Book review: Rosana Masiola and Sabrina Cittadini, The Golden Dawn of Italian Fashion: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Maria Monaci Gallenga

Abstract

The key word and argomento in this comprehensive but curiously long book by two scholars from the University of Perugia is 'enigma' or enigmatic. The subject is an admittedly little-known designer of luxurious women's fancy dress garmentsrobes, capes, evening gowns and dressesone Maria Monaci Gallenga . Even those active in the study of fashion history, and more specifically, Italian design, have likely little knowledge of Gallenga's works today. She has not been 'rediscovered' or fetishized like other figures in the fashion past. She had no mentors early in her short career and left no real disciples carrying forward her style.The authors demonstrate that she had a certain level of recognition and upper-class popularity in the interwar years, and traveled extensively with her comfortable situation to numerous fashion shows and international fairs and expositions across Europe, into England, and often to the Western Hemisphere. The book contains, as its high point, sixteen full color plates of representative dresses and capes based on Renaissance and medieval inspirations, reproductions of Gallenga's logo and labels showing elaborately turned-out seemingly Renaissance ladies in capes and headdresses, even a rather unglamorous Gallenga herself modelling one evening robe, low-backed and embellished with precious gold and silver stenciled designs on costly silk.Her techniques are unquestionably refined, even exquisite. She collaborated with her scientific husband to devise a special method of block imprinting through stenciling so that the soft and smooth silks and velvets carried the elaborate antique design lightly, allowing the garments to flow and hang with ultimate grace and keep their luster and dazzle over the ages.Gallenga came from a prominent Roman academic family, her father being a leading Romance university philologist, and she was raised in an educated environment with connections to leading cultural figures of the early twentieth century (D'Annunzio and others). She ran profitable ateliers in Paris, Rome, Florence, and London. She exhibited her garments at important world events in Paris and Chicagoeven in Birmingham Alabama at a special fair celebrating Italian culture but overshadowed with admiration for Mussolini! She never had a mass following other than with fashionable and privileged society clients. Her clothes were not intended for casual street wear nor lent themselves to less expensive copies or mass market distribution.Gallenga had liberal political orientation and never succeeded in building a following during the early Fascist period. Mussolini's style-setting daughter Edda (later Ciano) patronized other designers closer to the party. The regime did pay attention to the fashion industry but emphasized autarchy using less expensive, domestic fabrics suitable for uniforms and mass consumption, so that Gallenga's works were not only idiosyncratic but seen as outdated, even menacingly unpatriotic. She was too cosmopolitan, too exotic and out of favor with official taste, and this doomed her f...