vice versa; but it can comprehend any kind of transposition between different media, for instance Eco mentions Disney’s Fantasia transmuting music into animation.75 This tripartition has been the basis for many semioticians who studied these forms of translation. This study is framed by reflections on this intersemiotic translation expressed in Umberto Eco’s Dire quasi la stessa cosa (Saying almost the same thing) and Nicola Dusi’s Cinema come traduzione (Cinema as translation). In his chapter, Umberto Eco explains that two different semiotic systems can never express the exact same thing, they will both convey something more and something less than the other.76 Therefore, when carrying out an intersemiotic translation, one will need to make explicit those aspects

71 J. Strong, “Straight to the Source? Where Adaptations, Artworks, Historical Films, and Novels Connect”, Adaptation, vol. 12, no. 2, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019, p. 166, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apz020. 72 Id., pp. 165-184. 73 R. Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, in R. A. Brower (ed. by), On Translation, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1959, p. 233. 74 N. Dusi, Il cinema come traduzione (Cinema as Translation), UTET, Torino, 2003. p. 3-4. 75 U. Eco, “Quando cambia la materia” (When matter changes) in Dire quasi la stessa cosa: esperienze di traduzione (Saying almost the same thing: experiences of translation), Bompiani, Milano, 2012. Digital edition with no page numbers. 76 Eco, “Quando cambia la materia”. 22 left undetermined in the source text.77 In this act of explicitation, meaning is added and “connotations” overlooked by the original author are made “relevant” by the interpretive and subjective reading of the translators, who, in our case, are the film-makers.78 Most significantly, to explain this point, Eco uses an example – over many others that he could have come up with – that hints at the centrality of costume in this specific discourse. He imagines the scene of a hypothetical historical novel set during the French Revolution, where two friends from different factions – royalist and jacobin – are conducted to the guillotine with impassive countenances, and it is left ambiguous, whether on purpose or not, if thus they are honouring or disavowing their past.79 When transposing the scene on screen, the stoicism of the characters can be suggested by the actors’ performances, but the costumes can hardly show such indeterminacy; if the source text is “reticent” about the clothing, the film cannot and it inevitably conveys a message which was not there originally because actors must appear in some way, be it more or less dressed.80 Because of their strong symbolic power, costumes will necessarily show the attitude of the two condemned men: if these are dressed in the same way, this will highlight their shared destiny despite their opposite ideologies, while if the royalist wears breeches, waistcoat and coat in the fashion of pre-revolutionary years and the jacobin much simpler clothes, the choice will stress their faithfulness to their previous political identity.81 Costume, then, is often one of the aspects that the adaptors of the source text must determine, unless in the original text the author uses the ekphrasis, a “verbal device which wants to evoke in the reader’s mind a vision, as precise as possible”.82 This leaves no freedom of imagination to the spectator who does not decide the ‘look’ of the story.83 Therefore, in the passage between two different media, the interpretation of the original text is mediated for the recipient of the new text; for the interpreters, this entails always taking a critical standpoint, that Eco explains as being not always due to wanted and conscious interpretive decisions.84 For him, the explicitness and the manifestation of the adaptors’ interpretation in the intersemiotic translation – due to the demands of its visual representation – is what distinguishes it from the interlinguistic one. In fact, the critical approach of the interlinguistic translators must remain implicit and hidden (or be presented in the footnotes at most), while the interpretation of the intersemiotic translators is preeminent and constitutes the gist of the operation.85 Nonetheless, for this matter, this thesis proposes to consider costume designers’ mediation closer to interlinguistic translators’. This is because, as mentioned before when quoting

77 Eco, “Quando cambia la materia”. 78 Ibid. 79 Eco, “Quando la materia cambia”. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Id., “Far vedere” (To make see) in Dire quasi la stessa cosa. 83 Ibid. 84 Eco, “Quando cambia la materia”. 85 Ibid. 23

Deborah Landis, costumes should be invisible, meaning that it should seamlessly blend in with the actors’ performance and surroundings. Successful costumes are those which become one thing with the character and do not make the designer’s mediation and hand noticeable. This is similar to the way translators try to transparently convey the original author’s artistry and not to show theirs, even with inevitable and necessary changes for the comprehension in the target language and culture. Hence, to sum up, the adaptation as a whole clearly shows its interpretative operation on the source text through the resolution of indeterminacies involving costumes as well. Still, these are designed with the consideration that during the vision they should not give the impression of having being critically and creatively mediated a priori, but they are a product of the many fictional contexts that frame their use: historical, social, psychological. When producing and analysing a translation, the texts at the two ends of the process are divided into different textual “levels”.86 Levels indicate the various elements of the content and of the expression - more or less analogous to the relation signifier/signified - and sometimes it is difficult to distinguish them in texts with aesthetic purposes, such as poems, films and so on.87 These can be narrative, thematic, discursive, figurative, rhythmic, and concerning any other aspect that characterises a text in its creation and articulation of meaning, for example the text can present a series of dominant and homogenous isotopies, which could be described as recurrent or guiding semantic fields of the story.88 It could be said that the mise-en-scène is the expression of the film conveying through these different levels the parallel elements of the content of the story and the director’s interpretation. Therefore, levels present in the source text, especially those of the expression, cannot be “mapped one by one” onto a different medium which uses a different mode of conveying its meaning.89 Consequently, they cannot be all equivalent in an absolute sense of the word, as in a relation of sameness, but in a “flexible” sense that is closer to concepts of similarity and sharing of certain qualities (meaning itself, value, efficacy) having almost the same effect of those in the source text.90 Being equivalence flexible, it can be helpful to think of it as a continuum at whose ends there are the extremes of sameness and absence of relation between the texts.91 Moreover, it is flexible also because subject to the different stylistic, historical and cultural contexts in which source and destination texts are produced.92

86 Eco, “Quando la materia cambia”. 87 Ibid. 88 Id., “Dal sistema al testo” (From the system to the text). 89 Id., “Quando la materia cambia”. 90 Dusi, pp. 32-39. 91 Dusi, p. 34. 92 Dusi, p. 44. 24

A negotiation must occur isolating certain levels and sacrificing others considered by the film- makers less important or not easily representable in the source text.93 This will be determined also by factors external to the limited action of the adaptation, so levels considered significant by Visconti in the 1950s would be necessarily different from those in an adaptation of Senso made in the 2020s. This, again, means to “impose” a personal interpretation and to convey a different meaning.94 For instance, Visconti, as it will be explained in the next chapter, brought forward a political theme which was only vaguely hinted in the background of the original story. These considerations apply to my analysis of costumes as well, which will focus on certain elements/levels of costume as form of the filmic expression considered particularly communicative in relation to the story and history of fashion. By selecting certain sartorial elements which materialize the thematic levels of the story, I will also discuss important themes/phenomena for history of fashion conveyed by the costumes, such as standardization and Orientalism.

Historiophoty: history on film It is not possible to understand the role of historical accuracy of costume without considering also the relation between history and cinema because, it goes without saying, period costumes are embedded in historical films, whether they portray fictional characters or reality. They are one of the many tools that the filmic language uses to recount a story set in the past. The historian Robert Rosenstone has extensively focused on the topic of filmic representation of history and actively contributed to few productions, such as Reds (1981). In 1988, in the article “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film" appeared in American Historical Review, he raised the question of whether historical films can be as truthful as historiography.95 In the same issue of the journal, the postmodern historian Hayden White addressed Rosenstone’s question continuing the discussion, and in that occasion he coined the fortunate term historiophoty.96 White has controversially approached history with the perspective of narrative rhetoric, that is considering history as being constructed and made meaningful by language in a way similar to the production of fiction and poetry.97 Information about the past is turned into facts by an arbitrary selection of concepts, ideologies, arguments, literary genres and tropes considered appropriate by the

93 Eco, “Quando la materia cambia”. 94 Ibid. 95 Robert Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film", The American Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 5, 1988, pp. 1173-185. 96 Hayden White, “Historiography and Historiophoty”, The American Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 5, 1988, pp. 1193- 1199. 97"Hayden White", in Oxford Bibliographies Online in Literary and Critical Theory, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0084.xml, accessed on 15/04/2020. 25 historian who thus produces – rather than finds – a historical narrative.98 This radical stance of discursive construction was not welcomed by several historians. Indeed, it highlighted the interpretive nature of their arguments drawing them closer to fiction rather than to reality and was problematic with very sensitive topics like the Holocaust as it was considered as benefitting its deniers.99 Therefore, his ideas are considered to have influenced more substantially the field of literary criticism than that of historiography.100 Rosenstone, nonetheless, frequently hints at a vision of history influenced by White and other postmodern historians’ views. In this section, I will start by presenting White’s contribution and then I will continue with Rosenstone’s deeper exploration of this specific topic to which he dedicated many works.101 White’s article was seminal for starting to build up my theoretical framework as, while reading it, I first had the intuition of approaching this topic with the perspectives of translation and adaptation. In “Historiography and Historiophoty”, White coins this term, historiophoty, which means “the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse”, and compares it with verbal and written historiography.102 Through this comparison, he reinforces Rosenstone’s stance against the historical purists who consider the filmic narrative severely undermining any “analytical interests” the film-makers might have towards history.103 It is assumed that because of the story’s innate characteristic of fictionality, it is impossible to significantly contribute to the historical discourse.104 For White, instead, the new concept of historiophoty should be considered as a “supplement” to historiography rather than its “complement”.105 By this, he means that it should not be considered merely as an “illustration” of written arguments, but an independent discourse not inferior to historiography because capable of saying something further and different.106 First of all, because images can convey an high amount of information which verbal language cannot provide; visual evidence can constitute a foundation for a more accurate historical reproduction than one based on verbal accounts only.107 Indeed, we have a clearer picture of a certain period when we also have visual documentation for it, especially in the form of photographs and

98 R. Parkes, “The Practical Legacy of Hayden White”, Public History Weekly The International Blogjournal, May 10, 2018 https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/6-2018-17/the-practical-legacy-of-hayden-white/, accessed on 15/04/2020. 99 "Hayden White", in Oxford Bibliographies Online. 100 N. Genzlinger, “Hayden White, Who Explored How History Is Made, Dies at 89”, The New York Times, March 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/obituaries/hayden-white-who-explored-how-history-is-made-dies-at- 89.html, accessed 11/03/20. 101 R. Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, Pearson, London and New York, 2006; Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History, Harvard, Cambridge, 1995; R. Rosenstone and C. Parvulescu (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Historical Film, Blackwells-Willey, Oxford, 2013. 102 White, “Historiography and Historiophoty”, p. 1193. 103 White, p. 1195. 104 Ibid. 105 Id., pp. 1193-1194. 106 Ibid. 107 Id., p. 1194 26 films.108 Secondly, because also written history itself is not devoid of the feature of “fictionality”.109 Any historical account, including historiography, is the product of a construction which can involve many conventions more or less processing facts and evidence – like condensation, displacement, symbolization, qualification.110 For instance, White cites among others the convention of “typification” when presenting causes and effects of historical events, that is taking as referent of the representation “a type of event” rather than a distinct one.111 This is because “representational literalness” – the coincidence of the representation and the represented subject - is impossible to achieve unlike the “likelihood” of reported types of events suiting certain times, places and contextual conditions.112 Therefore, in this light, accuracy of detail is not lost in translation between historiography and historiophoty as more traditional historians would argue.113 The differences between the two lie in the kind of medium, thus in the different languages involved, and in the different nature of their claims of concreteness for the images created; these determine the “discursive function” of events accounted within the historical narrative and the criteria for assessing their validity.114 For my study, historiophoty is significant since the images forming the filmic discourse are composed by costumes too. Thus, I consider the arguments White advances for historiophoty apt to invest costumes. Consequently, this would establish their meaningful historical significance and validate their serious consideration in the matter of what they can express about fashion and dress history.

White only touched upon the topic of history on screen, unlike Rosenstone who dedicated several works on the question of how films convey historical meaning and even collaborated to some productions as a historical consultant. With his unique insights, he contributed to pave the way of historical studies on films in a non-prejudiced way, that is recognizing that these have a great impact on how we relate to the past and on what we learn about it, on our historical consciousness, especially because the majority of people encounter history on screen rather than on page.115 Throughout History on Film/Film on History, one of his seminal books, he proves the importance and the potential of historical films in commenting, influencing and reconfiguring “traditional historical discourse” on a past event or period despite their fictionality.116 An emblematic example he recurrently uses is Oliver

108 Ibid. 109 Id., p. 1195. 110 Id., p. 1194. 111 White, p. 1197, his emphasis. 112 White, p. 1198. 113 White, p. 1198. 114 Ibid. 115 Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, pp. 4 and 34. 116 Id., p. 9. 27

Stone’s controversial JFK (1991) which triggered heated discussion on the press about the assassination of President J. F. Kennedy and led to the anticipated public reopening of the related documents.117 Without aspiring to find and highlight such grave and momentous effects, this thesis nonetheless aims to make Rosenstone’s theories on historical films relevant for historical costumes as well, by exploring how they engage with history of fashion and dress. In his works, Rosenstone compares and contrasts written history and the moving image. He is aware that there are more people who watch a history film than read a history book, and that visual media are extremely powerful in shaping our view of the world.118 Therefore, he considers it “judicious” that historians should know how films actually “work to create a historical world” rather than scorn them as pure entertainment.119 He identifies a gap of knowledge which leaves out the history film’s “coordinates in the space time of our thoughts about the past”, its relation to traditional history.120 In order to fill the gap, Rosenstone believes that historians should become acquainted with “the rules of engagement of the dramatic feature film with the traces of the past” which are inevitably and necessarily different from the conventions of written history.121 Here lies an underlying concept to history and adaptation: in order to say more than the other, written and visual languages must say something different, meaning that one is more eloquent than the other in relation to different aspects of a story or a time period. There are a few points in common between the written and filmic discourses which challenge the concept of history in general and are influenced by post-modern historical views. There is no “single truth” in history and the most valued form of historical thinking itself, the written form, is not “solid and unproblematic” because it is an “ideological cultural product” subject to shifting conventions.122 Changes in fashion history themselves, for instance, were constantly re-evaluated and re-interpreted as new schools of thoughts succeeded each other.123 A crucial idea for Rosenstone is that historical truth is not based on the “verifiability of individual pieces of data” but on the “overall narrative” that connects together the data and makes meaning out of it, also taking into account previous knowledge and debate about the specific subject under study.124 This is what supports his argument that the moving image can produce historical meaning because the film-makers, in order to create their narrative of the past, carry out the same processes of recounting, explaining and

