Fashioning Italian youth: Young people's identity and style in Italian popular culture, 1958-75

By Cecilia Brioni

Fashioning Italian youth examines popular media representations of Italian young people’s style trends and bodily practices from 1958–75. By looking at visual and written representations of transnational youth trends – like urlatori, amici, beats and hippies – in Italian teen magazines, Musicarelli films and youth-oriented television programmes, it investigates changes in the social construction of Italian young people’s political, generational, national, ethnic and gender identities. The monograph connects the emergence of youth-oriented transnational trends to the national and global history of young people, and explores the dynamics that contributed to the construction of a specifically Italian youth culture in this period.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526161994

Book preview

Fashioning Italian youth

STUDIES IN

POPULAR

CULTURE

General editor: Professor Jeffrey Richards

There has in recent years been an explosion of interest in culture and cultural studies. The impetus has come from two directions and out of two different traditions. On the one hand, cultural history has grown out of social history to become a distinct and identifiable school of historical investigation. On the other hand, cultural studies has grown out of English literature and has concerned itself to a large extent with contemporary issues. Nevertheless, there is a shared project, its aim, to elucidate the meanings and values implicit and explicit in the art, literature, learning, institutions and everyday behaviour within a given society. Both the cultural historian and the cultural studies scholar seek to explore the ways in which a culture is imagined, represented and received, how it interacts with social processes, how it contributes to individual and collective identities and world views, to stability and change, to social, political and economic activities and programmes. This series aims to provide an arena for the cross-fertilisation of the discipline, so that the work of the cultural historian can take advantage of the most useful and illuminating of the theoretical developments and the cultural studies scholars can extend the purely historical underpinnings of their investigations. The ultimate objective of the series is to provide a range of books which will explain in a readable and accessible way where we are now socially and culturally and how we got to where we are. This should enable people to be better informed, promote an interdisciplinary approach to cultural issues and encourage deeper thought about the issues, attitudes and institutions of popular culture.

To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/studies-in-popular-culture/

Fashioning Italian youth

Young people’s identity and style in Italian popular culture, 1958–75

Cecilia Brioni

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Cecilia Brioni 2022

The right of Cecilia Brioni to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6200 7 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Front cover: A group of Italian young people in Borgosatollo (BS), 1974. Family photo, courtesy of the author.

Typeset

by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

List of figures

General editor’s foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Noi siamo i giovani: youth in Italian popular media

1 Urlatori and amici, 1958–65

2 Beats, 1965–67

3 Hippies, 1967–70

4 Fragmented youth, 1970–75

Coda: Noi, ragazzi di oggi

References

Index

Figures

General editor’s foreword

All across the Western world, the decade of the 1960s was synonymous with youth and change. It was the era of the ‘youthquake’, an explosion of freedom and creativity particularly in the fields of music, fashion and film. In this fascinating and ground-breaking book, Cecilia Brioni explores the social construction by the media of a new identity for Italian youth in the 1960s and 1970s. The post-war Italian economic boom, dubbed the ‘Economic Miracle’, promoted a consumer culture which developed a new market, ‘i giovani’, the young people for whom that market created distinctive products concerned with style and image.

Brioni seeks to shift the focus of previous historians from the political activities of young people associated with the ‘events’ of 1968 to the cultural construction of the youth culture. Her analysis is structured around three particular themes. Central to her interpretation is the construction of a ‘performative’ image of youth, which was embodied in distinctive styles of dress, dance, hair, slang and attitude. Magazines, films and television programmes aimed exclusively at the young produced teen idols who personified the new image. The second of Brioni’s themes is the influence on Italian youth culture of foreign cultures – such as the French Nouvelle Vague, the Swinging London of Carnaby Street and the laid-back Californian hippie lifestyle – and the incorporation of elements from these cultures. Her third theme is the role of the media in promoting new identities of masculinity and femininity. Long-haired boys and short-haired girls, unisex fashions and the increasing discussion of hitherto taboo subjects (premarital sex, contraception and abortion foremost among them) challenged strongly held views on what it meant to be a man or a woman.

Brioni concludes her study in the 1970s, arguing that that decade saw a fragmentation of the previously homogeneous youth culture, along social, class and geographical lines. It also saw the development of new and militant movements such as feminism and gay rights. Deeply researched and carefully argued, Cecilia Brioni’s study throws important new light on the nature, meaning and promotion of youth culture in Italy.

Jeffrey Richards

Preface

This book originates from my interest in Italian popular culture during a period of Italian history when, for the first time, several monolithic norms connected to age, gender, race and sexuality began to ostensibly crumble, thanks to the emerging visibility of young people in Italian society. I hope that it will initiate a discussion about what it has meant to be ‘young’ in Italy across time, and about the role of popular culture in the circulation of subversive and subcultural representations of Italian identity.

