Book Review

Comparative/World

Nicola White's original and informative exploration of the rise and consolidation of an internationally recognized Italian fashion industry in the two decades following World War II offers a welcome corrective to those several uncritical celebrations of Italian style that offer up the late twentieth-century success of famous brands including Versace, Armani, MaxMara, Gucci, and Prada as evidence of a more recent and apparently spontaneous flowering of national talent. White's work is grounded in the methods of design history, a discrete discipline that has developed its focus in answer to the intellectual and pedagogical concerns of the art and design sector of the British university system over the past thirty years. In this way it differs from the kinds of studies relevant to any consideration of postwar Italian style that have emerged from the fields of social and economic history, from perspectives informed by the more overtly political and representational concerns of cultural studies, or from the descriptive analyses associated with publications on dress produced in the museum and promotional sectors. Its ambition is rather to draw on the benefits of all these approaches in a synthesis that has the significance of the designed object and the factors affecting its manufacture, reception, and use at its heart. In working toward this end, its primary sources consist of those garments of the period surviving in public and private collections in Europe and the United States; the archives of significant industrial players, particularly MaxMara; interviews with corporate managers, designers, buyers and journalists; and the content of the contemporary fashion media including trade journals, consumer magazines, and film.

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