117 Rosenstone, p. 5. 118 Id., p. 14. 119 Ibid. 120 Id., p. 33. 121 Id., p. 34. 122 Id., pp. 32 and 149. 123 Veblen, Simmel, Bell, Laver and Cunnington, etcetera. 124 Id., p. 149 and “The History Film as a Mode of Historical Thought” in R. A. Rosenstone, C. Parvulescu (eds.), A Companion to the Historical Film, Wiley Blackwell, Chichester, 2013, p. 83. 28 interpreting on page, addressing similar questions and issues of written history.125 In this perspective, written history and historical film share a conceptual artificiality - as they are not “mirrors” but “constructions” of the past.126 Then, narrative is a “most common device” which combines a selection of traces left from the past, becoming relevant facts, and “story-telling”, be it in verbal or filmic language, which gives them an illusory but useful sense of “coherence”.127 In this way, for Rosenstone, both books and films “transcend the data and launch into a realm of moral argument and metaphor”, even though their aim is to “make the structure of interpretation appear to be (the same as) the structure of factuality”.128 This means that Rosenstone and the theorists he is inspired by see the past as “literal” while history – the thinking, writing and understanding of that past - as more or less “metaphoric” but at the same time invoking a sense of “authenticity” derived from their use of evidence.129 Another idea is that history can be considered as a “series of genres” because it can be approached in different ways, both in written and filmic forms, with each genre using different rules of engagement defining what past to express.130 For instance, in historiography there can be, among others, the branches of microhistory, biography or quantitative history, while in film Rosenstone identifies the mainstream drama, the innovative film and the documentary.131 The first type is the one that reaches the highest number of viewers thus the one that has the most influence.132 Senso fits this category as it presents the six elements he delineates: a 3-act structure with a moral message thus based on a “progressive view” of history; the protagonists are either notorious historical figures or characters inspired by people who have carried heroic or admirable deeds or who have deeply suffered; the film generally expresses a “unitary historical assertion”; watching the film involves an experience thanks to the personalization, dramatization and emotionalization of the past; it presents the “look of the past” with costumes, props etcetera; it represent history “as a process” maintaining all its aspects together.133 Nonetheless, the ‘challenging’ features of historical meaning-making highlighted by Rosenstone’s postmodern view are much more manifest in film than in historiography. This is because the nature of the visual medium determines other demands, practices and claims, that is other rules of engagement. Rosenstone describes history on screen as paradoxical: the on-screen historical world cannot be “taken literally” but it is created by such rich images and visual metaphors that hardly

125 Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, pp. 146 and 181, wondering about the meaning of an event, its causes, issues of ethnicity, revolution, war, gender relations, social change. 126 Id., p. 42. 127 Id., pp. 104 and 176. 128 Id., pp. 175 and 183. 129 Id., pp. 44 and 183. 130 Id., p. 43. 131 Id., pp. 16 and 43. A precursory example of the second category which, like the third, I will not cover, is Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). 132 Id., p. 55, and “The Historical Film as Real History”, Film-Historia, vol. 5, no.1, 1995, pp. 5-23. 133 Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, pp. 53-54. 29 any other medium can help people “see and think about” the past so intensely.134 Historical films cannot be taken literally because their use of evidence is much “looser” than in written history and for this reason Rosenstone states that they can never be “accurate in the same way books (claim to be)”.135 Time constraints, the dramatic structure of film and the “greediness of the camera” pose demands that can only be met by “invention”.136 In fact, for these reasons the film-makers need to remove, alter or add traces of the past unlike written history which must necessarily be based on verifiable data for artificially “evoking” the past on page.137 In terms of time limits and dramatic demands – the structure and emotional involvement - Rosenstone cites film acts that echo Genette’s transposition practices. Compression or condensation reduce different characters or moments - which a book could address each one individually – into one; alteration attributes to characters feelings or actions that fitted other figures or nobody at all; dialogue is important because in few lines one can understand the characters, the events and situations; the characters also are an invention, even if based on real historical figures, because often their gesturality and way of talking are “wholly unknown”.138 The other and crucial source of artificiality, which most specifically interests this study, derives from the need for precise details of the camera.139 The written form can focus only on what there is evidence for or generalize, but the image on screen must be complete in order to appear ‘real’.140 Therefore, the traces of the past must necessarily be invented in order to fill the image as historical research can hardly reach the required level of thoroughness.141 Rosenstone is against criticisms of historical films vowed to check their ‘mistakes’ in terms of accuracy, still he also states that in order to “promote historical truths” these invented traces should be “within the possibilities and probabilities of the given period”.142 At the visual level, the invention involves costume and all the other physical entities which are “part of the texture and the factuality of the world on film” that recreates that of a real past.143 Rosenstone does not singularly address costumes in his work but he does recognize it as an important element forming the look of the past and which “confines, emphasizes, and expresses the body at rest and in motion”.144 Nevertheless, according to Rosenstone this fabricated factuality, this specificity shown by the look of the film – a specific garment worn in a certain way, the location of a piece of furniture in a certain position, a statement pronounced with a

134 Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, p. 186. 135 Id., p. 42, my emphasis. 136 Id., p. 32. 137 Id., pp. 43-44. 138 Id., p. 44. 139 Id., p. 182. 140 Id., pp. 18 and 182. 141 Id., p. 182. 142 Id., p. 52, my emphasis 143 Id., p. 18. 144 Id., pp. 18 and 53. Furniture, tools, locations of people, gestures etcetera. 30 certain intonation – works in the same way of generalization.145 In fact, these details – no matter how accurate – are not “literal” like a real piece of evidence but are a “symbol of a larger meaning”.146 In other words, these details symbolize how the larger reality of the world could have easily looked in a given period in time considering aspects of contemporary culture, social life, aesthetics, technology and so on. For Rosenstone, then, an important contribution of historical films is exactly their highly “suggestive, symbolic” language which creates “visual metaphors” of the complexities of the past helping viewers to understand it as well as ongoing discourses about it.147 Indeed, one of the six mainstream drama practices mentioned above is that of synthetizing audio-visually all aspects of history (economy, politics, gender, race, etc.) together in one scene, while the page generally splits them into different chapters and books albeit with more “informational content” and “theoretical insight”.148 Even so, for the visual heritage of the past, for its thinking and understanding, the comprehensive metaphorical truth of the “proximate and possible realities” that the historical film creates is more valuable than that of empirical raw facts which are hard to be made meaningful if taken individually.149 Rosenstone states that past details are “fascinating” but it is more important “how to think about them” which is shown by the filmic images.150 These visual metaphors are at the same time fabricated and “true” because in any case they stand for a “larger amount of data” and convey an “overall meaning of the past” which relates in different way to a pre-existent body of knowledge – debated issues, arguments, evidence, findings etcetera - around a certain figure, topic, era.151 It could be possible, then, to envisage a more specific relation within Rosenstone’s larger discourse concerning the film as a whole, that between the historical costume and the historical fashion. Ancillary to the work of film directors, the costume designer attempts to condense in the former the traces of the latter, which could encompass the use of particular fabrics and dyes, certain cuts and models, the social meaning of an elaborate embroidery, the way of holding a fan. These are documented in sources – like engravings, paintings, plates - and how fictional characters might look like if they lived in real life should be invented based on what is already known in order to provide viewers with meaningful and metaphorically truthful images. Looking at a glove or any other piece of historical clothing in a showcase might benefit from the metaphorical use of it in a film because this provides an immediate and vivid way of trying to understand it.

145 Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, p. 47. 146 Id., p. 48. 147 Id., pp. 34 and 186, and “The Historical Film as Real History”, Film-Historia, vol. 5, no.1, 1995, pp. 5-23. 148 Id., pp. 54 and 181. 149 Id., p. 54. 150 Id., p. 185. 151 Id., “The Historical Film as Real History, exact page numbers not given. 31

Rosenstone identifies three ways in which historical film can contribute to the larger historical discourse with their meaning; these are envisioning, contesting and revisioning history.152 The former is opposite to the academic “distancing” for the sake of the study.153 It is what makes people involved and interested because by materializing in front of the camera the characters through the actors and costumes, the setting with props and set design gives the feeling of “learning about the past by vicariously living through its moments”.154 It brings the viewers closer to a distant past and its complexities through their identification with the characters and their participation to the emotions and experiences of the story.155 For the historian, to contest history entails presenting a vision of the past that challenges traditional and generally accepted views of a certain topic or event; while to revision – which is relevant for the analysis of Marie Antoinette - means to present a familiar subject in an “unexpected” way which could involve different aesthetics from the traditional ones, or the mixing of genres and playing with the dramatic structure, anything that can bring about a rethinking of a subject.156 Rosenstone’s argument is built on the premise that the past cannot be really grasped, we can only “play with” it, and the historical film is the medium to approach it that can paradoxically remind us of this.157

152 Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, p. 133. 153 Ibid. 154 Id., p. 132, my emphasis 155 Id., p. 133. 156 Ibid. 157 Id., p. 186. 32

Chapter 2. ‘Magical’ realism: Piero Tosi’s approach and the adaptation of Senso “His absolute perfection in the creation of a costume created also a kind of magical dress for the performer. An actress dressed by him extraordinarily entered her character and its epoch”

FRANCA VALERI1

According to film historian and professor Ivo Blom, “reproduction of images, pastiche, parody and other forms of intermedial appropriation iconize and strengthen the image, granting it a new status”.2 Dress is a multisensory form of art and medium, but through cinematic reproduction its visual and aural aspects (only) are captured. Even if appropriated and reduced in its physical attributes by the nature of the filmic medium, the look and sound of historical dresses can be immortalized by costumes. Thus, historical clothing is visible not only in paintings and art historiography but on the screen too. It becomes iconic and recognizable by many. No matter how it is reproduced, how it is transformed, its intermedial passage contributes to perpetuate, to “strengthen” its existence and memory. Its reproduction, through adaptation and mediation, increases its circulation. In this passage, its status shifts from historical find or coeval artistic representation to historical recreation. Nonetheless, it should be considered also that, because of the general demand of narrative texts for the suspension of disbelief, costumes can be attributed with Entwistle’s qualities of being “lived” and “experienced” historical dresses.3 Therefore, even if they are a historical recreation – with the inevitable differences this adaptation entails – successful costumes must give the impression of being a “situated bodily practice”.4 Thus, for the duration of the movie, they adopt the status of historical evidence of the characters’ daily life, set in a given past. Then, as Rosenstone explains, one should recognize the metaphorical nature of the truth they express (see CHAPTER 1). Italian costume designer Piero Tosi (Sesto Fiorentino, 1927 – Rome, 2019) is the perfect example for showing how costumes can genuinely recreate history of fashion. The only costume designer ever receiving an Academy Honorary Award in 2013, he is considered a “magician capable of making resurrect history, bringing the past into the present”.5 Apart from being fundamental elements of seminal films for the history of cinema, his creations are significant for synthesising his

1 Actress Franca Valeri in L’abito e il volto - Incontro con Piero Tosi, CSC Productions, 2007, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y2Lr7EbqGA, accessed on 18/05/20. 2 I. Blom, “Introduction” in Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art, Sidestone Press, Leiden, 2017, p. 18. My emphasis. 3 J. Entwistle, “Chapter 2: Theorizing Fashion and Dress” in The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Social Theory, ProQuest, p. 79. 4 Id., p. 57. 5 Oscars, “Costume Designer Jeffrey Kurland honors Piero Tosi at the 2013 Governors Awards”, YouTube video, 17/01/2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvHBcnmubbg; and director Franco Zeffirelli quoted in the announcement of his death by ASC (Scenographers and Costume Designers Association) website, https://www.aesseci.org/component/k2/item/75-%C3%A8-venuto-a-mancare-il-grande-maestro-piero-tosi, last accessed 12/05/2020. 33

considerable body of knowledge on history of fashion and dress. This knowledge is based on painstaking effort in documentation, research, close observation of authentic pieces of clothing and innate artistic and aesthetic sensibility which can hardly be equalled. With regards to the first research question of this thesis, what I consider crucial is that his costumes allow this body of knowledge, experience and sensibility to be accessible to anyone watching one of his movies. It is a valuable service for the divulgation of history of fashion as it is possible to visually learn much about fashion and dress and form a visual memory and familiarity from his costumes. Researchers and scholars will certainly gain extensive insights and explicit contextual information by the reading of academic writings on fashion and dress. Though, these can benefit from and grow stronger thanks to the making of critical connections to and the materialization of Piero Tosi’s costumes. In fact, he can be considered quite authoritative in this field because of his virtually scientific approach. As this chapter will show, his attention to form, volume and structure really enables the viewer to perceive a historically “bodily practice” – which, Entwistle states, was omitted by many studies on fashion, especially in the structuralist approaches such as Barthes’.6 In fact, his creations advance a realistic and supported proposal of what was an everyday life bodily experience in a past era.

Piero Tosi and Sartoria Tirelli Piero Tosi was active from the late 1940s to 2013 and towards the end of his career, from the late 1980s, he dedicated mainly to teaching Costume at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC), the most important school of performing arts in Italy. He started working for the theatre and opera, but then specialised in film, at a time when Italy, and Rome most specifically, was witnessing a flourishing period for cinema and fashion industries. In the 50s and 60s, Rome became the main centre of cinematic culture in Italy, because of the presence of the Cinecittà studios and because of the economic inputs by many American productions attracted by the financial benefits of working in Europe deriving from the Marshall Plan.7 This phenomenon was termed Hollywood on Tiber and brought about a concentration of international stars, film-makers and businesses in the city. Important costume workshops thrived in this period, among which Sartoria Tirelli owned by an important collaborator of Tosi’s, “fashion archaeologist” Umberto Tirelli who opened his workshop in 1964.8 After finishing his solid education at the Fine Arts Academy in Florence, Tosi started his career for the theatre in Florence in 1947. In 1949, on a production of Shakespeare’s Troilus and

6 Entwistle, p. 57. 7 E. Paulicelli, “Fashion, Film and Rome” in E. Paulicelli, D. Stutesman, L. Wallenberg (eds.), Film, Fashion, and the 1960s, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2017, p. 99 and E. Paulicelli, “Rome, Fashion, Film” in Italian Style: Fashion & Film from Early Cinema to the Digital Age, Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2016, p. 163. 8Archivi della Moda del Novecento, “Umberto Tirelli 1928-1990”, http://www.moda.san.beniculturali.it/wordpress/?protagonisti=tirelli-umberto-2, accessed on 12/05/20. 34

Cressida staged in Florence’s Boboli Garden, he met the distinguished director Luchino Visconti (Milan, 1903 – Rome, 1976) who shortly after called him for his first collaboration for the cinema, Bellissima (1951) with Anna Magnani.9 Tosi moved to Rome and settled there starting a life-long professional affiliation with Visconti, working with him on 12 films.10 Visconti’s own vision of a cinema heavily influenced by the real, but also interacting with the artificial, significantly formed young Piero Tosi’s own approach to costume design, which will be addressed more in depth in the next section.11 Visconti’s desire to “catch the real” applied to both contemporary and historically set films and he paid much attention to costume, even personally intervening on set, also given his first experiences in cinema.12 In fact, he started as assistant costume designers in France during the 1930s for Jean Renoir’s films thanks to the intercession and collaboration of Coco Chanel.13 Indeed, Tosi’s first experience on the Neorealist film Bellissima also entailed walking in the streets, stopping passers-by whose clothes would have fitted the characters and asking to lend them for the movie.14 Nonetheless, Tosi went on to work also with other important Italian directors and international stars of 20th century such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vittorio De Sica, Sofia Loren, Maria Callas, Romi Schneider, Charlotte Rampling, Peter Sellers and Alain Delon among the others. His specialization became the historical film – he worked on 24 - for his talent to understand the culture and aesthetics of the past. The most re-known are those directed by Visconti (The Leopard, 1963, Death in Venice, 1971 and Ludwig, 1973) and by Pasolini (Medea with Maria Callas, 1969), and he also designed the make-up and hairstyles for Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969). For the conception and the making of his costumes, Tosi often relied on the support of the tailor Umberto Tirelli (Gualtieri, 1928 – Rome, 1990) who defined himself an “archaeologist of fashion”.15 In fact, apart from creating costumes for the cinema, theatre and opera, he was also a collector of authentic pieces at a time when the cultural value of historical fashion was not yet fully recognised.16 He bought them at flea markets, auctions or received them as donations from noble Italian families, actresses like Ingrid Bergman or from tailors and dress-makers’ holdings.17 He came