My analysis depends on source material gathered in several Italian libraries and archives. With regard to magazines, I accessed Ciao amici, Big, Ciao Big/Ciao 2001 and Giovani/Qui giovani at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Rome. I consulted some of the early issues of Ciao amici and Sorrisi e canzoni TV at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan. To watch television programmes, I accessed the RAI online catalogue at the Discoteca di Stato in Rome and the Mediateca Santa Teresa in Milan. Musicarelli films are relatively easy to access, as most of them have been distributed on DVD, and some can even be found full-length on the online platform YouTube.

Quotations are given in the original language in-text, and italics in the quotations are in the original unless otherwise noted. English translations of quotes in the monograph are by me and are given in a note, or in-text for single words or titles.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many colleagues who have offered suggestions and feedback on this work, in particular Clare Bielby, Stephen Gundle and Laura Rorato. I am grateful to Jessica Lott for perfecting my words, and to Michele Gusmeri for perfecting this book’s illustrations. Special thanks are due to Loredana Placidi, Brunella Serana, Giovanni Serana and Rosa Tognoli for allowing me to use their photograph on the front cover.

In the last few years, I have had the luck to work with extremely inspiring mentors: thank you, Rachel Haworth, Ruth Glynn, Clodagh Brook and Catherine O’Rawe, for your enthusiastic support and honest feedback on my work. I am grateful to all the colleagues I met at Hull, Bristol and Trinity College Dublin for being constant sources of inspiration and new ideas and for their invaluable friendship, in particular Martin Nickson, Simon Willmetts, Riccardo Orlandi, Fruela Fernàndez, Stefania Triggiano, Stefania Placenti, Vera Castiglione, Carla Mereu-Keating, Daniel Finch-Race, Lorenzo Dell’Oso and Marco Bellardi. Thank you to the colleagues I met due to our shared interest in the history of Italian youth and Italian popular culture, particularly Alberto Mario Banti, Danielle Hipkins, Alessia Masini – hoping that this will be a step forward towards the fulfilment of our plan! – and Alessio Ponzio.

I owe my deepest gratitude to an inspiring colleague and a precious sorello: Simone Brioni. Thank you for our endless discussions about the many meanings of the ‘Other’ in Italian popular culture. A heartfelt thank you to my parents, Lidia and Giuseppe – who were young, but not giovani, in the 1970s – for their unwavering support and unconditional love. I am grateful to my uncles Federico and Davide for holidays, Burraco games and tarots, to Katherine for being a thoughtful and supporting sister(-in-law) and for lots of practical help, and to Ella, who always reminds me of the importance of bisbocciare together.

A final thanks goes to the many places I call home: Borgosatollo, Brescia, Bologna, Edinburgh, Pisa, Paris, Kingston upon Hull, Bristol and Dublin. And to all the friends I met in these places and who contributed to the development of this research with their thoughts and ideas.

I dedicate this book to the memory of Marina Fasser: I will always miss your energy, irony and curiosity.

Introduction

Noi siamo i giovani: youth in Italian popular media

Ma che cosa c’è / Balla insieme a me

E vedrai che poi / Ti passerà.

Noi siamo i giovani / I giovani più giovani

Siamo l’esercito / L’esercito del Surf.¹

‘L’esercito del Surf’ (Mogol & Pataccini, 1964)

In 1964, Belgian actress and singer Catherine Spaak hit the Italian charts with the song ‘L’esercito del Surf’ (Army of Surf). In the song, Spaak directly invites the listener to join a group of people dancing. That group of people is referred to as i giovani, the Italian term for ‘young people’. The song defines i giovani through a leisure activity – dancing – and by referring to the ‘surf’ music genre, which originated in southern California and was most famously represented by the Beach Boys. ‘L’esercito del Surf’ was written by an Italian lyricist and an Italian composer; however, the fact that reference is made to a foreign musical genre and that the song is performed by a foreign singer with a strong French accent arguably suggests to the listener that the community of i giovani has no specific national belonging. It also seems that in this group there are no gender differences: the fact that Catherine Spaak, a female singer, is singing about i giovani, which in Italian is a masculine and collective noun, means that women are also part of the community of i giovani. Clearly, i giovani più giovani described in this song are a homogeneous group of people, defined through leisure activities, in which national and gender differences are not visible.

