Feminine Beauty, National Identity and Political Conflict in Postwar Italy, 1945–1954

Abstract

After 1945 the Italian tradition of feminine beauty was redefined in a democratic context in which women, for the first time, became full citizens. Faced with a far-reaching challenge from Hollywood, traditional criteria of beauty were first strenuously defended and then modified and commercialised. Beauty contests proved to be a vital vehicle in this transition, since they acted both as a forum for the reassertion of Italian beauty and as a vehicle for the displacement of old ideas centred on the face with a new concept based on the eroticised body. This transition became bound up with the ongoing political conflict between Catholics and the left for the moral and political leadership of the country. While both, with different emphases, championed ‘natural’ at the expense of American-style ‘manufactured’ beauty, competition led them to engage with, and in some way adopt, the sexualised beauty that was the hallmark of the role of the United States in furnishing new models for the consumer society that would develop rapidly in the later 1950s.