9 F. Zeffirelli in “L’abito e il volto” (The dress and the face-Meeting with Piero Tosi), CSC, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y2Lr7EbqGA. 10 D. Stutesman, “Hide in Plain Sight: An Interview with Piero Tosi”, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, vol. 47, no. 1, Wayne State University Press, Michigan, 2006, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/frm.2006.0009, p. 114. 11 Id., pp. 107 and 114. 12 Id., p. 114. 13Chanel News, “Chanel e gli artisti Visconti” (Chanel and the artists: Visconti), 03/12/15, https://www.chanel.com/it_IT/moda/news/2015/12/visconti-and-chanel.html, accessed on 02/06/20. 14 Stutesman, p. 114. 15 Archivi della Moda del Novecento, http://www.moda.san.beniculturali.it/wordpress/?protagonisti=tirelli-umberto-2. 16 K. Aschengreen Piacenti, “La donazione Tirelli e la Galleria del Costume” in U. Tirelli, M.C. Poma (eds.), Donazione Tirelli: La vita nel costume, il costume nella vita (Tirelli Donation: Life in Costume, Costume in Life), Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano, 1986, pp. 9-10. 17 S. Gnoli, “Il collezionismo di moda di Umberto Tirelli” in P. Colaiacomo (ed. by), Fatto in Italia: la cultura del made in Italy (1960-2000) (Made in Italy: the culture of the made-in-Italy 1960-200), Meltemi, Rome, 2006, pp. 128-129. 35

to possession of precious Worth dresses once owned and worn by the royal house of Savoy and aristocracy which the tailor Gazzoni had bought from them with the intention of simplify them making them more accessible to the bourgeoisie.18 His passion for authentics was an invaluable contribution for both cinema and the legacy of history of fashion. These would be used as documentation and models for the conceptualisation and construction of faithful costumes reproducing the exact historical cut, or sometimes directly employed in the films.19 They were also donated to museums, lent to exhibitions and carefully archived for future research and use.20 In the 1980s, Tirelli donated 200 pieces, both authentics and costumes, to the Costume Gallery at Palazzo Pitti in Florence.21 The museum had never covered the performance sector before but the costumes presented such an exceptional manufacture and care in the choice of fabric, detail and were so respectful of historical criteria that they could hardly be distinguished from originals.22 Moreover, Diana Vreeland borrowed from Tirelli on the occasions of the Metropolitan Museum exhibitions Inventive Clothes 1919-1939 (1974) and The Eighteenth-Century Woman (1981-82).23 Thus, the workshop expanded to become also an archive and a foundation managing one of the largest collection of historical fashion (170,000 costumes and 5,000 authentics in 2017).24 Through this activity, he could develop a profound and meticulous knowledge of manufacture and cut which guided him in his varied research and made his collaboration valuable to any filmic and theatrical production. To this day, the collection presents the history of the European fashion mainly between the 18th and the first half of 20th century, though, with the costumes one can go even further back to the Renaissance.25 Many international costume designers relied on Tirelli’s collaboration throughout the years, even after the founder died. Among many important others, Tirelli Costumi confectioned the costumes awarded an Oscar designed by Ann Roth for The English Patient (1997), by Milena Canonero for Chariots of Fire (1985) and Gabriella Pescucci’s The Age of Innocence (1994). After his training in Milan, in 1955 Tirelli moved to Rome and gained experience at an important Roman costume workshop, SAFAS, which produced Visconti’s historical films before he started his own business in 1964.26 There, he was taught attention to the contextualisation of materials according to the film or play’s settings.27 Even if it was re-known for his attention to philology, its owners, two refined Milanese sisters, were in disagreement with Piero Tosi’s intention to actually

18 Gnoli, pp. 128-129. 19 Ibid. and D. Trappetti interviewed by Paulicelli in “Dressing the Dreams: Interview with Dino Trappetti—Tirelli Costumi Rome, December 2015” in Italian Style, p. 181. 20 Aschengreen Piacenti, p. 10. 21 Ibid, and Gnoli, p. 121. 22 Aschengreen Piacenti, p. 10. 23 Gnoli, p. 122. 24 Paulicelli, “Dressing the Dreams”, p. 178. 25 Gnoli, p. 122. 26 Interview to Piero Tosi quoted in I. Blom, “Costume and Painting in Senso” in Reframing Luchino Visconti, p. 104. 27 Gnoli, p. 125. 36

make actresses wear corsets in his movies, anxious about the intolerable discomfort they could cause.28 Tirelli, instead, shared Tosi’s vision and had the intuition of starting his own collection of originals, thus supporting the research and creative process of the costume designer.29

Piero Tosi’s method Piero Tosi expresses a vision of costume which resonates with the unities Jablon-Roberts and Sanders include in their definition of historical accuracy formed on Robert Hillstead’s taxonomy of appearance (see CHAPTER 1 and APPENDIX). In fact, Tosi is against an organization of the work which separates the tasks of the costume designers from that of the make-up artists and hairstylists, like in English and American productions where they are autonomous from each other.30 He stresses that there should be unity between these three parts (dress, face and hairstyle) which should be conceived by a same sensibility.31 Indeed, he states that for him the “face is fundamental” as it is the focus of the frame, the gaze and emotion.32 For him, a costume without a face is a “dead thing”.33 Therefore, the study of the character often starts with the analysis of the face rather than the rest of the body because, in his words, the latter “takes only a minute”.34 In fact, the face is the most important tool for the actors and costume should be careful not to violate its personality while transforming them into the characters.35 The costume designer should give it a close reading and understand it in order to know how to make it comply with different beauty and style ideals.36 It should also be coherent with the rest of the appearance for the costume to be “complete” and to strengthen the “values, the symbols the character embodies”.37 Facial appearance is most profoundly affected “by the whims of fashion”, by the changing canons of beauty throughout history and down the social ladder.38 Indeed, as Baudelaire writes “the idea of beauty which man creates for himself…in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face”.39 Thus, also because often in focus, Tosi deliberates that face should convince the audience even more strongly than the dresses.40 This means carefully studying the proper style of make-up and

28 Blom, p. 104. 29 Ibid. 30 P. Tosi interview in “Il mondo in un volto: Conversazione con Piero Tosi” (The world in a face: Conversation with Piero Tosi) in S. Iachetti, A. Baldi (eds.), Esercizi sulla Bellezza: Piero Tosi e i seminari di acconciatura e trucco al CSC (Exercises on Beauty: Piero Tosi and his seminars on hairstyle and make-up at CSC), Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Roma, and Electa, Milano, 2008, p. 20 and Stutesman, p. 112. 31 Iachetti, Baldi, p. 20, and Blom, p. 119. 32 Stutesman, p. 112. 33 Iachetti, Baldi, p. 19, my translation from Italian. 34 Iachetti, Baldi, p. 20, my translation from Italian. 35 Id., p. 21. 36 Id., p. 20. 37 Id., p. 21. 38 Ibid. 39 C. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. by Jonathan Maine, Phaidon Press, London, 1995, p. 2. 40 Stutesman, p. 113. 37

hairdo according to the aesthetics of a given epoch. Because hair changes so noticeably facial features and physical appearance, it is an important historical signifier.41 What most significantly characterizes Tosi’s method is the profound study dedicated to the history of fashion. This nonetheless, stems also from a different way of doing cinema: more time was granted to the preparation of films compared to the present time and different sources were available before the advent of electronic devices, Internet and extensive digitalization.42 Therefore, the times of production inevitably affect the outcomes, the interpretation. Indeed, Tosi stated that he would have worked in a different way nowadays.43 For Tosi, what is crucial is the nurturing of a comprehensive personal culture about the period under focus. It is a nurturing which for him comes naturally and starts even before his career as he says “[w]hen I was young I liked reading a lot. I was fascinated by ambiance in novels. […] It all originates from this desire and great passion to understand a certain context”.44 This reflection of his stresses the interplay between literature and fashion as by reading the first, the other is better understood and vice-versa. Thus, the understanding of the culture, the fashion, the “reality” of a period entails sourcing equally and broadly from “literature, art, sculpture” and photography.45 Studying the documentation constitutes the “tools” to construct a character and to find “ the moral and aesthetic feeling of their time” which Baudelaire wants to find in both the arts of the past and the present.46 Tosi explains that he needs to “be aware of what happened in a certain period” and this means covering not only figurative arts but also social mores, history, politics and technological advancements which also influence style and taste.47 Even if Tosi did not confection himself the costumes, after researching throughout his career, he knew both how the historical dress was constituted and what it stood for in its context. In these terms, costume design is really an interdisciplinary field, spanning from technical and material knowledge about fashion to social history. Costume designers could be considered as conducting the research process in a similar way to scholars even if their goals are different. Their research is guided by the story in the same way a researcher is guided by research questions. The story constitutes its filter and its scope. In fact, as Tosi states, “I read the story. When I look for material of a period of time I think of the characters and the story I am working towards. I gather all the elements, which help me achieve an understanding”.48 In fact, as it will be discussed in the next section, when working on Senso, the

41 Stutesman, p. 113. 42 Paulicelli, Italian Style, p. 12. 43 Ibid. 44 Stutesman, p. 110. 45 Iachetti, Baldi, p. 21 46 Id. p. 22, my translation from Italian, and Baudelaire, p. 2. 47 Sutesman, p. 116. 48 Stutesman, p. 117. 38

different social classes portrayed, the political situation of 1860s Venice and the specific style Visconti wanted to use sorted the documentation and research processes. His studying is carried out also through drawing. For him, drawing details over and over again enables to enhance and complete that understanding and familiarize with the style and taste of the era, entering that ambiance.49 Only by drawing it, one understands how the dress works, its system, that is grasping the dresses’ historical lines and cuts.50 The drawings are not aimed at artistic value rather at condensing, training and visualizing the acquired knowledge and its interpretation.51 Plus, in this way the results he wants to achieve become clearer.52 This process enables to grasp the taste of the time and society – which entails an awareness of class, gender, cultural and political implications – which translates into a specific shape and silhouette. Indeed, Tosi explains that he establishes “first the structure under the clothes and then…the waist. From there you could then create a character, with a detail, a little chain, a fan, etc., which respects the character, as well as fabrics that enhance the character.”53 This means that structure is the point of departure for historically accurate costumes. Accuracy is firstly conveyed through shape. Considering Genette’s imitation, through this process one comes to master the sartorial and social conventions of the time in order to use and apply them wisely and originally in a second moment. Tosi states that only if “reality”, specifically fashion culture, is well known the costume designer “can use fantasy”.54 Genette’s element of novelty in imitation is given by the character’s psychology and story, which if successively expressed through costume would then avoid a “banal and excessively literal and slavish quotation” of sources.55 Details and fabrics, in its colour and texture, would tell the characters’ stories. All this attention to shape and structure is directed to rightly recreate the materiality and bodily experience of historical fashion right. Tosi considers the dress as a “building” with its own “architecture”.56 “Faithfulness to the cut” affects the whole costume and “forces the body to modify itself”.57 Because every epoch has its own bodily experience and shape related to how the body is dressed, then in a historically accurate approach, cuts are important to stick to, the specific architecture of dress and body must be understood and recreated.58 This affects the image, the form

49 Stutesman, p. 116. 50 G.L Farinelli (ed. by), I vestiti dei sogni: La scuola dei costumisti italiani per il cinema (The dresses of dreams: the school of Italian costume designers for cinema) (Rome, Museo di Roma-Palazzo Braschi, 17 January – 22 March 2015), Edizioni Cineteca di Bologna, Bologna, 2015, p. 69. 51 Iachetti, Baldi, p. 128. 52 Id., p. 20. 53 Tosi interview in Blom, p. 104. 54 Iachetti, Baldi, p. 22. 55 Blom, p. 103. 56 Tosi in L’abito e il volto – Incontro con Piero Tosi. 57 Tosi in L’abito e il volto – Incontro con Piero Tosi. 58 Stutesman, p. 116. 39

and the movements of the actors. Tosi’s utmost philological attention to the cut of the dress and passionate strictness on this point – almost upsetting even when teaching his seminars at CSC – put the performers in the same physical conditions of the people, the characters, who lived in the past. This makes costume an authentic embodied experience which can be extremely uncomfortable for its wearers but also visually convey much providing an “essential and indelible portrait of a certain society” as Fersen argued (see Fersen, CHAPTER 1). Claudia Cardinale, when playing in The Leopard, would state that “it’s not me suffering, it’s Angelica [her character]”.59 Still, actors have modern bodies which sometimes can easily be moulded by understructures while other times not.60 Compromises must be found through strategies such as padding for increasing or flattening certain parts of the body, and make-up and shaving for the face, but Tosi would also prefer faces and bodies closer to aesthetic canons of the past than those of contemporaneity.61 The shape and right volume of the historical dress is recreated on the costume also thanks to the right choice of fabrics and other materials that would fall correctly.62 As mentioned before, these could be recycled using authentic dresses or sourced from flea markets around Europe. Nonetheless, antique fabric would be used mainly for smaller details as less feasible to use them for the confection of an entire dress. This was because of their reduced size due to the smallness of the looms or because handmade.63 Along with philological recreation, for credibility Tosi would also favour the use of authentic pieces of clothing showing signs of wear. He would rail against costumes completely “made from scratch with all the right measurements” as these could also look “false”.64 In these terms, he even exaggerates Genette’s category of forgery. By using authentic pieces not only he literally effaces himself from his creation, but, to a certain extent, he also fills the gap between costume and historical dress. The imitation of historical fashion comes very close to true equivalence. He would insert original clothing or details for not only a sense of authenticity, but also of aliveness.65 The close analysis of authentic dresses in itself would be a “revelation” for him.66 About the support of Tirelli’s collection, Tosi said “only by viewing original clothes, feeling the fabric, and recognising the colours of a period did I understand what I had to do”.67

59 C. Cardinale, “A Roma una mostra dedicata a Piero Tosi, Claudia Cardinale: "I costumi aiutano a diventare l'altro" (In Rome, an exhibition dedicated to Piero Tosi, Cardinale: “Costumes help beoming the other), La Repubblica, 11/10/2018,https://www.repubblica.it/spettacoli/cinema/2018/10/11/news/cinema_mostra_piero_tosi_claudia_cardinale -208713241/, last accessed 18/05/20. 60 Id., p. 117. 61 Iachetti, Baldi, p. 128. 62 Id., p. 22. 63 Stutesman, p. 116. 64 Tosi quoted by Deborah Nadoolman Landis in “Scene and Not Heard”, p. 218n. 65 Ibid. 66 Blom, p. 104. 67 Ibid. 40