What is more, the song seems to invite young people to join a community of peers identified by the first-person plural pronoun noi (we), as the point of view is not that of an external viewer but comes directly from within the group. In other words, the song’s lyrics do not discuss young people; rather, they are directed at young people. This form of address is symptomatic of a broader trend in Italian culture: from the end of the 1950s, popular media forms aimed at an audience of young people proliferated in Italy. Young people were addressed in songs, magazines, television and radio programmes and films. In these popular media, young people seemed to be the active agents of their own representation; yet, these media were ultimately controlled by publishing, music, television and cinema industries led by adults. The use of the pronoun noi in Italian popular culture functioned to socially construct youth: by directly addressing young people, popular media contributed to the construction of a collective identity, which had commercial, community building and ideological functions.

This monograph analyses representations of Italian youth in popular media aimed at young audiences – specifically magazines, television programmes and Musicarelli ² films – during the period 1958–75. I giovani are the subject of this study: I use this Italian term to denote popular media’s representation of young people, and to distinguish it from the actual youth, for which I use the English term ‘young people’. From the late 1950s, popular media played a significant role in the social construction of i giovani as a ‘performative’ identity (Butler, 1999, 2011) which was not defined by age, but rather by the reiteration of specific practices. In particular, this book concentrates on visual and written representations of young people’s style trends and bodily practices, focusing on their clothing, hairstyles, dances and the spaces occupied by their bodies. These elements are particularly relevant in my discussion for three different reasons. First, youth fashion was one of the main categories of goods created for young people’s consumption, and at the same time, it was one of the vehicles through which young people were able to express political and social claims. Second, the subcultural styles adopted by Italian young people, and those appropriated by the fashion industry, were often inspired by global trends coming from other Western countries. Third, style and bodily practices were used by young people to define their gender identity, and were therefore often the main site of struggle between the emancipation from, and the reaffirmation of, stereotypical gender roles, at a time when ideas of masculinity and femininity were being questioned both by emancipatory movements and by consumer culture. These three themes will be the focus of my chronological analysis.

The period under consideration starts in 1958, when media forms aimed at an audience of young people began to emerge, and continues through to 1975, when youth-oriented media for young people became diversified. Through an emphasis on popular culture, I interrogate the widely held view that popular media largely produced normative representations of young people. This monograph shows that popular culture is a site of negotiation between normative and subversive discourses, between the perpetuation of stereotypes and the circulation of emancipatory discourses. In short, by looking at images and descriptions of i giovani’s bodies and style in popular culture, I engage with the ambiguous media construction of young people’s generational, national and gender identity, and situate it in the context of 1960s and 1970s Italian social and cultural history. This introductory chapter contextualises my study, setting it against previous studies on the emergence of youth as a social subject in Italian society. Then, it outlines the theoretical and methodological framework that I apply to the subject, themes and sources utilised in this research.

Context: youth in Italian society

Youth is a social construction that has been naturalised over time, whose definition and relevance have been analysed by sociologists (Mannheim, 1928), historians (Mitterauer, 1993; Sorcinelli & Varni, 2004), cultural theorists (Hall & Jefferson, 1975; Hebdige, 2002; Hebdige, 1988) and journalists (Savage, 2007). Most historians have argued that, in the Western world, the emergence of youth as a separate social subject can be traced to the nineteenth century (Mitterauer, 1993; De Bernardi, 2004). However, it was in the twentieth century that generational kinship started to prevail over other patterns of social interaction for young people. Indeed, in nineteenth-century European societies, young people did not share the same formative experiences, as their regional, class and gendered forms of belonging were more significant to their development than their generational identity (Mitterauer, 1993: 235–40). Young people’s values and attitudes were also much more influenced by the family context, since young people had fewer opportunities to meet up and share common experiences with their peers. Furthermore, during the twentieth century, ‘youth’ has come to define a cohort of persons sharing not only the same age range, but also an attitude of rebellion against the established social order (Marchi, 2014: 23). This representation was not negative in itself: for example, the unruliness of youth was celebrated as part of the belligerent ideal of Fascism. The perception of youth as disobedient was often limited to specific groups of young people, especially those with a working-class background.

During the post-war period, youth started to be increasingly perceived as a homogeneous group. Three processes contributed to creating this perception: the growing equality among young people from different backgrounds thanks to compulsory education, the creation of a youth market and the improvement of mass communication. These processes occurred in Italian society in the late 1950s to early 1960s, during the Miracolo economico italiano (Crainz, 1996) (Italian economic boom). Schooling had the effect of creating a standardised lifestyle for young people and removing them from the family context on a daily basis (Mitterauer, 1993: 237–8). In Italy, secondary compulsory education until the age of fourteen was introduced by law in 1962: as a consequence, the number of school students had nearly doubled by the end of the 1960s (Ginsborg, 1990: 298). Not only did young people meet in schools, but they also started to gather in their free time. Michael Mitterauer claims that in the post-war period the ‘informal gathering of friends’ became ‘the most important form of adolescent community’ (1993: 225). Young people also started to use style as a form of identification, to express social and political affiliations and ideals, and to differentiate themselves from other generational groups (Mitterauer, 1993: 227).