Besides these material sources which perhaps would have seemed lifeless given their decontextualization, Tosi would study the visual arts representing the proper social class and ambiance for the film. When collaborating with Visconti, he would be given period-specific indications by the director.68 The colours used in art would set a suitable palette for narrating a story or a character.69 Apart from reality, costumes would interpret and be inspired also by the representation of fashion and dress in paintings contemporary to the recreated period. Art can effectively show how fabric was used and would fall from the body and reflect light, how its texture would look and what were the popular combinations of colours and accessories.70 Bignami states that this is a popular method because pictorial art has always been held as a Major artistic forms compared to minors, but it poses problems in terms of accurate representation because of the tendency to idealisation.71 As a matter of fact, Tosi would not use fashion plates from magazines such as the Journal des Dames for the rigidity and impersonality of the models.72 This is also why the multi- disciplinary preparation is helpful as it provides multiple perspectives on fashion and sartorial experience. Moreover, in Tosi’s case, he would often be given the task of representing a social class, ambiance and behaviour which belonged to Visconti – he was born in a family of Milanese counts - so Tosi would base himself on oral history as well.73 For the bourgeoisie and aristocracy of 19th century photographical documentation was then also a more accurate source.74

Senso on page and on screen Senso, in English also known under the title The Wanton Countess, was Piero Tosi’s first experience of designing historical costumes on film and was a great challenge considering the scale of the project.75 Indeed, the producing house Lux Film asked for something with a “spectacular tone”.76 Moreover, it was Visconti’s first Technicolor film and Tosi explains how this novelty was making the quality of colour setting “the psychological atmosphere serving to the story”.77 The film is an adaptation of Camillo Boito’s homonymous novella of 1883. He is considered a minor author partially pertaining to the Italian radical literary group of the Scapigliatura (literally,

68 Blom, p. 102. 69 Iachetti, Baldi, p. 21. 70 Blom, p. 105. 71 P. Bignami, “Il costume storico? Un abito fantastico” (The historical costume? A fantastic dress) in Bignami and Ossicini (eds.), Il quadrimensionale instabile: Manuale per lo studio del costume teatrale (The unstable quadrimensional: Handbook for the study of theatrical costume), UTET Università, Torino, 2010, pp. 6-7. 72 P. Tosi, “Costume come Vita”, bonus material in Senso, DVD edition, Cristaldi Film, 2007. 73 Blom, p. 93. 74 D’Amico de Carvalho, p. 38. 75 Previously, he had designed the costumes and the scenography for the Goldoni’s The Landlady staged by Visconti, Blom, p. 103, and C. D’Amico de Carvalho, “One Senso for two countesses” in F. Giacomotti (ed. by), Fashioning Cinema: Women and Style at the Venice Film Festival, Silvana Editoriale, Milano, 2012, p. 37. 76 S. Cecchi D’Amico, “Volevamo Marlon Brando” (We wanted Marlond Brando) in O. Caldiron, M. Hochkofler (eds.), Scrivere il cinema: Suso Cecchi D’Amico (Writing cinema), Edizioni Dedalo, 1988, p. 57. 77 P. Tosi in “Speciale interviste”, DVD. 41

dishevelness) - analogous to the French Bohémien and Decadent movements and reactionary to Romanticism. Boito was mainly an architect and an art critic, conservator and “forerunner of ‘philological’ restoration but delighted also in writing short novels occasionally.78 His narrative is influenced by this artistic culture and presents a pessimistic view of society as he wanted to represent the wickedness and cowardness of society hidden behind appearances and to find in the “high- bourgeoisie cult of beauty” signs of moral decay.79 This literary agenda was in opposition to bourgeois and provincial taste of post-unification Italy and wanted to show the spiritual annihilation of the values of Risorgimento, the period leading to the geo-political integration of Italian regions and reigns into a modern nation occurred in 1861.80 Boito’s story is set in 1866 during the occupation of Venice by Austrian troops which hindered the union of that region to the rest of the unified country. His protagonists are two anti-heroes: a self- centred and vain young woman recently married to a pro-Austrian noble man, Countess Livia Serpieri, and a coward and womanizer Austrian soldier, called Remigio Ruz in the novella and Franz Mahler in the film. They engage in an affair but soon he exploits her by asking money to obtain a false exemption from military duty. When she finds him drunk with another woman and denigrating her, she blindly takes revenge by denouncing his military betrayal thus leading him to deathly punishment. The novella is organised with the narrative frame of the flashback as it is the Countess, at the age of 39, who starts to write a diary confessing her debaucheries of sixteen years before. She is cynical and totally indifferent to the war that framed her affair even though few remarks would hint at her sympathy to Austria, as she describes Garibaldi troops as “red demons” and uses “ours” for herself and the Austrian occupiers. Plus, she states she married her much older husband on her initiative, against her parents’ opinion, as she wanted to have her own “carriages, diamonds, velvet dresses, a title, and above all, [her] freedom”.81 Initially, Visconti was not too keen to embark on the film adaptation of Senso, the advice of screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico convinced him.82 He found in the story starting points to the inclusion and the accentuation of new themes which in the original text were either absent or in the background. The film substantially diverges from the original narrative with new scenes and

78 D’Amico de Carvalho, p. 37 and G. Ferroni, Storia della letteratura italiana dall’Ottocento al Novecento, Mondadori Università, 2012, pp. 430-431. 79 Id., p. 431. 80 A. Iacoacci, “Senso da Camillo Boito a Luchino Visconti: storie di un’Italia mancata” in M. Spedicato, F. Danieli (eds.), Si quaeris caelum, Edizioni Universitarie Romane, Rome, 2017, pp. 128-130. 81 C. Boito, Senso: Dallo scartafaccio segreto della Contessa Livia (From the secret manuscripts of the Countess Livia), pdf accessible from the portal on the Risorgimento created by the Ministry of Education in occasion of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification in 2011, https://www.150anni.it/webi/index.php?s=45&wid=1119, accessed on 07/06/2020. 82 Cecchi D’Amico, p. 57. 42

characters, a different characterization of the protagonist, even though the plotline of the affair in itself is not twisted. Before dedicating to the analysis of costume, a brief overview of the adaptation process and production are discussed as they consequentially frame the specific interpretation of the costume designers. Genette’s framework can be used as a helpful guide to approach Visconti’s adaptation. In fact, the film presents some changes from the book which can be interpreted through the following transposition practices as these are directly transforming Boito’s text at the formal and thematic level. For Genette, formal transposition includes among others transmodalization, that is the “alteration in the mode of presentation characterizing the hypotext”.83 It can be considered equivalent to Jakobson’s intersemiotic translation. Senso in the specific is a case of dramatization as it presents dramatically a text that was originally presented narratively. This leads to the choice of eliminating the diary narrative framework and Livia’s retrospective. This affects also her characterization: in the ‘present’ time of the story she is already a mature woman. As Genette explains, dramatization “generally goes with” amplification.84 This entails the augmentation of the hypotext by various means, especially through the synthesis of extension and expansion.85 These can involve the introduction of details, descriptions, scenes and characters, flashbacks and flashforwards or comments of the narrator. With the introduction of these new elements, a general effect of “vivid realism” is produced on the original story also having repercussions on the underlying themes of the text.86 Indeed, in the film, apart from Eco’s visual explicitation of characters and setting, there is the inclusion of a new character, Livia’s cousin Roberto Ussoni. He is a patriot gathering resources and volunteer to fight for freedom from Austria independently from the regular Italian army, thus the addition of this character brings also a whole group of activists. He embodies positive values in contraposition to both Franz and Livia. His bravery and effort to fight for a good cause, collective national freedom, is both increasing the melodramatic vein of the film and introducing a political subplot which comes thus in the foreground.87 In fact, he stands for Livia’s ideological betrayal as she gives the money collected for the volunteers to Franz and this misdeed is portrayed by Visconti as even more immoral than the betrayal of her older and opportunistic Count, who turns his back to Austrians when he understands they lose the war. Moreover, through Ussoni, Visconti can follow the events that led to the defeat of Italian troops in the Custoza battle and the activity of patriot groups. He is the first main character to appear

83 Genette, p. 277. 84 Genette, 278. 85 Genette, p. 262. 86 Id., p. 261. 87 D’Amico de Carvalho, p. 38. 43

on screen, in the initial crucial scene taking place at the Venice opera house La Fenice, when he defies Franz Mahler who had grossly offended the Italian way of conducting war. This scene thus sets the other underlying theme and genre of the film, that of the melodrama interplaying with the new political subplot. To this interplay of formal and thematic changes, semantic transpositions practices can be seen related to the character of Livia. One of these can be Genette’s transmotivation, that is the substitution of a motive of an action by a character.88 If in the original story she chooses Remigio as a lover among a flock of suitors met in San Marco’s square, in the film she approaches Franz without having in mind a love affair but actually to convince him not to duel with her cousin to whom she is very affectionate. This hints at another change, a moderate revaluation which invests her - “by way of pragmatic or psychological transformation – with a more significant and/or more ‘attractive’ role in the value system of the hypertext”.89 Indeed, on screen she is not portrayed as obsessed about beauty as younger Livia in the novella. They both share a relative freedom from the older husband and in the first scenes of the film, this freedom translates in her open support of the patriot group at the theatre regardless of her husband’s political interests. Nonetheless, this different starting point of the character means that “her remorse would be all the more poignant” once she betrays her own self towards the end and thus the film brings on a harsher devaluation or aggravation of her negative traits as she comes to have a corrupted political conscience.90 Not only she betrays her cousin, her ideology but also the very person for whom she had betrayed. These transposition practices are all affecting the materiality of the mise-en-scène. As mentioned in the previous section, Visconti’s vision was always based on the artistic demand of full realistic reproductions. This partly belonged to a general taste and political agenda of Italian post-war cinema. In fact, the label Neorealist cinema describes film-makers eager to exploit the newly acquired freedom from censure and form a new image of the country which previously had been misrepresented by the comedy sub-genre of “White telephones” portraying righteous and idealised lifestyles, behaviours and morale in line with bourgeois and fascist ideology.91 This meant to not avoid representing distressing reality in a sincere way. Visconti stated that the fact that he would direct a historical film did not entail a betrayal of his style and a distancing usually attributed to this genre, often associated to exoticism, nostalgia and idealisation.92 Indeed, parallel to the portrayal of this negative love story, the Gramscian theory is brought forward that the fight and ideology for the

88 Genette, pp. 324-325. 89 Id., p. 343. 90 Id., p. 355, and D’Amico de Carvalho, p. 38. 91 D’Amico de Carvalho, p. 36 and Iacoacci, p. 126. The term “White telephones” is due to the presence in the film settings of white expensive telephones fashionable during the 1930s and 1940s. 92 Iacoacci, pp. 141-142. 44

unification of the country was eventually “betrayed”.93 In fact, it was felt that a true revolution for a deep renovation of Italian society would have happened only if it included popular involvement, like with the French Revolution, and not only that of the ruling classes and royalist officials.94 The support of the population was either absent, as it is shown with farmers carrying on their normal life in the fields, or voluntarily disregarded by the royal leaders, symbolised by Ussoni and his comrades being turned down by the Italian army in a censored scene.95 Portraying the 19th-century Italian nobility, embodied by Countess Livia Serpieri, at first inspired by romantic nationalistic feelings and later disrupting their “moral consistency” was consistent with Visconti’s, and in general other Neorealist film-makers’, refusal of the ruling élite because considered corrupted and uncapable of really caring for the losers.96 His plan to faithfully ‘catch the real’ meant a difficult and expensive project which at first was not a deterrent.97 Quality, finances and the presence of international stars were not a problem because, as explained in the previous section, the industry was enjoying a prosperous period and between 1953- 1954 the production company Lux Film had decided to finance “more expensive and spectacular” films than Neo-Realist ones.98 In the film, there are many scene changes, from internal to external settings, many collective and battle scenes with crowds. The choice of actors was a plan B because originally Ingrid Bergman and Marlon Brando had to play the two leading roles.99 The latter though was still relatively unknown while American actor Farley Granger had already featured in two successful films directed by Hitchcock.100 Nonetheless, the Italian actress Alida Valli as well was then at the brim of her success having worked for a period in Hollywood. The film was presented at the Venice Film Festival of 1954 but did not win as expected because of the political controversies regarding his negative vision of Italian politics.101

93 Iacoacci, p. 137, and L. Micciché in “Speciale Intervista”, bonus material in Senso, DVD, 2007. 94 Micciché, “Speciale Intervista”. 95 Ibid. 96 Iacoacci, p. 147. 97 D’Amico de Carvalho, p. 37. 98 Enciclopedia Treccani, “LUX FILM”, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/lux-film_(Enciclopedia-del-Cinema)/, accessed on 07/06/20. 99 L. Gastel, “Ricordo di Luchino Visconti”, bonus material in Senso, DVD, 2007. Gastel is Visconti’s nephew and a film director, working with both Visconti and Tosi on the set of Ludwig (1973). 100 Ibid. 101 Micciché, “Speciale Intervista”. 45

Chapter 3. The costumes of Senso: Forgery of 19th century fashion

At the age of 24 and on his first experience of historical costume design Tosi was called to the enormous task of creating the costumes of supporting characters, civilians and soldiers in Senso. It is interesting to consider the costumes of the ‘master’ who would become very influential in his field at his earliest attempt. Alida Valli’s were designed by French costume designer Marcel Escoffier, an already mature and experienced costume designer, who had to bestow a French touch to the diva, in line with the mundanity fitting a fashionable noble woman.1 Nonetheless, the two closely worked together and Tosi would contribute to Valli’s costume in the last scene as well.2 They could count on good finances that ensured the quality and considerable quantity of their work. As Jablon-Roberts and Sanders mention, historical accuracy often corresponds to “luxury”, and indeed Senso is lavish in the extent of his portrayal of fashion history and historical dress.3 In fact, Tosi had to meet the demands of the historical ‘fresco’ Visconti wanted to paint of the Veneto region in the peculiar moment of the dawn of the Austrian occupation. These demands were the dressing of not only the aristocracy, high-bourgeoisie and high ranks of the Austrian army attending the opera at La Fenice in Venice, but also the clandestine freedom fighters, the rural communities and the crowds in the battle scenes in the countryside, the servants and the slums. Especially for the latter group, sartorial behaviour can only be deducted from realist paintings by those artists who dedicated to portray the wrong sides of the tracks as lower classes have often been overlooked in fashion research because of the lack of evidences and the alleged ordinariness of their clothing. Obviously then, as Ivo Blom explains, Visconti gave the costume designers different figurative references fitting these two different chunks of society, as he would build the moods and colours of the story on those of coeval paintings.4 The intention was to have Livia Serpieri to stand out from the provincialism of the Italian community, so Visconti gave the references of Alfred Stevens, Franz-Xavier Winterhalter and Carolus-Duran, artists considered pertaining to the arrière-garde of their times as they became the painters of fashionable European rich bourgeoisie and royal families.5 For the rest, he mentioned the Macchiaioli, analogous to Impressionists, who focused on life in provincial communities rather than worldly circles and on the impact of the Risorgimento wars.6 In my analysis, I will focus on some of Tosi’s creations – including the protagonist’s final attire – which are quite effective in portraying the fashions of 1860s. As mentioned in the Materials

1 Blom, Reframing Luchino Visconti, p. 105. 2 Id., p. 116 and D’Amico de Carvalho, Fashioning Cinema, p. 39. 3 Jablon-Roberts, Sanders, “Definition of Historical Accuracy”, p. 124. 4 Blom, pp 102-103. 5 Blom, p. 114. 6 Blom p. 102. 46

and Methodology section, I will compare the costumes with a variety of sources on fashion and the sartorial descriptions present in the novella.

The crinoline and state of undress With regards to the feminine fashions, the costumes worn in all the scenes set in Venice, and by the servants in the countryside – thus all but the farmers’ – present the most fashionable silhouette of the mid-1860s, with the waistline in natural position or slightly higher than normal and with full skirts, which could reach their widest thank to the use of cage-like crinoline which flattened the front of the dress and expanded the rear creating a train.7 It is recorded by a commentator on a ball in the Tuileries, that already in 1866 Parisian women started to get rid of the cage crinoline because of its excessive size and amount of fabric required for the skirt but at that time it was a “standard trope for the bourgeois woman”.8 Accordingly, Senso shows women from different classes both with and without this kind of understructure, and effectively records the systems and functioning of feminine undergarments as there are two scenes re-dressing (see FIGURES 2a, 2b and 2c). In fact, a noble and fashionable woman like Countess Serpieri is mainly shown with the widest skirts throughout the film, but in the scene of her first intimate encounter with her lover, while he helps her in her dressing, she only wears a series of underskirts and the cage-like crinoline cannot be spotted together with the rest of her clothes spread on the sofa in the background (see FIG. 2b). In her last encounter with Franz, she finds him with a prostitute in her undergarments which do not include a crinoline and the scene reproduces a state of undress in a parallel and opposite mood to Figure 1. Rops, Type Parisien (Bal Mabile), 1867 the previous one and preludes to Livia’s impulsive vengeance

(FIG. 2c). The engraved illustration by Félicien Rops (see FIG.

1), used by Gloria Groom in her chapter on Monet’s “Camille, Figure 2. Rops, Type Parisien (Bal Mabile), 1867 the Green Dress” (1866) as an example of how media could represent women without hoop skirts, shows still that crinoline was the convention for both respectability and popular trends. Figure 3. Rops, Type Parisien (Bal In 1867, Rops was commissioned this illustration for a brief Mabile), 1867 guide to Paris by major French writers and poets and the title of the image “Parisian Type: Bal Mabile” hinted at “a popular but Figure 4. Rops, Type Parisien (Bal slightly risqué outdoor dance hall”.9 Another work from 1864, Mabile), 1867 “La buveuse d’absinthe” (The absinthe drinker), portrays a demi-monde woman clearly not wearing full skirts (see FIG. 3).

7 W. C. Cunnington, p. 206. 8 G. Groom, “Claude Monet: Camille” in Impressionism, Fashion & Modernism, pp. 49-50 and 307, n21. 9 Id., p. 50. 47

Figure 2a, b, c. Senso 48 Senso

In the last scene, when Livia has completely lost her dignity and wanders hysterically in the streets of Verona after having sent Franz to death, she appears as dragging similarly to Rops’ illustrations and, even if in that occasion she is wearing full skirts, her attitude and her appearance are analogous to the other two women’s with sombre and disrupted hair and dress (see FIGS. 18).

Figure 3. Rops, La buveuse d'absinthe, 1865

Revolution at the opera and practical wear

A scene that provides many cuesFigure is the 7 .initial Rops, oneLa buveuse set in the d'absinthe, Venice opera theatre La Fenice as it is crowded by three different social1865 groups, thus differences in sartorial behaviours can be spotted. The melodrama is, together with the Ri sorgimento, a fil rouge of the film which guided Visconti’s vision, in its visual and musical tones, emotions and moods.10 Starting the film in such setting enabled him Figure 8a, b. SensoFigure 3. Rops, La to determine its fundamental themes.buveuse d'absinthe, 1865 Going to the opera was not only a classic popular evening pastime for 19th century society. Bereson explains how changes in society and aesthetics did not transform the meaning and role the Figure 9. Rops, La buveuse d'absinthe, opera house had throughout Europe1865 and, via the colonies, also throughout the world as a place for state and communal celebrations. This venue was a place where to “symbolically reinforce … power” and its perpetuity.11 Still, being seen among those symbolically affirming power also entailed establishing and displaying one’s own social position. The social code of the opera involved not only

10 Micciché in “Speciale interviste”. 11 Ruth Bereson, The Operatic State: Cultural Policy and the Opera House. Abingdon, Oxon: Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. Accessed May 31, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, pp. 1-2. 49

the clothes worn but also the type of transport used to arrive there, the food eaten there, the seats occupied and thus the ticket bought as markers of privilege, even today.12 This explains how the opera attracts both the higher ranks of Austrian army with their wives affirming their waning hold on the region and the Italian nobility more or less sympathising with them like Count Serpieri. In most of Europe, opera-going is more often associated to an elitarian social gathering, a significant occasion to “see and be seen by the audience”, to display wealth.13 As the main protagonist jokes with her Austrian acquaintance, “you Austrians love music, while we Italians come to the theatre for entirely different reasons”.14 Indeed, as a place for social gathering, action occurred both on stage and in the foyers and theatre boxes.15 As the film shows, even questions of live and death could be negotiated (Livia prays Franz Mahler to not get in duel with her cousin Ussoni). Nonetheless, in Italy it was a diversion that generally interested all segments of society, even less wealthy ones.16 The operatic work being performed in the scene is Il Trovatore which is about revenge taken by a group of oppressed gipsies against nobility thus the story, resonating with the Venetian condition of that time, could easily stir nationalistic feelings. Then, the presence of the politically involved group of patriots exploiting that evening for a demonstration calling for popular regional upheaval against the Austrians is not suspicious for the rest of the refined audience, but strategical for them. Both men and women ‘pack’ the upper galleries of the theatre, always the more economical and narrower. From the high position they can throw tricoloured pamphlets and flowers so that theatre workers, musicians, Italian nobility and the Austrian could read them. Thus, the opera house as a place to symbolically affirm power can also be exploited for “political ferment” by rebels through non-violent demonstrations as in this case, or even assassinations attempts in others.17

The Garibaldi shirt These Venetian patriot circles were mainly formed by wealthy and educated members of professional and new bourgeoisie, therefore land and shop owners, lawyers, doctors, engineers, school teachers, university students and merchants.18 Their feminine relations were not excluded and actively

12 Bereson, p. 9. 13 D. Roy, V. Emeljanow, Romantic and Revolutionary Theatre, 1789-1860, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, GogleBooks, p.137, their emphasis, and Eric Salzman, Thomas Desi, The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body, Oxford University Press, 2008, GoogleBoooks, page numbers not given https://books.google.it/books?id=9l_nBwAAQBAJ&pg=PT176&lpg=PT176&dq=opera+as+pastime+19th+century&so urce=bl&ots=zlFUdk4IBh&sig=ACfU3U0bEw08_s5nR76v71uVlhRipiy0rA&hl=it&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwilmKPC3cf pAhUEkMMKHWyMAxcQ6AEwDXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=opera%20as%20pastime%2019th%20century&f=fa lse. 14 Line from Senso. 15 Roy, Emeljanow, p. 320. 16 Salzman, Desi. 17 Bereson, p. 5. 18 F. Agostini (ed. by), Il Veneto nel Risorgimento: Dall'Impero asburgico al Regno d'Italia, Franco Angeli, Milano, 2018, p. 298. 50

contributed to the patriotic effort in a team work involving secret correspondence with the patriots in exile, the organization of demonstrations and protests, the divulgation of clandestine material and crowdfunding.19 Some of them headed the Venetian committee of the Resistance, were arrested and processed by the Austrian police.20 In the art representation of that period by the Macchiaioli though, women are mainly seen contributing in the limited context of the ‘domestic front’ sewing red shirts for Garibaldi’s troops or nurturing children’s national conscience (see BORRANI and SCIUTI in

APPENDIXES).21 In the film, they are quite present in the shots representing both the demonstration at La Fenice and in the secret headquarters, and even if the values and effort of Risorgimento were also deeply linked to Romantic ideals of youth and passion, even older generations can be spotted in the backgrounds (see FIG. 29 in APPENDIXES).22 Even though they do not wear a full dress – specifically used for “evening functions” and always with a “low neck” - like Countess Serpieri and other extras in the theatre boxes, the group shows conventional and fashionable models of that time.23 Female activity in this political effort does not translate into unconventional or downgraded dresses, like extravagant Bohemian women or farmers working in the countryside not wearing any kind of structure (see FIG. 26 in APPENDIXES), but their fashions decidedly look downplayed in comparison to the rest of the audience. The costumes adhere to the conventions of bourgeois respectability and to the simplicity needed for their deeds, without showing the glamour and heightened taste for melodrama and Neo-Gothicism present in the Countess’ dresses full of embroideries, contrasting colours and accessories such as pendants, veils and ornated hats. Their crinolines are smaller and indeed in the 1860s – when the crinoline was very popular and economically accessible - there were different sizes and only the most fashionable women, as Livia would be, wore the full-size ones.24

In FIGURES 4a and 4b, female costumes diverge from the aristocracy and thus characterize the patriot women for their more informal, practical and ordinary appearance. In fact, the costumes seem to point at the dresses worn for promenades or simple activities like those seen in “Il canto di uno stornello” (The singing of a folk song) by Silvestro Lega, figuring three young middle-class women in singing in a domestic context or even in the illustration “Costume de Sa Majesté l’Impératrice pour

19 Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, “8. La resistenza degli uomini e quella delle donne” (The Resistence of men and that of women), Percorso didattico: Aspettando l’unità 1850-1866 (Educational Path: Waiting for the Unification 1850-1866), https://marciana.venezia.sbn.it/la-biblioteca/il-patrimonio/patrimonio-librario/i-libri-raccontano/percorso-didattico- aspettando/la-resistenza-degli-uomini, accessed on 02/06/20. 20 Ibid. 21 S. Bietoletti, “Odoardo Borrani: Cucitrici di camice rosse” (Seamstresses of the red shirts) in Ottocento: Da Canova al Quarto Stato (19th Century: from Canova to the Fourth Estate), Skira, Milano, 2008, p. 208. And A. Villari, “Giuseppe Sciuti: Le gioie della buona mamma” in 1861: I pittori del Risorgimento, Skira, Milano, 2010, p. 164. 22 Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, “8. La resistenza degli uomini e quella delle donne”. 23 Cunnington, p. 437. 24 Cunnington, p. 207. 51

son excursion à la mer de Glace” (Ensemble of Her Majesty Empress Eugénie for her excursion to

Iced Sea) (see FIGS. 5 and 6).

Figure 4 a, b. Senso

Figure 10. L'Illustration, Costume de sa Majesté l'Impératrice pour son excursion à la mer de

Figure 6. Lega, Canto di uno stornello, 1867

Figure 15. Lega, Canto di uno stornello, 1867

Figure 16. Cammarano, Piazza San Marco, 1869 Figure 17. Lega, Canto di uno stornello, 1867

Figure 18. Lega, Canto di uno stornello, 1867

Figure 5. L'Illustration, Costume de sa Majesté l'Impératrice pour son excursion à la mer de Glace, 1862 53

Figure 12. L'Illustration, Costume de sa Majesté l'Impératrice pour son excursion

The crowded ‘peanut gallery’ highlights the width of the skirts as it would seem unimaginable that women wearing crinoline would fit that space. This is a good representation that shows how, from 1860, the technical revolution of crinoline made its iron wire springing system folding and resistant to seating, travelling and thumps so that it would not lose its shape. This explains how the several women present in the scene could actually enter and stay in the narrow gallery and engage in other activities, thus representing the relative freedom this technological improvement entailed.25 In Boito’s original text, the scene where the two protagonists meet is not set in La Fenice, but in San Marco’s square which at the time was another very popular location for social gathering in Venice, with people filling the great space by seating at cafes and dancing, as seen in the painting “Piazza San

Marco” by Michele Cammarano, from the Macchiaioli school (see FIG. 7).26 Visconti had the intention of including this scene from the book which would have being visually inspired by this specific painting but for practical reasons it was cancelled.27 Still, the scene in La Fenice can be considered as effectively transposing the context of the crowded square to that of the crowded opera house, where people from different classes would meet and political tension potentially arise. In terms of ease of movement allowed by fashion, the same effect of the crinoline squeezed by the dancing crowd and the small tables can be considered equivalent to that of the final results in the film.

Figure 7. Cammarano, Piazza San Marco, 1869

25 G. Vigarello, L’abito femminile: Una storia culturale, Giulio Enaudi Editore, Torino, 2018, p. 134, Italian edition of La Robe. UneFigure histoire 19 Culturelle.a, b, c. Senso Du MoyenFigure Âge 20 à. ajourd’huiCammarano,, Éditions Piazza du Seuil, San Paris, Marco, 2017. 1869 And L. Johnston, “Corsets & Crinolines in Victorian Fashion”, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/c/corsets-and-crinolines-in-victorian- fashion/, accessed on 30/05/20. 26 Blom, p. 48. 27 Ibid. 54

The white and beige ensemble in FIGURE 4b, thanks to the narrative expedient of the hiding of nationalistic bouquets before throwing it from the galleries, also disclose the undergarment system of underskirts and petticoats, usually two, that covers the crinoline, which was not worn directly under the dress.28 This ensemble, and also other few that can be spotted in FIGURE 4a, include light fabric blouses, perhaps in cotton or linen, embellished with simple embroidery and a striped or check pattern, combined with belts and neckties. This style is also worn by the Countess in FIGURE 8a, in a less mundane context of her country house, when war is only few kilometres away. Indeed, this style really stands out in the context of the opera as it belongs to daywear.29 Still, it may raise awareness that theatre was not a prerogative of upper classes and function as a visual shorthand to easily characterize and identify the different social groups in a crowded environment. Moreover, it also connotes the political vein of the scene and could exacerbate Livia’s ideological betrayal of the patriot group and her cousin’s trust, since she gives away their collected money when dressed in this fashion. In fact, precisely from the 1860s, a trend for this type of blouse with wide sleeves ending with close-fitting cuffs originated in France and successfully crossed the Atlantic.30 It started as an imitation of the uniform of Giuseppe Garibaldi and his troops, gaining world-wide popularity thanks to their victories in the Risorgimento wars in late 1850s and early 1860s.31 Mischa Honeck argues how the omnipresence of a “revolutionary hero or celebrity” like Garibaldi in contemporary mass media, connected “high politics” with fashion mass consumption.32 In this way, it is argued that the trend of the Garibaldi blouse is an example of transnational revolutionary fashion but most importantly of the commodification, decontextualization and trivialization of abstract ideals of democracy and nationalism.33 Thus, worn and appropriated because of the values it represented, even by people with diverging opinions on fundamental matters, it eventually became an ordinary element of women’s wardrobe throughout the century and even afterwards thus a forerunner of the female blouse.34 It is an accurate and precise choice that of dressing these characters with this garment because of both its value as a fashionable style of that decade, and as a political statement fully appropriate to the context. Originally, it was made in bright red Merino wool, with black buttons in the front, braided in black, with high and narrow collar and in combination with a black cravat.35 Varieties in black wool and white cotton soon spread as it became a comfortable style for daywear.36

28 Cunnington, p. 248 29 Id., p. 211 and Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising Museum & Galleries (FIDM), “1890s shirtwaist” https://blog.fidmmuseum.org/museum/2010/09/1890s-shirtwaist.html, accessed on 05/06/2020. 30 M. Honeck, “Garibaldi’s Shirt: Fashion and the Making and Unmaking of Revolutionary Bodies” in Translatlantic Revolutionary Cultures, 1789-1861, p.158. 31 Ibid. 32 Id., p. 144. 33 Ibid. 34 FIDM, “1890s shirtwaist”. 35 Cunnington, pp. 208-211. 36 FIDM, “1890s shirtwaist”. 55

Figure 8 a, b, c. Senso 56

Figure 21a, b, c. Senso

Both on visual sources and in the costumes the decorations of black contrasting lining or darker neckties are maintained from the original military uniform and, together with the outerwear discussed in the next section, displaying borrowings from masculine fashion.37 In another scene, when Livia and her husband go to the secret headquarters of the freedom fighters, this kind of shirt is presented also combined to a Swiss bodice and by another female supporter (see FIG. 8b and 8c), clearly showing how it is a piece of garment that Tosi intended to use as an identifier of this political group.