Fashion trends were not only emerging from within the community of young peers: in the late 1950s, young people became a potential category of commercial consumers (Gorgolini, 2004: 214). The market took advantage of this newly created and relatively wealthy section of society by manufacturing goods specifically for youth. The products designed for young people’s consumption included mopeds and cars, which allowed for travel; fashion and accessories to visually distinguish young people from adults; and popular music, which was central in defining young people’s leisure activities. The commercial designation of products specifically designed for young people contributed to the homogenisation of both young people’s tastes and their everyday and free-time activities.

The perception of youth as a homogeneous group was also facilitated by the expanding interaction between young people, both in person – through increased local, national and international travel – and indirectly, through the mass media (Mitterauer, 1993: 238). Indeed, the emergence, post-war, of young people as a social category coincided with the spread of popular media in Italy, especially television (Crainz, 1996: 142–6). Mass media played a significant role in circulating information among young people of different nationalities and social classes, particularly those who could not afford to travel overseas or within Europe. It also helped to spread fashions and trends all over the globe. Italian popular media represented the features of the newly formed youth culture through images, songs and language (Gorgolini, 2004: 219). By doing so, they contributed to making youth more intelligible to both adults and young people themselves, by characterising them with specific styles, practices and behaviours.

From the late 1950s, young people also became a discursive object in the media (Colombo, 1993: 65). In particular, the concept of ‘youth’ encapsulated all the anxieties connected to the rise of consumerist society and to the increasing social and sexual emancipation of the young population. The print media tended to promulgate an image of irresponsible youth to adults: in particular, from 1958 to 1963 newspapers insisted on the emergence of teppismo (minor youth delinquency) in the major cities of northern Italy. These petty crimes ‘without a cause’ committed by a minority of Italian young people were represented as a large-scale phenomenon that could lead to social disturbance (Piccone Stella, 1993). Consumerism, too, was seen as a danger for the young generations. Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy), the conservative party in power, and the Catholic Church argued that it could corrode traditional Italian values. The left-wing intelligentsia also critiqued mass consumerism for being the main instrument for the Americanisation of Italian society (Gundle, 2000: 80–2). From the late 1950s, in Italy, young people were therefore perceived to be a problem, which, more generally, reflected the society’s overall anxiety about modernisation. The connection between youth and delinquency diminished after 1962, when popular media increasingly tended to offer a reassuring image of Italian youth to the adult audience in order to reduce social tension (Piccone Stella, 1994: 158). This was mostly carried out by building a connection between youth and entertainment, emphasising the leisurely aspects of youth and promoting young people’s consumption.

Accounts of the media’s construction of Italian youth from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s tend to draw a neat demarcation between the ‘commercial’ youth of the years 1965–67 and the ‘political’ youth of 1968 and the following years, for which ‘capelloni, musica beat, vestiti sgargianti, gonne corte, Beatles e Rolling Stones, sono una cosa, il ‘68 un’altra’ (Ghione & Grispigni, 1998: 9).³ One example of this approach is Diego Giachetti’s book on the 1968 Italian student unrest, in which he describes the generation prior to 1968 as a ‘generazione leggera’ (2008: 21),⁴ defined by music, fashion and consumerism, while, according to the author, in 1968 young people stopped defining themselves through fashion (2008: 27). Similarly, Fausto Colombo refers uniquely to leisure activities when describing the generation that was young in 1953–64, setting it apart from the ‘political’ youth of 1968: indeed, young people belonging to the 1953–64 generation are defined in the title of his book as ‘those who did not participate in 1968’ (2008). In contrast to this strict division, Ghione and Grispigni’s collection of essays Giovani prima della rivolta (Youth Before the Unrest) concentrates on 1965–67 to demonstrate that, even before 1968, Italian youth were far from apolitical (1993). The collection suggests that the first half of the 1960s can be seen as a sort of preparatory period, as the origins of the 1968 season of unrest are rooted in the final years leading up to it.

Conversely, the ‘commercial’ side of youth in the period from 1968 to 1975 has rarely been taken as a subject of inquiry and analysis. In many accounts of this period, the Italian student movement is implicitly taken to stand for the experiences of Italian young people as a whole. Scholars often consider the political role of youth in the Western world and in Italy as predominant, to the point where, for some of them, young people were all, to a certain extent, ‘political’. For instance, Grispigni describes the generation of young people from 1968 to 1975 as a ‘generazione politica’,⁵ in which most young people were united by political ideologies (1993: 46).

The alleged division between the disengaged generation of the period 1965–67 and the political generation of the period 1968–70 is caused by the evident centrality of representations of the Sessantotto (1968) in Italian history, journalism and cultural analysis. It is quite common to associate the idea of young people uniquely with those young students and workers who, from 1966 to 1969, started to organise demonstrations and university occupations to demand better education, the social emancipation of the working classes, better working conditions and a more integrated society in general. Moreover, many historians consider the Sessantottini (young people participating in the 1968 protests) to be the main ‘subjects of history’ in the 1960s, and thus the only young people who deserve academic consideration (Parisella, 1998: 20). The year 1968 was indeed fundamental in the history of young people and Italian society as a whole, and its history and that of the many political movements that emerged in Italian society during the 1960s and the 1970s have been exhaustively analysed.⁶ However, it seems evident that the history of 1960s Italy is far too ‘’68-centric’, and does not take into consideration other, more commercial aspects of the emerging Italian youth cultures. In this regard, John Foot maintains that the history of the 1960s is mainly a ‘self-referential’ history (2011: 115), written by the Sessantottini themselves, which tends to ignore other histories that were arguably less politically relevant but nevertheless significant from the point of view of social and generational changes in Italian society.

In order to investigate these other histories, and to get beyond the widespread contrastive construction of Italian youth scrutinised above, this monograph focuses on the analysis of popular media representations of young people. Indeed, in popular culture there is no clear-cut division between ‘commercial’ and ‘political’ youth: emancipatory claims were often used to appeal to an audience of young people, and they impacted the definition and advertisement of commercial fashion and music trends imported from other Western countries.

Subject: i giovani

Fashioning Italian youth distinguishes between representations of Italian youth in popular culture and those young people at whom this construction was directed through the use of two terms: i giovani and the adjective giovane; and young people, respectively. In this work, i giovani are a media construction ‘interpellating’ Italian young people (Althusser, 1971: 127–86). Althusser notably introduced the term ‘interpellation’ to indicate how ideological state apparatuses such as educational, religious and family institutions contribute to creating ideological subjects by turning ideology into ‘a lived, material practice – rituals, customs, patterns of behaviour, ways of thinking taking practical form’ (Storey, 2009: 78). Similarly, popular media can be considered ideological state apparatuses, given that they function to ‘ceaselessly … perform the critical ideological work of classifying out the world within the discourses of dominant ideologies’ (Hall, 1977: 346). From 1958, Italian popular media started to interpellate young people as their audience, by constantly naming them ragazzi (guys), or giovani. At the same time, they were contributing to the construction of this ideological category, by defining what was considered giovane and what was not. The way in which i giovani were represented in popular media can therefore shed light on the roles and behaviours that Italian society envisaged for young people in the 1960s and the 1970s.

In the process of socially constructing i giovani, popular media reproduced dominant discourses that were circulating in Italian society during that time. Discourse denotes here ‘a system of representation’ (Hall, 1997: 44), which includes all the ideas, practices, acts and language connected to i giovani that circulated in the media.⁷ Michel Foucault maintains that discourse can either stabilise or undermine relations of power within society, where power is a ‘process which … transforms, strengthens or reverses [force relations]’ (1978: 92). The idea of power as a process suggests that it is constantly produced from ‘innumerable points’ (1978: 93), and therefore is inherently ambiguous. Indeed, media representations of young people were not solely controlled by commercial, social and political hegemonies, nor had the work performed by journalists, directors, screenwriters and actors a deliberate normative aim. I giovani were constructed through a contradictory combination of normative and subversive discourses, in which hegemonic power was exercised and resisted at the same time. In fact, popular culture is a site of struggle ‘between the resistance of subordinate groups and the forces of incorporation operating in the interests of dominant groups. Popular culture … is … a terrain of exchange and negotiation between the two’ (Storey, 2009: 10).

In this monograph, i giovani are also considered a ‘collective identity’, homogenised in popular culture through the construction of ‘symbolic codes of distinction’ and elements of demarcation between an ‘outside’ and an ‘inside’ of the community itself (Eisenstadt & Giesen, 1995: 74–6). Stephen Gundle has highlighted that 1960s youth was ‘the first generation in Italian history to be broadly homogenous in terms of language, tastes, and cultural reference points’ (2000: 108). Considering the geographical, social and gender differentiations that permeated Italian society, it may seem unexpected that young people were so consistent in