Figure 9. The Lady's newspaper & Pictorial Times, The Garibaldi shirt, 1861

Figure 10. Lega, Giuseppe Garibaldi’s portrait, 1861

Figure 25. Lega, Ritratto di Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1861Figure 26. The Lady's newspaper & Pictorial Times, The Garibaldi shirt, 1861

37 Cunnington, p. 221. 57

Dressing for the opera and ‘variations’ on the theme of the mantle With regards to the higher classes attending the opera, women are fully and lavishly dressed with sheer fabrics exhibiting both bright colours and more sombre ones. In the original text, Livia, when attending social gatherings with the Austrian lieutenants analogous to and condensed in the on-screen scene at La Fenice, provides one of the few indications about her sartorial behaviours. She describes herself as being galvanised by the wearing of lavish dresses showing bare arms and cleavage made in “voile and laces and with a long train, and a big flower of rubies with leaves of emeralds on the head”.38 She also states that she assumes a pose by “waving the fan in front of [her] face as if to demurely hide from the gaze of the astonished people” even if in the privacy of her diary- writing she compares herself to “the sun of a new planetary system”.39 The garishness of the headdress worn by the on-page protagonist, characterized as extremely vain and eager to overwhelm those around her by a conspicuous consumption of fashion and jewellery and an exacerbated display of her beauty, is interpreted in a more sophisticated manner by the costume designers. The features of her dress, with voile, lace and a long train, are characteristic of that decade and are present in the costumes, but as mentioned before, for Tosi it is details that most often convey character, because with structure and form one cannot play too much if accuracy is sought (see Tosi’s method in

CHAPTER 2). Tosi states that Marcel Escoffier decided to make Livia wear diamond stars on her hair following the fashionable look of Austrian Empress Elisabeth in her famous portrait by Winterhalter, painted in 1865, that is one year before the time setting of the story.40 Blom states how this “Austrian ‘touch’ well befits” the sartorial behaviour of Venetian upper class supporting the occupiers.41 It could be argued that it also gives a different connotation to her character portrayed on screen. On page, Livia is an affected young nouveau riche climbing the social ladder only aiming at the greater possibilities of fashionable consumption. On her hair, she wears showy and elaborate jewellery with a bold combination of “highly-coloured” coloured gemstones and this indeed demonstrates how towards 1860s, “more extravagant and complex compositions of flowers and foliage” were being produced.42 It was very fashionable to “insert all manner of jewellery into their coiffures” which would be tied in big coils falling on the shoulders or knot at the back of the head.43

38 Boito, Senso. 39 Ibid. 40 Interview with Tosi cited by Blom, p. 108. The portrait is “Empress Elisabeth in a gala dress with diamond stars in her hair”, 1865. 41 Ibid. 42 M. Flower, “The Mid-Victorian or Grand Period (1860-1885) in Victorian Jewellery, Read Books Ltd, 2013, GoogleBooks, https://books.google.it/books?id=FKV8CgAAQBAJ&pg=PP3&dq=victorian+jewellery&hl=it&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi n-paq7ODpAhUTw8QBHRlsBN0Q6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q&f=false, accessed on 01/06/20. And Victoria and Albert Museum, “A history of jewellery”, https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/a-history-of-jewellery, accessed on 01/06/20, and “Brooch”, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O298989/brooch-unknown/, accessed on 01/06/20. 43Lang Antique Jewellery University, “Romantic Period 1837-1860”, https://www.langantiques.com/university/romantic- period-1837-1860/, accessed on 01/06/20, and Cunnington, p. 238. 58

Nonetheless, at that time stars were “the most popular jewellery motif” and diamonds being increasingly preferred in more lit indoor spaces.44 Probably then, the more timeless allure of the diamond stars in the portrait of Empress Elisabeth - who became a national icon and the painting a cultural capital massively exploited in any kind of souvenir – was deemed more appropriate to the on-screen Livia and perhaps more pleasing to modern taste. As mentioned before, on-screen Livia had to be portrayed as emerging from the provinciality of her Venetian acquaintances. Her costume had not to be “too ordinary for that time”.45 Even though her background story is not explicated as in the original text, therefore it is not known the circumstances of her marriage, her sartorial behaviour and gestuality seems not dictated by a recently-attained enjoyment and display of beauty and fashion. Indeed, in the context of the evening at the opera, her extra-ordinariness is conveyed with a simpler but effective guise closer to fashion ideals of 20th century. Thus, she is in stark contrast even to the Austrian lady with whom shares the theatre box, overburdened with ivy leaves on her head and bodice, bows and a flamboyant parure of pearls and gold (see FIGS. 11a and 11b). In other instances, though, as it will be discussed with the example of the burnous, Livia is dressed more dramatically, complying with the tragic nature of her active involution towards betrayal, humiliation and misery and with the theatrical tone given by the mise-en-scène.

Figure 11 a, b. Senso

Figure 27 a, b. Senso

Figure 28. SensoFigure 29 a, b. Senso

Figure 30 a, b. Senso

44 Lang Antique Jewellery University, “Grand Period 1860-1885”, https://www.langantiques.com/university/grand- period-1860-1885/, accessed on 01/06/20. 45 Tosi quoted by Blom, p.114. 59

A sartorial element recurring both in this scene and throughout the movie is the mantle, fashioned in different styles. It is visible how Tosi extensively used this kind of garment for both day- and evening-wear of bourgeois and aristocrat extras, for Livia’s housekeeper and also the protagonist wears some in several scenes. Tosi’s employ and the countless different variations used along the social ladder and throughout history of fashion and dress accurately demonstrate the versatility and variable accordance to shifting cultures and aesthetics of this piece of clothing. Still, it is specifically representative of the 1860s because quite flowing and thus easy to wear over the full skirts of the contemporary mainstream fashion.46 It can be found often in fashion plates and art as many artists of that time represented their models wearing it. With regards to Livia’s day mantles, Blom mentions Manet’s “Women at the Races” (1865) and “Street Singer” (c.1862) for their resemblance, even though these do not portray noble women and Tosi only mentioned artists like Stevens and Winterhalter as references given by Visconti for the upper classes.47 Also in the painting “In the street” (1860 circa) by Constantin Guys (see FIG. 12), Baudelaire’s painter of modern life, all the women strolling in the street are ‘captured’ wearing quarter-length sleeved versions of the mantle, called paletot, which could be more or less loose or semi-fitting, similarly to that of a female extra, probably belonging to middle class, in the long shot of FIGURE 13.

Figure 13. Senso Figure 12. Guys, Dans la rue, 1860

Figure 31. Senso Figure 34. Guys, Dans la rue, 1860

Figure 32. Senso Figure 35 a, b, c. Senso Figure 36. Guys, Dans la rue, 1860 Figure 33. Senso

Figure 37. Guys, Dans la rue, 1860 46 Victoria and Albert museum, “Mantle”, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O74556/mantle-unknown/, accessed on 07/06/20. 47 Blom, p. 114. 60

At the theatre, Livia and an extra passing in the corridor wear two lush varieties called sortie de bal and burnous (see FIG. 14a and 14b). The sortie de bal or de théâtre worn by Livia was a type of wrap especially reserved to evenings spent at the opera or at balls.48 It is considered an adaptation of “Egyptian fashion” because between 1859 and 1869 international attention was pointed at Egypt and the construction of the Suez Canal, finalised and opened with a sumptuous ceremony attended by Empress Eugénie, the fashion leader of the time.49 Nonetheless, it can be found in fashion magazines prior to that time frame as well.50 It was shaped like a circular cape usually with a “silk or sating quilted lining”, ornated with tassels and a trimmed hood.51 In fashion plates it is usually described as being made with wool velour, a kind of sheer fine velvet, or other fabrics reflecting light, very often in white.52 It was a garment worn only for few brief moments when entering and leaving the ballroom or the theatre; thus, even though prolonged and close observation of the garment by others was less probable, unlike the rest of the dress, still it could flaunt “dramatic” use of fabrics, embroidery and trimmings.53 The examining of few sortie-de-bals by the House of Worth revealed the presence of “curved steel supports” that were inserted in the lining at the shoulders to enhance the ample flowing lines of the mantle.54 Livia’s does not present explicit orientalist embroidery but it does have a contrasting lining system of cord tassels around the pointed hood as seen in other examples in the media.

In FIGURE 14c, the black burnous worn by the elder lady - who might prefer a fashionable but more discreet colour unlike the Austrian lady dressed in bright green moiré – is the same that Livia wears in the final scene (see pages 66, 67 and APPENDIX). It is reported by Tosi that this burnous was much appreciated by Visconti when shooting the scene at La Fenice. Later, when shooting in Verona, Livia was wearing a “bourgeois, heavy cloak of dark cloth with frills and chenille…tight” designed by Escoffier that Visconti felt not right and he asked for that extras’s burnous because it had more dramatic power, even though it had already appeared on screen.55 This kind of garment took inspiration from a folk loose hooded cloak, termed burnus, worn in many states of Northern Africa and presenting regional varieties in the details but originating from the traditional wear of Berber populations before the Arab conquest.56

48 Cunnington, p. 191, Olian, p. xi. 49 Olian, p. vi. 50 In Cunnington, the first found in 1856, p. 187. 51 Cunnington, p. 188. 52 Olian, pp. 18-30. 53 M. F. Gormally, review of “The House of Worth: Portrait of an Archive”, Fashion Theory, vol. 21, no. 1, 2017, p. 116, DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2016.1179400. 54 Ibid. 55 Blom, pp.116-119, my emphasis, and D’Amico de Carvalho, pp. 38-39. 56 V. M. Noon, “Burnous” in A. Lynch, M. D. Strauss (eds.), Ethnic Dress in the United States: A Cultural Encyclopedia, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2015, p. 56. 61

Figure 14 a, b, c. Senso 62

Figure 38 a, b, c. Senso

Originally, it was made in rough fabrics like wool or camelhair in sombre colours like browns, blacks and blues or whites and beiges.57 It was also common to find them in striped fabric.58 Given its extensive length it easily covered the whole body and the face and could be used as a blanket during the night if needed.59 In women’s fashion magazines it is found already in 1837 as a “new form of evening mantle of satin, very loose”, sometimes designed with sleeves unlike the original one.60 It was readapted in Europe around the 1830s because in those years France colonized Algeria and locally enrolled irregular Algerian soldiers called Spahi, whose uniform partly comprehended their traditional cloak.61 Moreover, in 1860, Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie visited Algeria and paintings of his visits were commissioned to represent his reception by the local leaders, who wore burnouses for the occasion.62 It may have caught on more substantially in that period because, as mentioned before and as stated in the cultural encyclopaedia of Ethnic dress, this kind of mantle could easily wrap the fully dressed body and its hood could cover hats as well.63 In its Western adaptations it maintained its original length even though it was going to shorten with the use of bustle in 1870s.64 It could be made in a variety of fabrics, from cashmere and velvet to silk, plain or striped, it fastened at the neck and could present embellishments like passementerie, embroideries and tassels evoking an exotic taste (see fig. 14).65 As evidenced by its dual use in the film, this kind of mantle could also easily be used for more practical activities like travel see fashion plates in FIGURE 15. Tosi created this burnous with black twill and trimmed the hem with black fringe lining and the shoulders with black beads, sequins and jais.66 Twill is a kind of diagonal weave that gives strength and durability but also allows ample draping because it has fewer interlacings than plain weave.67 With the black burnous, Piero Tosi interpreted what he considered an “inexhaustible source”.68 An album of early photographs he had found in a flea market represented the famous Countess Castiglione in a variety of poses and fashions.69 She was an extravagant, socially and

57 Nooon, p. 56. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Cunnington, p.118. 61 Noon, p. 56. 62 The Met, “Isidore Pils: Study for "Visit of the Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress to Algeria", https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/441375, accessed on 30/05/20. 63 Noon, p. 57. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. and Cunnington, p. 121. 66 “Senso” in Fashioning Cinema, p. 64. 67 Encyclopaedia Britannica, “twill weave”, https://www.britannica.com/topic/textile/Basic-weaves#ref359432, accessed on 07/06/20. 68 Tosi, “Costume come Vita”. 69 Blom, pp. 116-118. 63

Figure 15. La Mode Illustée, Town toilette and travelling toilette, 1863

Figure 16. La Mode Illustrée, Ball and Evening toilettes by Mme Alexandre Ghys, rue Sainte-Anne, 1863

Figure 42Figure 43. La Mode Illustée,

Town toieette and travelling toilette, 1863

Figure 44. Pierson, Alta, 1863-1866Figure 45. La Mode Illustrée, Ball and Evening toilettes by Mme Alexandre Ghys, rue Sainte-Anne, 1863

Figure 17. Pierson, Alta, 1863-1866

politically influent figure conducting a turbulent life in France and Italy between 1850s and 1860s.70 She had been sent to France in 1856 to raise the interest of Napoleon III about the Italian war effort against the Austrians and to unify the country.71 She became his mistress for a short time and settled in Paris becoming a sort of celebrity because of her beauty and the public image she constructed of herself, also thanks to the photographs she commissioned.72 She repeatedly went to the studio of photography of Mayer & Pierson which, like Stevens and Winterhalter, would portray the élite of the second half of 19th century passing by Paris.73 She was her own director, choosing the dresses she would wear in the pictures, studying the attitudes in front of the camera as she would interpret herself and literary, historical and invented characters, deciding the titles and even technical aspects like the angles and the re-touchings of the images.74 If her enthusiasm for fashion ruined her husband, it provided a precious source for fashion history and costume design. In fact, she staged her portraits in unconventional manner, wearing both the lavish dresses she would wear in society but also costumes when playing a dramatic attitude.75 She would send these pictures to her admirers.76 She seems to embody the two faces of Livia’s characters on page and on screen. Her vanity is recorded on the daguerreotypes, and the end of her life spent in misery symbolised by the burnous Livia wears at the end of the film. In the daguerreotype Alta (1863-1866) – in Italian, tall – Countess Castiglione stands on a stool wearing a black dress ornated with black embroidery and over it a wide black burnous with jais

(see FIG. 17). The dramatic effect is given by the exaggerated volumes and soaring lines of the crinoline and the draping of the fabrics against the little girl wearing a white, loose wide-sleeved shirt or mantle and clenching the hem of the burnous. This visual effect of the black mantle was used to adapt on screen the final scene of Livia’s travel to Verona, when she crosses the battlefields in order to surprise her lover after a long absence only to find him with another woman and to overhear him saying that the prostitute is more beautiful than the Countess. The scene and the costumes in the original text are described in a way to convey an effect of suffocation: “Nobody noticed me sliding along the walls of the houses and fully dressed in black with a thick veil on the face. I was going crazy …Waves of heat raising to my head compelled me to lift the whole veil from my face, I was burning”.77

70 M. Daniel, “The Countess da Castiglione”, The Met, 2007, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/coca/hd_coca.htm, accessed on 01/06/20. 71 Ibid. and Blom, p. 116. 72 Daniel and Blom, p. 118. 73 Daniel and Blom, p. 117. 74 Daniel. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Boito, Senso, my translation from Italian. 65

Therefore, in the film a black hat trimmed with black pendant beads and veil are added to the Castiglione-like burnous but, during the excruciating journey on the carriage Alida Valli keeps drying her face with a handkerchief under her veil without taking off any of her black layers for relief (see

FIG. 19 a and b). Only once in Franz’s room, she is crudely unveiled and dishevelled by him in front of the other woman, the climax of her humiliation. This confrontation is not faithful to the short novel, as the protagonist only overhears the offensive conversation to decide to denounce him to an Austrian general. Still, in the original text, when heading to witness the execution of her lover in the middle of the night, she writes in her diary:

I was feeling hot, I was suffocating. I did not want to remove the veil from the face, but I untied the first buttons of the dress, I turned upside down the edges of the neckline. The air… made me breath better…. At the threshold [of the military headquarters] I felt the veil ripped from my face, I turned and saw [one of her lover’s comrades] who, approaching his moustache to my face, spitted on my cheek.78

The violent act of degradation and smothering connected to dress is then present in both versions of the story, even if acted by different characters at different moments. Still, the images evoked by the text and film are equivalent as the burnous serves the purpose of making the protagonist dramatically appear like a “fluid” black mass.79 The colour makes it difficult to distinguish Livia from the dark streets but the weighing and draped volume of her clothes stress the physical and internal disgrace she has reached in a heightened manner. In fact, even if burnouses were actually quite common, even for daywear with different fabrics though, their form nowadays might seem quite impressive and, in the film, the rest of the mise-en-scène stresses their melodramatic effect.

Figure 18 a, b. Senso

78 Boito, my translation from Italian. 79 Tosi, “Costume come Vita”. 66

Figure 48 a, b, c. SensoFigure 49 a, b. Senso

Figure 19 a, b, c. Senso

Figure 50. Senso Figure 51 a, b, c. Senso

Another use of such outerwear is the mantle seen on Livia’s housekeeper, Laura (see FIGS. 20 and 21). For its shape, it could be a paletot which was a “loose jacket or short overcoat, usually with sleeves” and, like the burnous, could be found in a wide variety of fabrics.80 It is made with a striped cloth which could be the one known as “Algerienne” a coarse cotton fabric which could be mixed with silk and presenting bold stripes, often used for women’s burnouses.81 It presents slightly tighter sleeves compared to those in FIG. 22, and a darker contrasting passementerie outlining the edges. She is dressed in this walking ensemble as she has been ordered by the Count to go seeking Livia, who wandered the whole day looking for Franz, as he wants to leave Venice for their countryside estate with the war approaching. The weather is rainy and she carries an umbrella.

Figure 20. Senso

80 Olian, “Glossary” in Victorian and Edwardian Fashion, p. xi. 81 Noon, p. 57, Cunnington, pp. 193 and 429, M. Kolanjikombil, “Algerian stripes” in Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Textile Terms, Woodhead Publishing India Pvt Ltd, New Delhi, 2017, p. 40. 68

Figure 21. Senso

Figure 52. Photograph from Cunnington, 1861Figure 53. Senso

Figure 22. Photograph from Cunnington, 1861

69 Figure 54 a, b, c. SensoFigure 55. Photograph from Cunnington, 1861

Laura can be considered pertaining to the “industrious lower middle-class of female employees and shopkeepers” having “disposable income and more clothing needs to spend it on”.82 The sartorial behaviours of this chunk of society sustained and were sustained by the emerging of ready-made fashion which, in the sphere of female clothing, started right from outerwear like cloaks, and later continuing with suits, shirts and skirts.83 Her job in a noblemen’s house obviously entailed a close contact with them and thus her clothes, “out of necessity”, must be respectable and thus not too dissimilar from her employer’s.84 Exactly from this period, ready-made industry was making this possible by dedicating to women’s wear and not only more sectorial markets like clothing for sailors and the army.85 Nonetheless, increasing interest in outerwear also made tailors’ shops specializing in this new niche which relied on different techniques from those of women’s dressmakers, only working with finer and lighter cloths.86 Given that industrial manufacture at the time needed simpler models, the loose-fitting outerwear such as mantles were the easiest garment to start with for the serialization and standardization of the production of female fashions.87 This is linked to a “general masculinization” of female fashion analogous to the Garibaldi shirt as well. Green informs that in Europe and United States in the second half of 19th century, the number of coats produced per day increased from 8/10 to 20/24.88 This can explain how so many varieties – with or without sleeves, tight or wide pagoda sleeves, fully loose or semi-fitting - were made in different fabrics allowing their use in different occasions, for both formal and informal wear. Considering the context of Laura’s use of this mantle it could be wondered whether this sort of mantle was already water-proof but Lou Taylor writes that waterproof fabric was commercialised indeed towards the end of 1860s in France and England but that it was “strikingly plain” thus not applicable to the bold stripes.89 Moreover, it is not probable that a lower-middle class middle-aged woman in a country at war could be so up-to-date. Nonetheless, the Dictionary of Fashion History mentions the loden, defining both a kind of fabric and a style of cloak.90 With regards to the fabric, it was a traditional sheep’s wool water-proof fabric “dyed in several colour ways” and made in Tyrol, the region between Austria and Italy, close to Venice.91

82 N.L. Green, “Fashion and Flexibility: The Garment Industry between Haute Couture and Jeans” in Ready-To-Wear Ready-To-Work: a Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1997, pp. 26-27. 83 Id., pp. 23-27, my emphasis. 84 Id., p. 27. 85 Id., pp. 22-23. 86 Taylor, p. 33. 87 Id., p. 27, and L. Taylor, “Wool, cloth, gender and women’s dress” in A. de La Haye, E. Wilson (ed. by), Defining Dress: Dress as Object, Meaning, and Identity, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1999, p. 31. 88 Green, p. 32. 89 Taylor, p. 31. 90 Cumming, Cunnington, Cunnington, “Loden” in The Dictionary of Fashion History, Berg, Oxford and New York, 2010, p. 122. 91 Ibid. 70

Loden garments could comprehend “capes and short jackets…edged with braid” like the one worn by Laura.92 Instead, the loden meant as a specific style of coat was most often in a dark green hue and in 20th century became a most popular and classic garment thus overshadowing other denotations of the meaning.93 This might be a more plausible and appropriate guessing at the fabric of the mantle. Another wrapping garment widely seen on secondary characters, extras and on Livia is the cashmere shawl. One is seen on the landlady of the room where Franz and Livia meet, another on the extra in FIGURE 13 and a third is worn by Livia over her Garibaldi shirt. The latter case is mentioned in an interview to Tosi and gives evidence of his use and recontextualization of authentics in his costumes.94 In fact, he states that the:

cashmere paisley shawl … was truly an unexpected find, a real surprise which I dug up in an antique haberdashery shop in Verona. It was an extremely popular accessory amongst women of nobility and the bourgeoisie during the entire Nineteenth Century, but by the mid-1900s [time of production of Senso], paisley shawls had become incomprehensibly hard to come by. None of us had ever seen them if not in prints and portraits from that era. Alida Valli’s was not even a shawl, it was a plaid, but the slightly rigid effect it gave when it both slipped off the shoulder and held together with the hands was just perfect.95

This comment and the use by a wide range of social classes perfectly sums up the story of this piece of garment because from being highly fashionable as a signifier of high status and respectability, often offered as a souvenir from a travel to India, it gradually became unfashionable as it travelled down the social scale.96 The cashmere shawl was popularised at the beginning of 19th century in France and by 1850s “shawls of many descriptions were worn by women of every social class”.97 It became an essential element in the upper and middle-class woman’s wardrobe, and only a few could afford the original ones. The purchase became more affordable at the expenses of high quality and handcraft when imitations manufactured in Norwich, Edinburgh or Paisley lowered prices.98 This caused a shift of range of consumers and connotation as cashmere shawl was no longer rare and exclusive to the wealthiest. The mid of the century being the moment when sartorial manufacture was

92 Cumming, Cunnington, Cunnington, p. 122. 93 Ibid. 94 “Senso” in Fashioning Cinema, pp. 58-59. 95 Id., p. 59. 96 S. Daly, “Kashmir Shawls in Mid-Victorian Novels” in Victorian Literature and Culture, Usa Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 237–256. 97 Id., p. 238. 98 Daly, p. 251. 71

Figure 23 a, b, c. Senso. 72

significantly implemented, then the use of a shawl both on the shoulders of the Countess and of a landlady renting rooms to clandestine lovers signal a brief point of convergence. The fact that Tosi could not find anywhere this type of shawls might be due to this devaluation as Daly argues, by using examples from fiction, that families would get rid of them.99 Considering the mentioned examples, it could be argued that the prominent presence of these types of mantles and wraps on a variety of actors and extras rightly demonstrates the status of this garment as an “unselfconscious” Orientalist influence.100 In this way Gezcy defines the kind of Orientalist styling that involves a borrowing from ‘Eastern’ or ‘Arabic’ ways of dressing which “so readily” blends in with the Western dress that is “very much part of it”.101 The only traces expressing their foreign origins are in some cases their names and few stylistic details, like the hood, the sleeves, the patterned fabrics, that, through the cyclical alteration and renovation demanded by the fashion system, lose their sense of connection to their source. Joanne Olian states that the characteristic “eclecticism” of 19th century fashion in general is due precisely to a cultural tendency to revive historical styles and to let itself be promptly and conspicuously affected by political events and international influences, as also seen with the Garibaldi shirt, giving birth to “remarkable pastiches”.102 This tendency results in the “failure to develop an innate design vocabulary…concealed

Figure 24 a and b. Mantles denominated as burnous, sortie-de-bal, paletot (1860-1870 c.), Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris. 24a is a donation by Balenciaga archive

Figure 56 a and b. Mantles denominated as burnous, sortie-de-bal, paletot (1860-1870 c.), Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris. 24a is a donation by Balenciaga archive

99 Daly, p. 252. 100 A. Geczy, “Introduction” in Fashion and Orientalism: Dress, Textiles and Culture From the 17th to the 21st Century, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2013, p. 11. 101 Ibid. 102 Olian, p. vi. My emphasis. 73

by an infinite number of adaptations of earlier styles” and of foreign models.103 Indeed, one can find so many different terms (burneous, sortie-de-bal, paletot, peplum, mantlet, dolmen….) indicating models of mantles hardly distinguishable from each other that names overlap and are used as synonyms (see FIGURES 24 a and b which are interchangeably defined with the three terms burnous, sortie-de-bal and paletot on the digital catalogue of the museum of Palais Galliera).104 The numerous contexts of use, fabrics and models of the mantle that the costumes in Senso suggest translate on screen what is already manifest in the 1860s artistic and commercial media: that as an Orientalist garment is “circumscribed and codified within everyday European (and American) life,.105 Gezcy considers this type of rapid “assimilation” as dictated by the convenience and practicality of the traditional, original garment and thus should be regarded as a development of history of dress, not of fashion.106 Nonetheless, as Geczy also states, this does not prevent the convergence with other types of “Orientalist styling”.107 Indeed, considering that the mantle was intended to adapt to and make more feasible a hindering trend like that of the full-width skirts, that it could be found as a garment serialized for mass production and that in general female outerwear gained increasing attention through diversification of styles, the development of the mantle as an Eastern-inspired clothing could be regarded as falling also in Geczy third category of “inflection, inspiration, tokenism, galvanisation.108 This is especially linked to the realm of the fashion system and the European context of social mobility which demanded imminent and necessary change.109 Gezcy explains that in these terms Orientalist influence poses a paradox as it is both perceived as extreme spectacle, an element adopted in an unconventionally and extravagant Bohemian lifestyle and also as a “generic sign of difference”, as a “rhetoric of transgression” and for its social integration and massive generalization in fashion which loses its mystic connotation.110 Even if Tosi does not explicitly call attention to this semantic/figurative isotopy (see Eco in

CHAPTER 1) in his interviews about Senso, this theme in fashion history can be regarded as harmonizing with the vision Visconti had of the film and his indications to his costume designers. The dichotomy melodrama/historical fresco of Senso resonates with that of Orientalist elements in

103 Olian, p. vi. 104 Paris Musées, “Burnous”, https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/palais-galliera/oeuvres/burnous-0#infos- principales and “Sortie-de-bal”, https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/palais-galliera/oeuvres/sortie-de-bal- 0#infos-principales, last accessed on 07/06/20. 105 Geczy, p. 89. 106 Gezcy, p. 11. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 Id., p. 14. 110 Id., pp. 11, 113. 74

fashion as spectacle, eclectic extravagance with Decadent undertones and as accepted, rooted, serialised garments affecting sartorial behaviours and everyday bodily experiences.

What then? The few examples taken from Senso make it possible to answer the research questions. With regards to what the costumes can do for history of dress and fashion, it can be said that they crystallize and disseminate a reliable visual representation of the fashions of 1860s. This means increasing its visual discourses whenever the film is seen and increasing the possibilities of knowing more about it. By this, I mean that not only costumes visually educate about how fashion was worn and looked in this era during the vision of the film, but also provide a contextualisation of use and visual and sartorial conventions of the past that can build up to a memory of history of fashion.111 This memory will be summoned whenever one will see another movie set in the past, or another medium relating to history, and historical fashion in particular, which can challenge or support the sedimented visual knowledge. This could thus kindle visual connections and comparisons, even automatically, without necessarily having specific background information about historical fashion which can only seem to provide a “coherent” explanation of this complex phenomenon (see

White and Rosenstone in CHAPTER 1). Julia Petrov advances the idea that those exhibitions and museums that stage hyper-realistic scenes to display historical fashion put into focus the “artful assemblage, not the object”, thus visitors marvel at the mastery of representation, not at the source material, similarly to an appreciation of a historical film.112 She argues that this way of displaying and educating about history of fashion hinders the visitors’ critical faculties and intellectual participation in the display because it does not ask them any “engagement in imaginative projection” and does not provide any “external or contradictory detail”.113 I would counterbalance this idea by advancing that a “visual literacy and familiarity” with history of fashion nurtured by costumes in films provides a tool to actively make meaning of it.114 Possibilities to increase knowledge might arise precisely because costumes can stimulate questions about ‘reality’, given that the main focus of the film is precisely representation and not its source material. Moreover, again, when seeing a fashion exhibition or, say, a fashionable portrait of 19th

111 For the exploration of the specific terms “prosthetic” and cultural memory in relation to cinema see E. Løfaldli, “From Biographical Text to Biopic: Adapting the Cultural Memory of the Eighteenth Century”, 1700-tal: Nordic Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Svenska sällskapet för 1700-talsstudier, 2018, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7557/4.4481. 112 J. Petrov, "Tableaux Vivants: The Influence of Theater" in Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress, London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019, DOI: 10.5040/9781350049024.ch-006, p. 116. 113 Id., pp.115-120. 114 Id., p. 115, referring to Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth- Century Britain and France, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984, p. 58.

century, that image will be actively informed by the contextualization and situatedness of costumes seen in the film. Costumes do so thanks to their faithful reproduction of the trends of that decade which propose, in Landis’ words, a “credible” and convincing portrayal of the characters. In fact, they bring on connotations to the characters that blend in with their identity, like the Garibaldi blouse fitting both younger women in the patriots’ ranks and Livia. Costumes’ material features that can be seen on screen, in this case especially the cut and the design, thus their form, express their epoch. The extensive use of certain sartorial elements and the way of portraying them – like the grouping of women in full skirts in a close and claustrophobic space such as a ‘peanut-gallery’ or the black burnous - bring on an emphasis on them which presents a “heightened reality” and an accentuation that favours the noticing and acknowledgment of their bodily implications as a start (see Landis and

Fersen, CHAPTER 1). Witnessing this contextualised bodily experience of costumes on actors also favours what Rosenstone describes as the learning of the past by “vicariously” experiencing it (see Rosenstone in

CHAPTER 1). This learning involves understanding how the proposed use of 1860s fashion can relate to its cultural, historical, political context. This relation is only a constructed example as no historical or artistical representation or critical comment can be literal, equal to its subject. Nonetheless, the fact that politically involved young women of the Venice region in 1866 would wear the Garibaldi-like blouse is “within the possibilities and probabilities of the given period”. Its specific use in this context still promote the existence of this piece of garment and the metaphorically truthful use of this shirtwaist as practical, comfortable, fashionable and potentially politically charged. Costumes from Senso can partially help us to understand (as any other resource at hand would) the history of fashion of 1860s: Piero Tosi proposes a way to think and visualise it that condenses and considers many important aspects of culture which constitute Rosenstone’s “larger meaning” and “amount of data”

(see CHAPTER 1). His artistic choices comment reality by extensively selecting what to include in the frame like the different styles of mantles, sorties de bal and burneous and provide the audience with different contexts in which this versatile garment with Oriental influence was used and how it differed according to the occasion – morning and afternoon walks, travel, formal and elegant evenings. The different uses for different characters and extras give more insight and provide a clearer picture of its meaning than if observed individually. Excluding the leads’ make-up which is closer to the 1950s’ with bold black lines on the upper lid for dramatic effect, Jablon Roberts and Sanders’ unities of the actors and extras’ appearance are visually close to 1860s sources, thus historically accurate but not obviously reaching the ideal 100%

(see Jablon-Roberts and Sanders in CHAPTER 1). Tosi, under Visconti’s indication, uses the same styles of fashion sources for characterizing new fictional wearers. Considering the difficulty in 76

identifying specific inaccuracies in Tosi’s choices makes his costumes forgeries of the original ones they imitate, even though these are often representations themselves, subjects to painters and fashion illustrators’ sensibility. As forgeries, they engage in a palimpsestuous relation to history of fashion. The metaphor of costumes as palimpsests borrowed from Genette fully answers my first research question: they expose and bring back to a recreated life unfamiliar sartorial conventions and trends from the past by accurately imitating them. Approaching the second question of this research - why accuracy or inaccuracy should matter - Senso can demonstrate that accuracy matters because it increases the “likelihood” of the reality of the filmic image (see White, CHAPTER 1). This validates costumes’ significance and reliability as a visual argument about fashion which can be used to make meaning of it. Visconti’s desire to have alive and true people in front of the camera in the sense of having the costumes as forms of life and not as decoration leads to a process of convincing representation of life that advances serious claims.115 Tosi’s costumes have indeed been taken more seriously as accepted as extraordinary donations in the most important Italian museum of fashion, Palazzo Pitti. In the case of Senso, then, claims of accuracy matter as they make its costume a resourceful historiophotical support for history of fashion. Moreover, accuracy matters for making costumes recognizable and historically meaningful, clearly analogous to sources which in turn acquire the status of symbol, legend and icon of an era (see Fersen, CHAPTER 1). It can be added that inaccuracy also matters if, exactly like accuracy, blends in with the story, the characters and the spirit of the represented era. The exaggeration and theatricality of the burnous, the hint of eyeliner and the modern appeal of Livia’s glamourous opera ensemble do not betray the fashionability and extravagance of such figures of mid-19th century like Countess Castiglione. Finally, in regard to the third question - the implications of the costume designer’s mediation between history and story - it can be argued that the acquired familiarity with the story and its characters narrated through visual shorthands become the filter, the lenses through which a pre- existent visual and fashion cultures, perhaps less familiar for some, are made meaningful. Through Genette’s imitation and the filmic recreation (considering not only the actors in costumes, but also the cinematography and lights with which the image is framed), costumes in Senso transform popular and less popular sources like the fashionable portraits of European higher classes and Castiglione’s daguerreotypes, or the casual and bucolic scenes of the Macchiaioli. The implication is the connection of the meaning of costume in the movie – the characters’ story, thus the act of storytelling – to a pre- existent visual and aesthetical culture. Costume designers add new connotations to their sources which can be drawn from historical fashion and art more or less familiar to the audience, but

115 P. Tosi, “Costume come vita”. 77

potentially also, as argued before, to any other image of history and fashion that the viewer may encounter after the vision of the film. Consequently, these sources will no longer be the same as they acquire new meaning and may even come back under focus. Moreover, this applies to the original text as well. The story on page acquires new meaning as the film visually connects it to a wider visual culture which instead, while reading, solely depends on the individual reader’s imagination, knowledge and experience or the writer’s use of ekphrasis. The explicitation and selection of certain attributes by the filmmakers implies an interpretative stance.

Conclusions

This study has explored the representation of the fashion and dress of 1860s through the costume of the historical film and adaptation Senso. Some sartorial elements of the costumes in particular have been investigated and acknowledged as effectively visually documenting aspects of class difference, Orientalist and political influences, popularization of styles and more in general the actual appearance and taste in this particular period in time. This has been done by a comparison of costumes with primary sources like Camillo Boito’s text which, through the protagonist’s point of view, gives insights to the character’s bodily experiences of dress and aspirations materialised through fashion, like some authentic pieces of garments archived in important fashion collections, and like visual culture comprehending art, photography, fashion plates and illustrations. Considering post-modern views on history by White and Rosenstone, I have come to the conclusion that costumes are a valid tool to think about past fashion and dress, despite their constructedness and narrative function. In terms of the first research question, costumes in Senso nurture knowledge on historical fashion by crystallizing it into a version of fashion that cannot be equal to it but invites critical engagement and provides a visual and emotional memory when seeing or thinking about historical clothing. The second question can be answered by saying that accuracy matters because it validates costumes’ historiophotical quality. At the same time, inaccuracy is inevitable as costumes will never be the same as their source. Inaccuracy might be ascribed to the power of heightening reality mentioned by Fersen and Landis, and implied by Jablon-Roberts when saying that 100% historical accuracy is almost impossible to attain also considering the situatedness of the practitioners’ perspectives. If it blends in with the story, if it makes it more credible then it matters as well. With regard to the third question, the mediation acted by costume designers adds meaning with new connotations to pre-existent visual discourse and translates historical fashion for the modern viewer through the lenses of the film narrative. These conclusions contribute both to the fields of costume and fashion studies. For the former, it calls attention to the prominent role of the costume designer in shaping collective and individual visual memory of historical fashion and the potential of costumes as a communicative tool for historical meaning. For the latter, it advances the validity of an alternative way to approach, study, think about past fashion using a non-standard and not original documentation. Naturally, there are many limitations of this study, and this might be considered as a starting point from which research can take many directions. In fact, my focus was only on certain elements

of white female European wear and the materials I could have access to were only digital. Therefore, I can think of many possible ways in which the topic and the scope can be widened. Cultural and gender diversity can become a priority thus leading to a focus on historical films set in other regions of the world, other time settings and other sartorial conventions and behaviours. This could also influence a selection of films produced in other economic circumstances, thus it could be interesting to see how historical accuracy or inaccuracy are treated with fewer funds. The analysis is based on my own interpretation framed by theory but a next step could be bringing this scope forward and see if a study on the reception of this kind of film challenges or support my arguments. This would entail changing methodology and conducting interviews to a range of viewers about how they engage with historical costumes on film, during and after the vision. Another way could be exploring more in depth the materiality of costumes, which was not possible at the time of my research. This could mean a close comparison of material details between extant costumes and extant authentic dresses or encompassing all the possible stages of the material life of a costume like creation, use and post-production life like its display in exhibitions. This would also shed light on further ways they can relate to history of fashion when seen not in the two- dimensional frame of the camera, but in their three-dimensional physicality.

Appendixes

Table 1. Robert Hillstead's Taxonomy of Appearance quoted by Jablon-Roberts and Sanders, p. 11

Table 2. Genette's chart of hypertextuality categories, Palinsests, p. 28. The dotted lines stand for the blurred boundaries between these categories.

Table 3. Genette's chart of hypertextuality categories, Palinsests, p. 28. The dotted lines stand for the blurred boundaries between these categories.

Figure 57. Sciuti, Le gioie della buona mamma, 1877Table 4. Genette's chart of hypertextuality categories, Palinsests, p. 28. The dotted lines stand for the blurred boundaries between these categories.

Table 5. Genette's chart of hypertextuality categories, Palinsests, p. 28. The dotted lines stand for the blurred boundaries between these categories.

Figure 25. Senso

Figure 26. Fattori, Le macchiaiole, 1866 ca.

Figure 27. Borrani, Le cucitrici di camicie rosse, 1863

Figure 28. Sciuti, Le gioie della buona mamma, 1877 84

Figure 29. Senso

Figure 30. Tosi, Sketch for Livia's ensemble in final scene, 1954

Figure 31. Tosi, Costume for Alida Valli, 1954

Figure 32. Tosi, Costume for Alida Valli, 1954

Figure 33. Escoffier, Costume for Alida Valli, 1954

List of Illustrations N.B.: Stills from Senso were retrieved from the cited version of the DVD.

Cover Images: Photo from the set of Senso, Rocchetti&Rocchetti, https://rocchetti- rocchetti.com/senso/, accessed on 09/06/20; Pierson, Scherzo di follia, 1863-1866, Open Access from The Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons; carte-de-visite of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Naples, 1861, Open Access from Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons and re-modified from https://www.megamodo.com/gli-occhiali-italia-independent-incontrano-giuseppe-garibaldi/, accessed on 09/06/20.

Figure 1. Félicien Rops, Type Parisien (Bal Mabile), 1867. Open Access Image from the Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University (http://www.wesleyan.edu/dac/openaccess) ...... 47 Figure 2a, b, c. Senso ...... 48 Figure 3. Félicien Rops, La buveuse d'absinthe, 1865. Bibliothèque Nationale de France (no. FRBNF45048955) ...... 49 Figure 4a, b. Senso ...... 52 Figure 5. L'Illustration, Costume de sa Majesté l'Impératrice pour son excursion à la mer de Glace, 1862. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, (no. FRBNF41524874) ...... 53 Figure 6. Silvestro Lega, Canto di uno stornello, 1867. Europeana/Palazzo Pitti...... 53 Figure 7. Michele Cammarano, Piazza San Marco, 1869. Google Arts&Culture/La Galleria Nazionale ...... 54 Figure 8a, b, c. Senso ...... 56 Figure 9. The Lady's Newspaper & Pictorial Times, The Garibaldi shirt, 1861. Gale Primary Sources ...... 57 Figure 10. Silvestro Lega, Giuseppe Garibaldi’s portrait, 1861. Deartibus ...... 57 Figure 11 a, b. Senso ...... 59 Figure 12. Constantin Guys, Dans la rue, 1860. Photo Musée D’Orsay ...... 60 Figure 13. Senso ...... 60 Figure 14 a, b, c. Senso ...... 62 Figure 15. La Mode Illustée, Town toilette and travelling toilette, 1863. Olian, p. 11 ...... 64 Figure 16. La Mode Illustrée, Ball and Evening toilettes by Mme Alexandre Ghys, rue Sainte-Anne, 1863. Olian, p. 12 ...... 64 Figure 17. Pierre-Louis Pierson, Alta, 1863-1866. Christian Kempf/adoc-photos/Corbis ...... 64 Figure 18 a, b. Senso ...... 66 Figure 19 a, b, c. Senso ...... 67 Figure 20. Senso ...... 69 90

Figure 21. Senso ...... 69 Figure 22. Photograph from Cunnington, 1861. Cunnington, p. 213...... 69 Figure 23 a, b, c. Senso ...... 72 Figure 24 a and b. Anon., Burnous/sortie-de-bal/paletot, 1860-1870 c., Palais Galliera...... 73 Figure 25. Senso ...... 83 Figure 26. Giovanni Fattori, Le macchiaiole, 1866 ca. Arttribune ...... 83 Figure 27. Odoardo Borrani, Le cucitrici di camicie rosse, 1863. Wikimedia Commons ...... 84 Figure 28. Giuseppe Sciuti, Le gioie della buona mamma, 1877. Wikimedia Commons ...... 84 Figure 29. Senso ...... 85 Figure 30. Piero Tosi, Sketch for Livia's ensemble in final scene, 1954. Giacomotti, p. 64...... 86 Figure 31. Piero Tosi, Costume for Alida Valli, 1954. Giacomotti, p. 65 ...... 87 Figure 32. Piero Tosi, Costume for Alida Valli, 1954, Photo courtesy of Costumi d’Arte Peruzzi .. 88 Figure 33. Marcel Escoffier, Costume for Alida Valli, 1954. Photo courtesy of Costumi d’Arte Peruzzi ...... 89

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